“Let not any one pacify his
conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and
forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that
good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a
protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he
helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the
subject.”
John Stuart Mill
I sat in a
room full of pastors once and the discussion made me more furious than perhaps any
other discussion I have had with a group of leaders in my life. This was a room
filled with pastors of all ages, young one’s like myself and older pastors too,
but most of the men were older and experienced pastors, men who had been around
in life and ministry for some time.
They were
talking about the National Redress Scheme and how it would work, and why
it was better for Churches to sign on to the program offered, rather than go it
alone. The National Redress Scheme is a system set up to compensate the
victims of institutional abuse. It is an attempt to reassert justice for the
victims of abuse and it is necessary. So, it was not this which angered me.
What angered
me was something the pastors said. I asked a question about why so many pastors
did not report abuse to the police at the time. One of the worst aspects of
these abuse scandals is not that the laws at the time did not have the ability
to punish offenders, it was that the laws at the time were often not applied,
because things were kept, hush hush, on the down low, quiet. One of the older
pastors said to me, “You have to understand Matt, it was not the done thing at
the time to report this sort of thing.” Other pastors in the room nodded, as if
to say this settled the issue.
This is what
made me furious and I let them know it. I asked them why did they need to be
told that they should seek justice for harmed children. There was no excuse for
not taking this stuff to the police. This is part of a shepherd’s role; when
made aware of danger we need to protect the littlest lambs from wolves and devouring
lions. Why did the government need to make a law for mandatory reporting?
Should not pastors have led the way in this? I was furious at those men, and
they were rightly chagrined. But their reason stuck with me: it wasn’t the done
thing. In other words, they couldn’t bring themselves to go against the culture
of society in that day.
Society is
now punishing the Church for this neglect and complicity in many ways. There is
the financial compensation, which is the least that the victims deserve. There
is the decline of the Church in Australia. And there is a social denigration of
the Church’s reputation. Even though some of the secular authorities were just
as culpable in many abuse situations themselves, many people, rightly, hold the
Church to a higher standard. Christians and non-Christians alike in Australia
believe the Church should be a place of justice that seeks to advocate for true
justice in society as well. They are right to hate the Church’s failure in this
regard and to wave it in the Church’s face.
But God in
his grace gave the Church a chance to redeem itself: Covid. In the last two
years, society was faced with a time of rampant anxiety, and as people do when
they are anxious they lose sight of what is right and find themselves willing
to do or support things they would not normally do or support. Out of fear for
a virus that was shown from very early to have a very mild effect on the
majority of people, a malady hyped up around the world by terrified and often
dishonest leaders and media personalities, the nations of the West began to
employ unjust mandates in an attempt to control the virus – mandates which
really controlled the populations who had been terrified by what their leaders
said about the virus. These mandates required Western people to override long
held views on human rights, and just basic decency, all in an effort to cajole
the population to accept certain measures; like coerced vaccination. Fear was
propagated at every level of society, and voices of reason were quashed and
labelled as trouble-makers, anti-vaxxers and more.
This
situation handed an easy win to the Church. All the Church had to do was step
up and say clearly that mandated medical care is evil and no one should lose
their job or be coerced to have a vaccine. They should be free to choose and
freedom to choose requires that they are not pressured in anyway. To help it
stand in such a way, the Church simply had to draw on its deep tradition of
advocating for liberty of conscience, its long tradition of standing in the way
of tyranny, and simply say: we do not agree with mandatory vaccines.
In the
height of the hysteria secular leaders and media personalities would have
attacked the Church, but eventually once people calmed down, they would have
appreciated the fact that the Church did not lose its cool in a moment of
anxiety. It was a softball throw, an easy win for the church. Take the
momentary unpopularity but do the right thing for the nation in the long term.
The response was a no-brainer: mandates must be condemned. And yet, the Church
dropped the ball utterly. Very few spoke up, and those that did were rebuked by
loud voices in the Church’s media arms. Why didn’t many speak up? Well as they may say in the future, “You have
to understand Matt, it was not the done thing at the time to speak up about
this sort of thing.”
Now the
narrative is breaking and secular authorities are starting to say the right
thing:
“According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, it
can be unlawful to require an employee to be vaccinated and that ‘the need
for vaccination should be assessed on a case-by-case basis, taking into account
the nature of the workplace and the individual circumstances of each employee’.
It goes on to say that the Commonwealth Sex
Discrimination Act 1984, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992,
and Age Discrimination Act 2004 makes it unlawful to
discriminate on the grounds of pregnancy, disability, and age, including
employment – with disability broadly defined as including past, present, and
future disabilities. Strict rules or conditions that impose mandates on these
groups may result in ‘indirect discrimination’.
One key test to reasonableness about imposing mandates is
whether alternative methods can be used to achieve the same goal. It also seeks
to determine whether an ‘unjustifiable hardship’ would be placed on the
employer.”[i]
This is what
those of us who have been opposing the mandates have said all along. The same
article notes:
“The Courier Mail has reported that the Human
Rights Commission (Commission) has sensationally intervened in the Supreme
Court challenge brought by educators – believing the CHO has gone too far.
According to reports, the Commission claimed the vaccine mandate for teachers
and childcare workers was outside the Chief Health Officer (CHO) John Gerrard’s
powers under the Public Health Act 2005. The Commission further
stated that the right of the CHO to give such directions was conditional based
on reasonable and demonstrably justifiable limits upon human rights and that
based on the present evidence, the CHO’s mandates were not justified.”
