Martin Iles: Christian lobbyist, lawyer, and Israel Folau’s new best friend
A month ago, few had heard of Martyn Iles. So who is the fresh leader of the Christian lobby and Israel Folau’s new best friend?
At the Come To Jesus evangelical church in western Sydney, the bright smiles of the faithful conceal a certain anxiety as they gather on a brisk winter morning for a Saturday service. Conversation among the 50-odd parishioners keeps coming back to the subject of Israel Folau, the multi-millionaire rugby player who lost his job and his major sponsor a month earlier after posting an Instagram warning that homosexuals and other sinners will burn in hell unless they repent.
To this small congregation of mainly Filipino-Australians, who gather to worship in a converted industrial workshop nestled among engineering and machine-hire companies, Folau was merely spreading the word of the gospel they all follow, leaving many of them wondering whether their religious beliefs could likewise cost them their jobs.
Laura Gonzales, a young disability support worker, ponders how she would respond if a disabled client requested the services of a sex worker. “As a Christian, that is against my beliefs,” she says. “Do I just submit to it? If I raise it with my supervisor, will they understand my objections? That would be the best-case scenario; worst-case, you might get fired.” Another Come To Jesus member murmurs quietly that he’s a middle manager in a multinational company that won a major award for its diversity program. Two of his Christian workmates, he says, have already been chastised for breaching the company’s policies on discriminatory speech, leaving him confused about what can and can’t be said in casual office conversation.
Moving among these parishioners — in fact, towering over them — is a boyish, 2m-tall figure with a brushed-back quiff of pale auburn hair. Martyn Iles, the country’s most high-profile Christian lobbyist, has driven up from his home in Canberra to address the concerns of these suburban believers in the wake of the snowballing Folau controversy. Dressed in a hipsterish getup of blue sports jacket, jeans, light brown brogues and open-necked shirt (untucked), the 30-year-old is clearly something of a celebrity to the younger members of the flock. A former corporate lawyer who can quote the Fair Work Act and the Book of Isaiah with equal ease, his outspoken defence of Folau on radio, television and social media has made him a ubiquitous figure over the past month. His jousting with Kochie on Sunrise went viral; the fundraising campaign he launched for Folau was so wildly successful that it became part of the story.
Standing onstage in front of a crucifix emblazoned with the word LOVE in neon, Iles launches into a seamless exegesis on the topic of “Church and Government”, pausing only to quote scripture from his iPhone (“my trusty mobile Bible”). Over the course of a couple of hours he paints a portrait of Christianity besieged by radical secular forces bent on hounding its followers from their jobs and snuffing its beliefs from public discourse. By way of example he cites a litany of cases: a priest in Tasmania reported to the anti-discrimination commissioner; a middle manager sacked for voicing his opposition to the Safe Schools transgender education program; a Christian couple forced to close their successful wedding magazine after a boycott campaign by gay activists. He talks about the car bomb that blew out the windows of his Canberra office at the Australian Christian Lobby, and the demonic laughter of the people who call threatening to kill his staff and their children.
“I don’t know where it will lead,” he says. “I think if the cultural trend of the last 10 years multiplies over the next 20, 30, 40 years in a linear way, we’ll be gone… I’m not necessarily saying that will happen. I just think the church needs to get active.” It’s part sermon and part call to arms, with the congregation murmuring its assent as Iles urges them to emulate Israel Folau and boldly proclaim their beliefs. “Our job is to get on with it,” he concludes with a flourish. “Let’s pray.” The session ends, in the Christian tradition, with a collection for the ACL, a registered charity that relies almost entirely on donations and bequests.
If the talk was designed to galvanise the faithful by confirming their worst fears, it was certainly effective. As Iles drives off, Laura Gonzales is still standing in the car park with two friends, discussing the implications of his message. “If what Martyn is saying is true,” she concludes, “we don’t have anything to protect us.”
It would be fair to guess that few Australians hadheard of Martyn Iles until a month ago, when he suddenly began appearing on television screens around the nation as one of Israel Folau’s most outspoken supporters. When Iles took over as managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby in February 2018 he was only 29, a lawyerly young man with a newsreader’s voice and little public exposure. But after Rugby Australia sacked its star player in May for his “gays will go to hell” post, Iles came out swinging, defending Folau’s views as “bog-standard Christianity” and accusing rugby officials of an orchestrated campaign of lies. Within weeks, Iles and “Izzy” were posing together with fists raised for a publicity snap. When GoFundMe shut down the footballer’s online appeal for legal funds, Iles launched an alternative fundraiser and dropped $100,000 of the ACL’s money into it.
