A ban by other means

Everyone thought the great threat to Christian schools was posed by overt secularism. Like the communists back in the mid-20th century, many imagined Christian schools would be shut down by government fiat. A lesson from Down Under is quite different.

Australia’s left-wing Labor government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, is moving to amend Australia’s anti-discrimination legislation. The past decade in Canberra has seen an impasse on the question religious freedom and what some might call “woke” anti-discrimination causes.

The key interest groups in question are conservative and evangelical Christians on the one hand, and the LGBTQ folk on the other. There have been claims of students being expelled from Christian schools for being gay, and teachers losing their jobs for dissenting from traditional sexual ethics. In the current political and cultural climate, these sordid tales of sexual discrimination leave a bad taste in many mouths.

The Christian schools of Australia deny that such things happen often, and when they do occur the reasons are within the bounds of the current discrimination legislation. People who are a part of these Christian learning communities, be they teachers or students, sign up knowing that they will be taught traditional Christian ethics and that participation in this community will be, to some extent, governed by Christian ethics.

Until recently, the idea that a Christian school could decide who participates in their community was uncontroversial. Just as a political party can refuse membership to individuals whose views don’t align with those of the party, a Christian school can refuse to hire a staff member or enroll a student whose beliefs and behavior will not be a good fit.

That convention, and the accompanying laws, have come under severe strain in recent years in Australia. Almost a decade of center-right governments, from 2013 until 2022, saw multiple attempts to break the impasse between the ideology of equality and the right to religious freedom and association. But no one discovered a solution to balance these competing claims.

Until now, that is. The problem is, the solution is to destroy the integrity of Christian schools by way of anti-discrimination law. By amending one small legislative clause, Christian schools could quickly tumble into functional secularity.

The details of the proposed amendments are complex, but can be distilled like so: section 38 of the federal Sex Discrimination Act exempts religious organizations from toeing the legislative line on employment and enrolment discrimination. In short, Christians schools can refuse entry to people who don’t uphold or live out Christian sexual ethics.

The Albanese government wants to remove that exemption as a major part of its solution to the aforementioned impasse. What it would allow for is beyond what Christian schools and their respective religious communities and churches can deal with.

For example, schools would be forced to hire the best candidates for teaching roles even if they are practicing homosexuals. They would be unable to refuse a student whose planned gender transition would completely disrupt the culture of the school. These are just two of the many examples that Australian Christian schools are likely to face in a world without the Section 38 exemption.

The debate around this proposed legislation is heated, with much of the noise coming from religious interest groups and denominations. The argument necessarily moves along classical liberal lines: “We have a right to do what we want and protect our way of life,” argue religious leaders.

Some center-right Liberal and National Party politicians are weighing in as well. But the pressure on major political actors to bow to the demands of radical lobby groups must be immense. Few are cutting through with arguments that demonstrate conviction on the issue.

Political will is only one problem here. The other is a lack of Christian public influence. The liberalization of the public square in the 19th century occurred under culturally Christian conditions, which tied the values of liberalism to Christian ethical and social norms. Liberalism is now untenthered, and public discourse about balancing competing interests is reduced to the combat of interest groups.

This situation should be fine, in theory. John Stuart Mill would have argued that the best arguments will, in the end, come out on top. The problem is, the best arguments are arguments that point us to Christian ends. Arguments pointing to the good of Christian ethics and the gospel of Christ are less and less welcome in the secularist liberal public square, meaning that faithful defenders of Christian institutions are shouted down.

Christian education is a good that is now under severe threat in Australia, in part because of the success of certain lobby groups in pushing the new ethics of our “Sexular Age.” No government is threatening to shut the schools down in Australia. Rather, Christian schools simply have to give up key aspects of their identity to survive. Equality, the dominant political value of our day, is killing Christian education.