In recent weeks Liberal backbencher Julian Leeser has conducted soundings with faith-based leaders across his Sydney electorate in preparation for the religious discrimination debate in parliament, and reports that “I was told things I never believed I would hear expressed in this country”.
Leeser says: “I never thought that Christians in Australia — and I am not a Christian — would find they could not express their faith in the way they had before. I had always felt the expression of religious faith was something that was axiomatic in Australia. But Christians are concerned about how they now operate in general, secular Australian society, from workplaces to schools, in professing their Christianity, and fear this threat will only become greater in the future.
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“Anti-Semitism is sadly on the rise in this country, with a 60 per cent increase in attacks on Jews in Australia over the last 12 months. When I have consulted Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists in my electorate about their religious freedom, they have told me of people in public and private contexts asking them to remove articles of clothing that denote their religious devotion and of public libraries not wanting to stock their holy books. While there are fewer physical threats against Christians, there is a cultural and existential threat to Christianity as people are trying to de-legitimise the place of Christianity in the public square and force it off the national stage.”
Leeser gave an address to the St Thomas More Society last Thursday that documented the feedback obtained from his seat of Berowa in northwest Sydney. Asked if he felt other MPs shared similar sentiments, he said: “I think there is a reasonable acceptance among MPs that this is a problem and a challenge for our society.”
Leeser’s remarks are measured and nuanced but his main point is unequivocal: Australia is changing in fundamental ways because of anti-faith and anti-religious sentiments and campaigns. This has the potential to touch many people and many lives precisely because faith, to a greater or lesser extent, remains pivotal to the identity and purpose of so many individuals.
He speaks as a Jewish Australian, a lawyer turned politician who seeks not to promote the views of any religious community but who believes “the maintenance of religion and religious institutions is vital to the moral ecology of our nation”. His recent soundings have involved all faiths but on August 12 Leeser convened a meeting of Christian representatives to test their views on the proposed religious discrimination bill, which he supports with serious reservations.
He found eight specific concerns from that consultation. Christian leaders worried about their freedom to quote the Bible; their ability to preach and share the message of Jesus; what their children are being taught about gender and sexuality; what they will be allowed to teach about gender and sexuality to the next generation; the right of employees to follow their conscience and object to work-based corporate social responsibility programs without finding their jobs are threatened; the attacks on the right of church institutions to preach, teach, employ (or not employ) and provide (or not provide) services in accordance with their faith; the use of discrimination law in the name of human rights as a weapon against Christians; the media culture and in particular the ABC bias against Christians and Christian leaders.
Leeser concedes that some of the decline in the standing of churches is self-inflicted. In this context he nominates failures of leadership, moral corruption and the systematic perpetration and cover-up of child sexual abuse as ventilated by the royal commission. But he says the public standing of Christianity has been weakened by a decline in religious literacy and empathy for religion.
He says: “At the heart of this is the growing hostility, at first in radical circles but increasingly in broader circles, to the holistic view that Christians have of marriage, life and family. Properly presented, Christian teachings are not threatening but they are at odds with the zeitgeist. Today those teachings are attacked by people with a different view, some of whom have hostility to organised religion and Christianity in particular.”
Implicit in Leeser’s critique is that the growing hostility towards religion comes from elites, from people who have organisational power and are willing to use that power, from politics to business to the law, to infringe freedom of religion. Once this sentiment is given legitimacy then it spreads to the local and neighbourhood level in decisions by public officials.
“Now increasingly there is a legislative attack on freedom of conscience,” he says. “Laws are currently being debated in Victoria which will force priests to violate the seal of the confessional. Many priests, including the Archbishop of Melbourne, have indicated that they will go to jail rather than violate the confessional seal.”
This law is not just an attack on religious freedom but counter-productive as a public policy measure. It typifies, however, today’s ideology and its willingness to suspend rationality. Obviously under the proposed law no child sex offender would go to a priest to confess their crimes — the end result, Leeser said, being the state acting “to compromise a fundamental feature of the Christian faith for no practical secular benefit”.
He nominates the provision in the proposed NSW abortion bill that forces a doctor, nurse or midwife with a conscientious objection to abortion to recommend another practitioner as a violation of conscience. Describing this provision as “anathema to everything I stand for as a Liberal”, Leeser calls for its removal.
The debate about religion is heading in a dangerous direction that, unless reversed, will leave permanent schisms in society and create serious problems for multiculturalism. Leeser’s central message is that the public discussion of religion must be reset. The task, he says, is “how we can live together with differences” creating a “shared space for everyone”.
The Ruddock review recommended a religious discrimination act given the inadequacy of existing commonwealth law. Attorney-General Christian Porter will soon release the draft for public discussion. But Leeser warns church and faith groups to be careful. Such a law “will inevitably hand more power to the courts”, and that means a surrender of sorts to the grip of international human rights law. This is a risky path.
Leeser says people who work in the human rights industry seek “to use the law as a political weapon” by “bypassing the democratic process and achieving their goals through the courts or international bodies”. The idea of human rights originated in the Judaeo-Christian idea of human dignity but “the corruption of that idea by the human rights industry” is another story. “No one should assume that judges and the human rights commission will be any more sympathetic to issues of concern for faith communities than the parliament is.”
While accepting the RDA with serious reservations, Leeser flatly rejects the notion of a religious freedom act as recommended by some churches. This would be “a backdoor bill of rights which religious communities have always been right to oppose”. It would give judges a power over religion to make decisions now the domain of bishops, clergy, imams and rabbis. Leeser says that once churches demand special protection then other interests will demand the same, witness talk of a media freedom act.
Leeser warns the issue ultimately transcends law and goes to culture: “An Australia where Christianity no longer has an important role to play is an Australia whose future is bleak.” Many feel this way, including non-religious people.
While much of the media declares itself to be clueless about this entire issue, the political class is about to be plunged into this debate. What will be fundamental are the policies and principles MPs advocate. The roots of our civilisation lie in Judaeo-Christian traditions and the issue is the respect secular society accords this tradition or whether, under the guise of “ethics” and competing rights, it authorises the campaign against faith and religion with all the consequences this may encompass.
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