Tory Shepherd: The tricky tactic conservatives have adopted from the US – be the aggressor while claiming victimhood

Tory Shepherd: The Liberal Party is checking if these new Christian applicants are their friends – or if they’re really just on a moral crusade against… Satan?

What would you do if a bunch of crashers turned up to your party? What if the guy in charge was preaching fire and brimstone?

South Australia’s Liberal Party is understandably taking a moment to check that the hundreds of people who are trying to get into their party are their friends.

They’re taking a closer look at more than 500 people who want to come in, many recruited from the Pentecostal movement in the wake of successful votes to introduce Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation and to update abortion laws.

But this isn’t a new offshoot of the old moderate versus conservative faction wars in the Liberal Party. And it’s not an anti-Christian move, as some would have you believe.

The party is rightly concerned that hordes of people with specific axes to grind are trying to change its shape. It is firmly focused on whether the mob that turned up to its gate is genuinely interested in the party itself or in trying to off endorsed candidates.

But this is not just a group of people benignly interested in politics. Pentecostal pastor Rob Norman – the figurehead of the push – has made it clear that it’s about infiltration.

“We are to infiltrate,” he said in a recent sermon about the need for churchgoers to get involved in politics, a sermon that rambled about the ills of tolerance and fairness.

He reminisced about the “good old days” when his father would give out stripes across the backside with a riding whip. You couldn’t do that these days, he said. Damn tolerance and political correctness.

He said they were fighting a “real war” on issues such as abortion, prostitution and same-sex marriage.

Pastor Norman’s Southland Church in Pasadena is clearly on a moral crusade.

Its foundation is the belief that Satan has “established a counter-kingdom of darkness and evil on the Earth”. That “the whole world is under the domination of Satan and that all people are sinners by nature” and the only way out is through salvation.

That’s why they also believe they have a God-given right to go out into the world and convert people.

While the party considers their applications, there is a vote planned for this weekend, and murmurs of legal action.

Legal machinations aside, should a political party just allow its own takeover? The Young Nationals had to stand up to an attempted fascist takeover in 2018, and there are countless other skirmishes around the nation when it comes to branch stacking and attempted infiltrations.

What if it was the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that was trying to overrun them, to implement its specific brand of Pastafarianism? What if it was Satanists fighting for religious freedom for all faiths?

Maybe the religion matters, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’ll turn out these are all well-intentioned wannabe Liberals, who’ll eventually be let in to be feet on the ground in the upcoming elections. Who might give a tithe to the Liberals’ famously broad church.

And maybe it’ll turn out to be a concerted effort to change the shape of the Liberals, a takeover by people who believe their divine mission is to drag us back to the 1950s. Or further.

Conservative MPs told The Australian it was a “power grab” by the moderates. But it looks much more like an attempt to resist the “power grab” of the Pentecostal grab bag. Tony Pasin, the Member for Barker, said that “the message to Christians” was clear – you are not welcome. What self-serving tosh. The message, such as it was, was to a very specific bunch of Christians. A bunch who may have plans to undermine the party. Whose leader talks about a war, about Satan, about infiltration.

Federal Liberal Senator Alex Antic said the push was sparked by “extraordinary frustration” (in the wake of those abortion and euthanasia votes). That the door wasn’t enthusiastically swung open and beers immediately offered was “cancel culture”, he said.

This is the tricky tactic Australian conservatives have copied from their American compatriots. Claim any limit on your power is an attack on your freedom. Be the aggressor while claiming victimhood. Say you’ve been silenced when you’re shouting loudly.

These cheeky devils’ greatest trick is convincing the world they’ve been cancelled.