Pass-The-Parcel With Religious Freedom

Pass the Parcel Bomb

At the height of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland there was a spate of parcel bombings, in which seemingly innocuous packages were packed with lethal explosives, posted off to known political or military targets, with the express (post) aim to go off in the hands – and up into the faces – of the recipients, maximising physical damage.

It led to the dark joke – (all dark conflicts have correlating dark jokes by the way)  -, that the most dangerous game at an Irish birthday party was pass-the-parcel. Hey, as the picture above shows, it’s even an actual party game now, though I don’t think it sells all that well in Northern Ireland.

Now here we are in Australia just a matter of days before yet another Federal election and once again the main parties have been playing pass-the-parcel with religious freedom legislation, and hoping against hope that the music never stops.

Why? Because they are, like the Northern Irish joke, afraid of something going off in their hands and causing them damage. They just want to keep passing the thing on and hoping someone else has to deal with it.

And this failure to solve the issue – for some brave soul to take it firmly in hand –  is  occurring at the very time that The Australian states are exhibiting a vice-like grip on religious freedom issues themselves, with flawed anti-conversion therapy laws popping up everywhere that are specifically designed to limit freedom of conscience in the religious space.

You would think this issue would have become a top priority. But once again everyone has been busy passing the parcel of Religious Freedom for yet another three years. The music for each election round is increasingly dervish and frantic, as the leaders of both parties – so loathe to let the parcel land in their lap for too long – shift it from their laps as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile there are any number of bad-faith actors just slavering over the chance to shut down religious freedom, especially for faith-based schools. There are bad-faith actors who would love to get their hands on that parcel.

Yes I am speaking primarily about The Greens, who have an almost voracious appetite to see every issue as a cry for freedom from religion not for it. And unlike everyone else, they just can’t wait to rip the paper off that parcel and get to what’s inside.

Dodging a Bullet

I still remember the time when six years ago (pre-pandemic days, remember them?) that, against all odds Scott Morrison (remember him?) won the 2019 election. Remember that? Remember the days before the pandemic? Or is that all just a blur to you now?!

Oh the heady days of 2019! Religious freedom, particularly for Christian schools to staff all positions in line with their ethics, would be signed off ASAP with a conservative party victory, and schools could all get on with the boring stuff once again, like figuring out timetables.  Something would finally be done.

But it wasn’t, was it? Nothing was done for yet another there years. Yet back then, immediately after that 2019 election, I wrote an article entitled “Christian Schools Dodged a Bullet, But What Next?” Here’s what I said:

The unexpected electoral result of a few weeks back cleared my calendar. As a board member of a Christian school I was assuming an ALP government would come to power, a party which had vowed to cut all religious exemptions for Christian schools… And that would mean a whole lot of meetings to first try and dissuade an already settled -in-its-mind government to change its course of action, and then if that didn’t happen, to figure out a way to negotiate a future for faith-based schools with a government hostile to alternate ethical communities.

It was my call for the Morrison Government (he was a Pentecostal Christian after all!) to do something. To at least open a layer of the wrapping paper. This was always going to be the way – Morrison was a buck-passer well before he ever got to be a parcel-passer.

Sure enough, for three Morrison years, bucks and parcels were passed. Heaps of nothing happened. Sco-Mo lost the 2022 election and heaps of nothing has happened again since. Not that that was the intention. When in 2019 the shadow Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, wrote to faith-based schools on the misguided assumption that the Australian Labour Party would win the election, he was adamant about what was going to happen.

So confident was he of electoral victory that he penned a long lecturing letter to faith-based schools outlining his intention to get The Australian Law Reform Commission onto the matter tout de suite. It’s a letter I also quoted in that 2019 blog post, and it’s worth quoting it again. His intention was to ensure that the ALRC would work…

“…to provide recommendations on how best to remove the exemptions from discrimination against LGBTQI students and teachers contained in commonwealth legislation as a priority”.

So you would think after the false start of 2019, then the victory in 2022, that Dreyfus would be out of the blocks! Yet he has been the A-G for three years and this much vaunted removal has not occurred. I wonder what he’s done with that letter?

Now don’t get me wrong. I do not think that Dreyfus has had some of Damascus Road experience and realised that religious freedom, and freedom of association are critical matters to hold tightly too, even if one disagrees with the results. No, I think it is because he is a political beast who lacks a moral centre and is more concerned about retaining his role above any other issue.

This is, after all, a man who is our most senior Jewish political figure. He is a man whose party called out The Greens for their rabid anti-Semitism over the past few years. This is the man and who went to Israel to smooth the political waters with the government there after our government flipped and flopped over cars being set alight, synagogues being burned and students being hounded off campus.

But his most recent move?  Placing the very same Greens Party at number two on his local ballot paper to ensure their preferences. We will never know if Dreyfus lacks the courage of his convictions, because one must possess actual convictions in the first place before it can be determined whether one is lacking the courage required of them.

Post-Election Possibilities

So what will happen next? Here we are with an almost certain ALP return to government and Dreyfus once again holding the reins of our primary political legal role.  Yet if the government does not change many other things have changed. Things that I believe will lead to Dreyfus holding fire. Things that I believe will lead to the parcel once again being passed.