“Hey, guess what?” he announced insouciantly on Facebook. “I called Izzy and we fixed it.” Within two days the fund had pulled in $2.2 million, a surge of support that took many by surprise. In a breathless 48-hour media blitz, Iles appeared on Sunrise, Today, The Sunday Project, on multiple radio stations and in every major newspaper. Asked in one interview whether he agreed that gays would burn in hell, he sidestepped the question with a theology sound bite that was the verbal equivalent of Folau’s bob-and-weave.
It was a striking demonstration ofnew-generation leadership at the ACL. Iles’s predecessor, Lyle Shelton, a former journalist and Toowoomba councillor 20 years his senior, had done much to build the ACL’s political influence during his five years at the helm. But Shelton’s rhetoric during the same-sex marriage debate alienated many mainstream Christians, not least when he compared the push for gay marriage to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Since Shelton quit the ACL last year to launch a failed bid for the Senate, he has aligned himself increasingly with far-right agitators like Milo Yiannopoulos. In mid-June, while Iles was posing for photographs with Folau, Shelton was in Queensland snapping selfies with four members of the Proud Boys, a “Western chauvinist” organisation whose members have advocated street violence and racial purity.
Iles, who joined the ACL as Shelton’s chief of staff in 2014, has wasted no time in distancing himself from his former mentor. “I’ll put it on the record: I can’t stand the alt-right,” he says. “I’m not a supporter, I’m not interested in them, and I think they represent a kind of right-wing politics that’s devoid of faith. It’s a form of identity politics which I detest… As for Lyle, I have absolutely no idea what his inclinations were around that incident or what was going on. I haven’t spoken to him recently and he is completely unaffiliated with ACL.” For his part, Shelton says he has no problem with Iles’s remarks, describing his successor as an emerging leader and one of the smartest people he has met.
Despite his pink-cheeked youthfulness, Ilesdemonstrated a shrewd tactical mind not long after joining the ACL when he hit on the idea of a Christian legal service modelled on the pro-bono law centres that champion progressive causes. With another Christian lawyer, John Steenhof, he set up an office at the ACL’s Canberra headquarters under the artful name Human Rights Law Alliance. Their first case was a young Christian university student from Adelaide who had been reported for misconduct after openly discussing his views on homosexuality. Iles produced a slick video detailing the case, in which he strolled the grounds of the High Court talking to camera with the mellifluous ease of a 60 Minutes reporter. The legal service has since been involved in more than 60 similar cases of Christians in conflict with anti-discrimination law or diversity rules, many of which have ended up in the media.
After taking the helm of the ACL last year, Iles installed a mini television studio next to his office, from which he broadcasts a YouTube video blog called The Truth Of It, a 30-40 minute monologue on issues ranging from euthanasia to religious persecution, interspersed with snatches of scripture and the odd breezy joke. The vlog’s title reflects his keen admiration for the Canadian psychologist and men’s activist Jordan Peterson, whose attacks on identity politics and postmodern thinking he frequently echoes. Iles attended one of Peterson’s lectures in Australia early last year and was struck by his messiah-like following among young men unnerved by #MeToo rage and the new language of gender neutrality and toxic masculinity.
The same desire for certainty, he believes, is driving the popularity of evangelical churches, the only stream of Christianity holding its numbers in Australia. It’s a world he knows well, having been born into it. His father Paul, a Brisbane doctor, was an elder in the Open Brethren, an evangelical Protestant group that pursues an austere, non-hierarchical style of worship. Iles was named after the 20th century Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones and can remember visiting nursing homes as a child with his father and reciting scripture. At their home on a small acreage in Brisbane’s bushy south-eastern suburbs, television was banned in order to protect the children from the moral perils of the outside world.
Iles lived there until he was 24, attending Christian schools before enrolling in a law degree at the University of Queensland. By his own description he was something of an über-nerd — a straight-As achiever who at age 10 told his dad he planned to become prime minister. In high school he qualified for the state debating team while launching an information-technology company from his bedroom using his father’s ABN number to secure a $100,000 line of credit. “I’ve always been a straitlaced kind of guy,” he confesses amiably, sitting on the sofa in his sun-drenched but spartan Canberra office. “I’ve never done a Jonah or prodigal son… I know nothing about pop culture. When people quote The Simpsons in conversation, I have nothing to contribute because I was outside building a cubby-house, or running away from my brother.”
In his adolescence and early 20s Iles swotted over every verse in the New Testament in Christian youth groups and edited a Christian children’s magazine, even as he was making serious money from his IT business. The ascetic principles of the Brethren evidently run deep: to this day he has no partner, being a strict believer that sex outside marriage is a sin. After selling the IT business he worked as a corporate lawyer in Brisbane and entertained ideas of becoming a barrister. But along the way he parted from the Brethren’s strict admonition against mixing faith and politics, and at 26 made a sudden switch.
