This was published 2 years ago
Broadcaster Tom Tilley on questioning religion – and the ‘fornication risk zone’
By Benjamin Law
Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Tom Tilley. The journalist and broadcaster, 41, was a long-time host of Triple J’s Hack and currently hosts news podcast The Briefing. His debut book is the memoir Speaking in Tongues.
Tom Tilley: “I wasn’t rebellious when I was young, and I actually thought the idea of saving yourself for marriage was beautiful.” Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
MONEY
You’re the eldest son of a Pentecostal pastor. In the church, some careers were considered off-limits for being too worldly and involving too much ego. Why? Your career was supposed to be the humble accompaniment to your walk with God. Hobbies and other passions were treated with suspicion: “Why don’t you put more of that time into the church?” “Are you telling people about the Holy Spirit?”
You later ended up questioning your faith and leaving the church. What did that cost you personally? Stepping away from my community and social connections. That involved risking my relationship with my family and saying goodbye, almost immediately, to a lot of my closest, deepest friendships.
Was it worth it? A million per cent. It was initially very challenging for my family but, ultimately, it has opened the door to a much more beautiful, exciting, enriching, truthful existence, not just for me, but for my parents and three brothers, too. And I’m not taking all the credit for that because they had to be open to the change as well.
Once you’ve got all your essentials covered, what do you like spending money on? Oh, I picked up a really daggy habit in my late 30s: I’ve gotten into cycling.
That’s not daggy, is it? It’s a filthy habit. And you wear shocking clothes.
DEATH
How many near-death experiences have you had? Well, I got impaled on a fence out the front of a terrace house in Sydney’s Redfern. The spike went in three inches deep between my ribs, fairly close to my heart.
That’s gruesome. How old were you? Thirty-one – too old for that kind of nonsense. In my early years on the rugby union field, I suffered many concussions. Once, I was taken off in an ambulance and woke up four hours later in hospital, vomiting. And there was a motorbike crash, which I write about in the book. It was a real shock and really rattled me.
Is there anything to be gained from experiences like those? You scramble to try to find the good in those moments. You’re sitting on the couch with lots of time on your hands doing a lot of philosophising. I had a bit of a reckoning, started to do the maths, and it dawned on me that I wanted to move on to the next phase of life. Having the crash helped me get off the pure-pleasure train and make some bigger – maybe harder – decisions that had a longer-term payoff than just continuing the LOLs and good times. I’ve taken such silly risks, but now that I have a partner and son [one-year-old Maxwell Banjo], I understand risk better. I didn’t need to go the extra mile of climbing up onto someone’s balcony at 9am for a laugh; I’d already had enough laughs that night.
What were you told about death growing up? Death is the moment where this carnal existence ends and there’s a judgment on whether you’re saved – and go to heaven – or not. So really, death was broken into this binary from an early age: a joyful, blissful, eternal existence in heaven or being eternally submerged in fire and brimstone.
What do you believe now? I’ve ended up with this heaven hangover, which isn’t bad. I’m not worried about dying, basically. I just feel like there’s no way that this life – that we can’t even understand properly – could exist just to end all of a sudden and turn into nothing: there has to be something more. There’s no intellectual rigour in this belief; it’s not based on any deep spirituality or scholarship, but I still think there’s something nice waiting for us.
SEX
What were you told about sex growing up? That sex is heterosexual and that it happens only in the context of marriage. If it happens outside that context, it’ll take you to hell.
When you were 14, your church declared that any members who had sex outside of marriage would be permanently banned from the church. Looking back, how did something like that affect your own sexuality? That was the point where the church got more hardline. My mum acknowledged recently that that was the point where we should have left as a family. But I wasn’t rebellious when I was young, and I actually thought the idea of saving yourself for marriage was beautiful.
What do you wish you’d been told about sex? When it happens between two consenting people, you can decide what it really means. It can be a fun, fleeting encounter or the most beautiful, meaningful thing ever. But it also needs to be treated with care and love. It can be fun. It can be devotional. And it can be both.
One of the phrases in your book that really caught my eye is “fornication risk zone”. What is that? The church identified all the risk factors leading up to fornication, then made rules about those as well. In the guidelines it literally said that couples should not be spending time in parked cars or flats alone. That dancing often leads to fornication. Drinking can lead to fornication.
Well … that’s all true, right? [Laughs] It’s all true. But this is how fundamentalism kind of works. It often starts with one hard line, but then you need to create all these other lines so that you don’t slide down the so-called slippery slope.
Have you thought about how to approach conversations about sex with your kid later on? The funny thing is that it’s pretty much all laid out in [Speaking in Tongues]. Anything I say that contradicts what I actually did? Well, there’s hard evidence …
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