This has
been obvious to many of us for a long time now, but finally the narrative is
breaking and secular authorities are starting to admit that things have gone
way too far.
Where was
the Human Rights Commission all along? Doing the same thing Church leaders were
doing: hiding from the obvious truth that the mandates were unjust, wicked, and
needed to be opposed. But at least now the Human Rights Commission has spoken
up. The majority of Church leaders in Australia are still silent. Instead of
being at the front of this issue, having roundly condemned evil from the start,
the Church sat on its haunches and cuddled up to the world, submitted itself to
the mandates, stayed quiet about their injustice, and in some instances even
enforced them in their spheres of influence. The Church did what it had done in
the past with the abuse scandals: shown it was no better than the culture of
society around it. And the saddest thing is this did not have to be.
It was the
Church that taught the concepts of liberty of conscience to the West. Early
Anabaptists and Baptists had already fought the battle for freedom of
conscience on disputable matters and won. Hence such Christian teachings can be
found in secular Australia laws, such as this example from the Queensland Human
Rights Act 2019:
“20Freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief
(1)Every person has the right to freedom of thought,
conscience, religion and belief, including—
(a)the freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of
the person’s choice; and
(b)the freedom to demonstrate the person’s religion or belief
in worship, observance, practice and teaching, either individually or as part
of a community, in public or in private.
(2)A person must not be coerced or restrained in a way that
limits the person’s freedom to have or adopt a religion or belief.”[ii]
This has
also had an impact on medical human rights laws, the same act tells us:
“17Protection from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment
A person must not be—
(a)subjected to torture; or
(b)treated or punished in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way;
or
(c)subjected to medical or scientific experimentation or
treatment without the person’s full, free and informed consent.”[iii]
This was not
rocket science. There were clear injustices being perpetrated on society, and
the Church already had a grand tradition of having stood against similar
injustices in the past. The Church of the past had opposed slavery, spoken out
against one man owning the body of another, worked for safer working environments,
spoken against child labour and more. Early Baptists paved the way in the
English speaking world for liberty of conscience; they had influenced and
taught other denominations to take up the cause, and such teachings were
eventually set into the laws of countries like Australia.
This was a
battle that had already been fought, won and settled on the right side; no one
has to right to coerce another on matters of conscience. History had already
chosen the side of liberty of conscience in disputable issues, and all the
Church had to do was remind people that this was the case and stand firm
against mandates. The government likely would have still gone too far, but at
least we would have had clean hands. And there is the likelihood that the
unified voice of the Church would have had an amazing chilling effect on
tyranny.
The Church
failed on this issue massively. But not all of the Church. There were voices
that spoke up. Writers at Caldronpool, The Canberra Declaration, Bill
Meuhlenberg at Culture Watch, Bob Cotton at Maitland Christian Church
in NSW and others were speaking. They were marginalized, attacked by the majority
of Christian media, called all sorts of names, but there were people who did
not forget the Church’s role in a time of crisis is partly to challenge
authoritarians from going too far. Because of these bold Christian leaders no
one will be able to seriously say in the future that “it just wasn’t the done
thing to speak up about it at that time” because brave men and women did speak
up.
God gives
kings authority to rule and he gives the Church the authority to call kings, that
go too far, to account. It has been the balance of these two biblical teachings
that have helped make the West so great in the past. A balance of powers. The
Church and State both taking an active role in society are necessary for a just
land.
The Church
was given a softball on this issue and on the whole it failed utterly. For many
reasons, but partly because it has forgotten its own legacy. This is why myself
and Tim Grant wrote Defending Conscience: How Baptists Reminded the Church
to Defy Tyranny. We want to remind the Church in Australia of how the
concept of liberty of conscience was developed, and the great things it
achieved in Western society. The Baptists were central in this history, but it
was not until they convinced other denominations to take up the cause that
liberty of conscience started to become enshrined in Western law.
You can buy
this book here at: https://lockepress.com/defending-conscience/. It can be pre-ordered now, and
should be released soon. This book is part of our efforts to remind the Church
of this legacy.
In my view
the Church is largely to blame for what is happening in society, because the
Church forgot its great calling: to command nations, including national
leaders, to obey the teachings of Jesus, and these include not coercing
people’s bodies to accept something they do not want. For Christians we are
taught in the Bible that Christ bought those bodies with a price, they are his,
they are not Caesar’s, and they are not the Premiers. And for all people, the
human body carries the image of God, not the image of Caesar, so still it is
owned by God and not the state.
The Church failed on this issue, as it had failed on the abuse issue. It better
soon start lifting its game or God and society will have no need of it, because
it will just fade into the society around it and become irrelevant. The Church
is at its best when it fearlessly stands against the culture’s sin, whatever it
is, even when it is unpopular, especially when it is unpopular, because that is
exactly the legacy our own Lord displays for us in the gospels.
List of
references:
[i] Christin
Carney 2022, “Queensland Human Rights
Commission claims vaccine mandate outside CHO’s power”, Australian Free and
Independent Press Network, https://afipn.com.au/queensland-human-rights-commission-claims-vaccine-mandate-outside-chos-power/?fbclid=IwAR2pE_e30j-HOCVTbxZRRVl8GK69cMQZLhcR_g-GWHfma7AJzJJbofpU9sc.
[ii] Queensland
Legislation, Human Rights Act 2019, https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/whole/html/asmade/act-2019-005.
[iii]
Ibid.
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