“I was doing too much in my life,” he says. “I was working really hard, doing the youth group, doing the magazine, and I decided to take a break.” The ‘break” was a three-month internship at the newly established Lachlan Macquarie Institute in Canberra, an organisation designed to groom young Christian leaders. It was set up by the Australian Christian Lobby, and by the end of his internship Iles was recruited as its chief of staff.
The Australian Christian Lobby describes itself as a “grassroots movement” that favours no particular political party or Christian denomination, although it has long been associated with Queensland’s deep-rooted evangelical movement. Launched in 1995 from the suburban Brisbane office of businessman and former journalist John Gagliardi, its influence grew rapidly in the early 2000s under the leadership of Jim Wallace, a Queensland evangelical Christian and former Army brigadier who is now the ACL’s chairman. Wallace and Gagliardi both attest that political neutrality is fundamental to the ACL, a vision that hit its high-water mark in 2007 when then prime minister John Howard and opposition leader Kevin Rudd — both avowed Christians — attended a televised ACL gathering that featured several prominent Catholic and Anglican clerics. Unfortunately, things would change during the ugly rhetoric of the same-sex marriage debate.
In 2011, Wallace was forced to apologise for an Anzac Day tweet in which he said: “Just hope that as we remember Servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for — wasn’t gay marriage and Islamic!” Five years later, ahead of the national plebiscite on same-sex marriage, the ACL’s Lyle Shelton caused a media storm with his comparison of gay marriage and fascism. A month later, in July 2016, a troubled 35-year-old gay man from Canberra named Jaden Duong began searching the internet for information on homemade bombs. On the night of December 21, Duong parked a rented van loaded with gas cylinders outside ACL’s Eternity House headquarters, opened the cylinder valves and waited before igniting a cigarette lighter. The resulting explosion destroyed the vehicle, severely burnt Duong and caused $200,000 damage to the building, which was unoccupied at the time. Iles recalls that the windows of his upstairs office were blown out and ceiling panels collapsed.
Police initially said Duong was not politically motivated, but in court it was revealed he had told investigators and hospital staff of his antipathy towards the ACL. The would-be terrorist committed suicide in 2017 without explaining his motives in court, but the bombing now looms large for the ACL as a symbol of its self-proclaimed struggle against the forces of radical extremism. In his speeches and writings Iles regularly alludes to the incident as he rails against “Marxist, Queer and similarly destructive political theories”. Today’s Rainbow activism he likens to the moral degeneracy of the Roman Empire, when homosexuality was celebrated and “orgies were the foul indulgence of the elite”.
The end-is-nigh tone suggests a Pentecostal belief in the impending apocalypse, although Iles insists that’s not the case. “I’m not in that ‘end-times’ camp that says something is going to happen in Israel and the barcode on the cereal box will be a certain shape,” he says sardonically. “I don’t find that in the Bible; I don’t think it’s helpful.”
Does he understand how deeply wounding it is for gay people to hear their sexuality described as a mortal sin that will consign them to damnation? “The short answer is yes,” he replies. “I completely understand why some people would find the beliefs difficult, and I understand why they would feel upset by them. What I would actually suggest under those circumstances is that we talk. I would like them to know the motives people have for believing those things and saying those things.”
It’s the carefully parsed response of a lawyer who believes that the millennia-old texts of the Bible are handed down from God. In this world view, Folau’s warning that “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolaters” will go to hell doesn’t single out any particular group. Gay people are just one little subset among the billions of sinners who’ll enter the fiery pit and Christians issue such warnings out of love, not hate.
The conflict between these age-old religious views and modern ideas about diversity and tolerance has yielded plenty of intractably complicated disputes, many of them fodder for Iles and the ACL. The wedding magazine White was forced to close after gay activists targeted its Christian owners for refusing to publish gay wedding photos. A Christian wedding photographer in Perth was reported to the Equal Opportunity Commission after suggesting to a lesbian couple they might be more comfortable hiring someone else. But Iles also champions Victorian anti-abortion campaigner Kathleen Clubb, who deliberately flouted a law that forbids people from harassing women within 150m of a clinic. In his portrayal of the case, Clubb is a deeply compassionate counsellor offering women “safe haven”. The Tasmanian pastor he often refers to is Campbell Markham, who was reported to the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner after posting a biblical quote on his blog that suggested parents of gay children would be better off weighed down with stones and drowned.