For one, the progressive side of the ALP is under fire in the western suburbs of Sydney which have large immigrant Muslim populations. Not over religious freedom per se, but over the Palestine issue. These are the very same electorates who voted down against same sex marriage in the 2017 plebiscite. The progressive ALP figures are walking on tippy-toes desperate to retain their seats.

And guess what that means? The faith-based schools in those regions – the Muslim equivalents of the Christian schools –  aren’t too keen on the types of letters such as the one that Dreyfus wrote in 2016. Turns out they’re not keen on open season in their schools from all sorts of sexual behaviours or ideas that they deem perverse.

When it comes to progressive tolerance and Allah, they’re always going to choose Allah. And that’s something patronising secularists in the West don’t get, so quick are they to deem Muslims victims of some sort of colonial invasion. Turns out the colonial invasion most despised by Muslims is the secularist version.

Which all means, combined with Catholic Education, and a large portion of the total of  independent schools (who, combined educate more than 1/3 of Australian students), there is a voting bloc that the government does not want to get offside.  The parcel is likely to be passed on again.

But here’s what else we did not see some six years ago either, the returning tide of faith in the West. There’s a strong interest in Christianity again (and in all forms of spirituality to be fair), against all of the odds and against the crowing predictions of many a Rationalist Society member.

The pandemic exposed something hollow and rotten at the core of the Australian – and the Western – soul. As The Quiet Revival report from the UK shows clearly, church attendance, spiritual disciplines and Bible reading is making a comeback, and among a younger cohort of people. People who will, in the next decade or so, have children, and who  may have a vested interest in an education option that includes religious freedoms.

There’s every chance that the voting bloc that has an interest in religious freedoms in Australia is going to get bigger and younger, not smaller and older, as the likes of The Sydney Morning Herald’s resident gadfly atheist, Peter FitzSimons, had assumed during the pandemic.

FitzSimons wrote gleefully that the closure of churches during the pandemic would be the death-knell (or at least one component of the knell) of religion in Australia, as it was generally older people who were religious, and once things opened up again, then they would be too enfeebled to attend. Australia would be on its way to freedom FROM religion at last.

At which point God said “Hold my beer”. Things have turned out very differently indeed. I believe that even if we get a hung-parliament and the rabid types such as The Greens hold some sort of balance of power, they’re going to get a “Tell him he’s dreamin’‘” moment from the Prime Minister if they seek to push their anti-religious agenda.

Use Your Freedoms Well

So what does it mean for Christian schools in particular, even if the parcel is to be passed yet again?  It’s simple in one sense: Just get on with what you are doing. Get on with it!  Use your freedoms well while you have them.

The time is ripe for Christian education even if there are conflicts coming.  Education is not just about information transfer, as you well know, it’s about pitching a vision of human flourishing in line with your deepest spiritual and ethical commitments. It is worldview formation, and hence human transformation.  And that’s what people are looking for all of a sudden.

I believe we are going to see an upsurge in parents sending their children your way, and maybe not simply for the values – the so called “fruit without the root” of the faith, but for the actual, you know, faith! You won’t have to be find a way to soften what you are on about for sceptical parents. In fact they may push you for more clarity.

So don’t settle for moralistic therapeutic deism. Don’t settle for simply pleasing the loudest stakeholders who the principal lies awake at night worrying about. Make sure the board holds the line for the sake of the gospel direction in a generation that lacks a compass.

Yes, educate well, but any secular school can do that too.  This is about moral formation and a vision of human flourishing that is uniquely Christian. This  moral formation and vision of human flourishing did not spring up out of nowhere, despite what the secularists would have us believe. Good education and moral formation are conjoined twins. Both will die if you attempt to separate them. A truly Christian school will hold them together, sometimes in tension, but always together.

And the likes of The Greens know that education is about moral formation. As good Marcusean long-marchers-through-institutions they are well drilled in how to change culture over time to reflect their progressive sensibilities. The fact that by dint of history there is a firewall around some forms of these institutions – particularly the educational ones –  that has left rendered them off-limits to progressive rot, only emboldens (and enrages) them.

I believe we could see parents even more invested in Christian schools for deeper, spiritual reasons, and parents who will sniff out any attempt by governments to water down the message or taint its waters. Anthey they might just vote accordingly, and see it as a primary election issue

. I once thought that the issue was not a big enough one – with not enough cut through – to gain any mainstream voter interest. But let’s not be fooled by pollsters. The US pollsters, and all of the great and the good, told everyone who would listen that abortion rights would be high on the agenda for, especially, young women in the recent election, but it was well down the list.

Have a read of this piece in First Things, which shows that older women – to put it bluntly, those well past child-bearing years -, considered abortion as a primary issue, but their child-bearing daughters and granddaughters didn’t. It’s worth having a peruse of that article.

Turns out when abortion is safe, legal and commonplace, and pills can be bought online to induce them, no one is paying attention to those who say the sky is falling.  Things change and we often only see it well after the change, and elections show these changes up.

But hey, I once thought – and less than two election cycles ago – that Christianity had a few more years of wane left before we might see anything like a waxing again.  Yet here we are, baptisms aplenty, university Christian Unions with heaps of inquiries, and crunchy versions of the faith back in vogue.

Let’s see what God does in the next three years before the 2028 election. That parcel could be passed for a few more years yet before the music finally stops and someone actually does something about it.