Fairness In Religions In Schools Hates Sectarianism – Except of Course Where It’s Really Happening

The anti-Scripture-in-schools organisation Fairness In Religions In Schools wasn’t much on my radar when I lived in Western Australia. It popped up from time to time when it came to paying out on the state’s chaplaincy program.

It was fairly screechy about how most of the chaplains came from one Christian organisation. And did its best to embarrass that program by banging on about how sectarian it all was. But since there was no legislation in our state that required state schools to offer religious education, it was fairly ad hoc in its approach.

And so it was when I came to live in New South Wales – Sydney to be exact – in which state schools by law have to offer Special Religious Education (and not just Christian education, but all religions), that I began to see Fairness In Religions In Schools for what it actually is.

Fairness In Religion In Schools is anti-Christian first and foremost. And it hides its hatred of Christianity behind the concocted fear of a return to sectarianism if religion is taught in schools.

You see, sectarianism, or the fear of it, is the drum that Fairness In Religions In Schools bangs all of the time. Sectarianism is its bogeyman, the word and idea that it seems to pull out on a constant basis, in its efforts to take religion out of schools.

Indeed their most recent reposting on their Facebook page was of an article from a Humanist Society likening Donald Trump and Australia’s Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, saying that Dutton was on a right wing religious crusade, just like the Donald was. The words accompanying the post were “Sectarian is so last century!” So clearly they have a problem with religions.

Well actually that’s not true. Not all religions, or at least not as far as I could see. So apart from the Trump/Dutton article, everything else – including about 95 per cent of the photos on the site were photographic evidence of Christian organisations who were expressing their support of, and their active engagement in, teaching Scripture in local government schools.

Not an imam, nor for that matter, a rabbi in sight. For a group that’s got a generalist name, they sure seem to have a particularist focus. Clearly the sectarianism they have a real fear of from religious instruction is coming from one religion only.

So I decided to do some digging and ask some questions.

I went onto their Facebook page this week in light of the horrendous protest outside Granville Boys High School in Sydney’s west earlier this week, in which dozens of students, egged on by teachers, stood chanting “Allah Akbar” as a protest. It’s been all over the news.

What was the protest about at that high school about? It concerned the suspension of a support staff worker who had publicly praised two Muslim nurses who had been sacked by Bankstown Hospital.

Not just any two nurses, Two nurses who had been stood down for telling a Jewish man on a video chat forum that not only would they like to see him killed, but that they would – and indeed had already done so – end the lives of Jewish patients who came into their care.

Cue outrage across the community and loathing from politicians at those nurses. Well not from everyone. The usual glad-bag of “they were just misunderstood”, or “This was taken out of context”, and the by now standard blame the Jews line, “That man led them on to say that on video, they never meant to say it.” And clearly not outrage from a support worker at a state school.

There are current criminal investigations under way, so the less I comment on the issue, the better.

But fuelled by my curiosity as to the type of sectarianism that Fairness In Religions In Schools is appalled by, and worried about being seeded in our schools, I wanted to see if they were posting anything, an article, a comment, about what had happened.

After all, it there was ever a cast iron case of sectarianism in a state school there it was! Surely the good folk at their organisation would be all over this.

They would be horrified, and would be gathering the stormtroopers, to lead the charge against their sectarian bogeyman. You see, contrary to their assertion, sectarianism is so this century, and it’s not the Christians who are leading the way!

So in light of all that, what did I find? Crickets!  Nothing. Nada. Nix.

So I decided to go onto their site and ask them.  I PM-ed them just to keep it nice and polite. And because I deduced – correctly – that they would eventually block me.

And below are the screenshots of what I asked and how they responded. I can’t tell if they have said anything since publicly, because can you believe it, they have blocked me? Here’s an organisation that loves to link to rationalist and humanist societies and is a self-proclaimed believer in science and evidence, and you present them with evidence and they run and hide!

Here’s how the conversation went:

In other words, squirm, wriggle, obfuscate, hey look over there everybody!

And astonishing too, that presented with immediate experience (Granville Boys High School) and longitudinal evidence (The Cardus report) the very crew that claims it is rational and scientific can say nothing, does say nothing, and can merely huff and puff and obfuscate.

Let me be brutal: Fairness In Religions In Schools is a flat track bully. If you don’t know cricket terminology, a flat track bully is a batter who can score plenty of runs and look good when the pitch they are batting on is dead or unresponsive to the ball, i.e, it’s flat.  But get a bit of spice in the pitch with a few cracks and a bit of green grass, and the flat track bully suddenly finds themselves in trouble.

Fairness In Religions In Schools is standing on land it did not purchase. The Christian framework in this country gave rise to a right to protest and to push back against religion. And it’s not to say we have not had our sectarian times in this country, we surely have. But that’s clearly not the fault of SRE, and it’s clearly not – as the events of this week have shown – restricted to Christianity. In fact we’re in for a big healthy dose of sectarianism in the coming decades, that’s one thing for sure.

I think that for too long in Australia, those involved in SRE, especially Christians, have played a straight bat to this organisation’s bullying tactics. We’ve tried to be polite. We’ve tried to run cap-in-hand to show them that actually we’re doing good stuff. And every time we come up against them at a legislative level we argue with them in good faith.

There is no good faith. It’s time for Christian organisations to push back hard on Fairness In Religions In Schools, and show just how sectarian they are themselves, or indeed how cowardly, for having no response to one of the more disturbing – and sectarian – events we have seen in a long while at a state school.  And all without a Mrs Darcy-Evans and her flannel-graph Bible stories in sight.

And when it comes up again in Parliament, as it inevitably will, pull this story out and show the powers that be what this organisation is truly against.

And – until they block you – get on their Facebook page, and if you care to – and I would love it if you did – post this article on their Facebook page and then ask them privately why they are happy to strain out a scriptural gnat and swallow a sectarian camel (even if they don’t get the reference).