The furore these issues provoke has certainly been good for the ACL financially — donations and bequests more than doubled to $8.7 million in its 2017-18 financial year, and it now boasts more than 150,000 members. Same-sex marriage may have been approved, but the toxic rhetoric of the debate has endured on both sides. Homophobic remarks have littered the ACL Facebook feed during the Folau controversy, in particular directed at Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce after he threatened to review the airline’s sponsorship of Rugby Australia. Gay activists have returned fire by sending death threats to ACL members and posting homosexual pornography to their email inboxes.
Some mainstream Christians worry that the polarised debate is pushing the ACL into an embrace with the reactionary Right. Nathan Campbell, a Queensland Presbyterian pastor who initially welcomed Iles as a fresh voice, says he was horrified during the federal election when the ACL’s how-to-vote cards preferenced Pauline Hanson’s One Nation over the Liberal National Party. Anglican theologian Michael Jensen shares these concerns, saying: “The temptation to push the Christian vote towards one side of politics is one I would resist.”
Prominent gay figures such as Kerryn Phelps see the Folau controversy as a calculated attempt by the Christian lobby and the political Right to push for laws that will loosen prohibitions on hate-speech. Iles vehemently denies it, saying he had never met Folau until mid-June and threw his support behind the footballer at a time when it was politically risky. “I’ve been accused of being an opportunist and jumping on this issue, but that’s just not how it happened,” he says. “I mean, I almost had to be a fool to insert myself into this. You put your foot in your mouth and it’s the end of your leadership.”
Certainly Iles could not have anticipated his support for Folau would be backed up by the ethicist Peter Singer, an atheist, and Gillian Triggs, former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission. Singer says it is bizarre that Rugby Australia can claim to have a diversity policy that welcomes anyone regardless of religion while insisting Folau not express his religious views — a stance he likens to welcoming homosexuals but asking them to hide their affection. Triggs pointed out there is no law against homophobic speech, and questioned Rugby Australia’s right to enforce such a prohibition. When ANZ Bank publicly castigated Folau’s wife Maria for supporting her husband’s fundraising drive, Triggs called out the bank as a corporate bully. Her intervention came on the same day that the ACL’s fundraiser pulled in $1 million in its first 24 hours. It was the moment the debate suddenly swung Iles’s way.
On a bracingly cold Canberra morning, Martyn Iles takes his place in the wooden pews of St Christopher’s Cathedral for the traditional ecumenical service heralding the opening of the 46th Australian parliament. In the front row is Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a Pentecostal Christian who was photographed during the federal election worshipping at the Horizon Church in Sydney, his arm raised to heaven. Across the aisle from him is Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, a Catholic who still attends church, albeit sporadically. Their parliamentary colleagues sit five deep in the pews as both men walk up to the pulpit to read passages of scripture, and a succession of Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Coptic and Uniting Church ministers offer blessings. The one-hour service is a long-observed ritual that offers a snapshot of just how deeply entangled religion and politics are in the nation’s history.
As he walks from the church, Iles is approached by Queensland MP George Christensen, who cheerfully congratulates him on the Folau campaign and chats briefly about the latest developments. It was in Queensland that the outcome of the 2019 election became clear as Coalition MPs such as Christensen enjoyed massive swings and stole the seats of Herbert and Longman from Labor, thanks largely to preferences from One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. Iles has claimed some credit for that result, arguing that the ACL’s campaigning in marginal seats made religious freedoms a “sleeper” issue.
In fact, most pundits believe Labor alienated Queenslanders with its opposition to the Adani coal mine and confused voters with its economic policies. Religious freedoms were barely mentioned during the campaign and the party that campaigned hardest on the ACL’s pet issues, Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives, failed to win a seat and has since collapsed. The campaign cemented the perception that the ACL is drifting right, although Iles insists it remains unaligned with any political party. He points out that it actively campaigned against the National Party in last year’s NSW election and suggests he is already re-evaluating support for the Morrison Government because of its ambiguous statements on protecting religious freedoms. “It looks like the Coalition is going to baulk at doing anything,” he says, “and there is no way I would run a campaign that effectively lends them a hand in the future if they don’t move on this issue.”
Two months after the Folau case exploded, Iles must surely chuckle at the strange alliances that have formed around it. Fellow Christian Reverend Tim Costello insists that the faithful have nothing to fear and should all calm down, while the atheist Peter Singer warns that suppressing offensive religious speech places freedom “in grave danger of disappearing entirely”. Folau’s case is now heading to court, as Iles holds meetings with the Government and Opposition over proposed new laws on religious freedoms. The ACL, meanwhile, is under investigation by the charities regulator over allegations that its Folau fundraiser contravened its charter to promote religion. It’s enough to keep a workaholic servant of the Lord very busy.
“This is a multicultural, pluralistic society, and we are going to have beliefs that deeply contradict each other,” he says. “My concern is: how can we live free in those beliefs together? That’s really the big question.”