Politically speaking, Aussie conservatives are spoiled for choice. Spoiled because they have such a wild array of choices. The Saturday Paper reported that TWO factions in the Liberal Party have a Christian religious affiliation: the hard right (Catholics) and the centre right (Evangelicals). Then, if the anti Abortion rallies led by Prof Joanna Howe are your thing, chances are that you will meet the Libertarians and One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce seeking your vote.
Which is one reason that Lyle Shelton, once the leader of the Australian Christian Lobby and now campaigning as the top of the Family First ticket for the NSW upper house, has written a new book, Against the Tide, which conjures up two images for this writer.
The first is of Shelton “Standing athwart history yelling stop,” which comes from the US conservative William F Buckley describing the role of a traditional conservative. Like Buckley, Shelton is now confronting a force arguably to his right. Buckley finally defeated the “Birchers”, the members of the John Birch Society with a penchant for conspiracy theories, driving them out of the conservative mainstream in the US. (They are back in the Republican Party, which needs to be purged again.)
Perhaps some to the left of Shelton can see that many votes for him will be votes taken away from One Nation, which should be a good thing. And one of the last one or two seats in the NSW upper house, one of which Shelton is most likely to win, avoiding One Nation winning it would be way better.
My second vision is of Shelton mourning with the 19th-century poet Matthew Arnold, writer of the epic Dover Beach, which compares the receding of faith with the tide flowing out. Except, of course, Shelton’s book title is of a tide coming in, taking society in a progressivist direction. But presumably Shelton would agree that his concerns about society are based on the erosion of faith.
Shelton is an unpretentious Aussie character, not upper-class like William F Buckley, and Against the Tide is not very poetic at all. But it reveals a lot about Lyle Shelton, the social critic and, yes, culture warrior.
To play with the title Against the Tide again, there’s a tidal rip in Shelton’s saga that’s dragged him into deep water. It’s the seven-year-long drag queen saga, where social media comments by Shelton to the effect that Drag Queen Story Time performers in public libraries were “dangerous role models for children.”
Seven years and $500,000 later, the legal process is still going on. And four chapters Against the Tide – the process has been so torturous that laying it out was going to take a lot of space. TLDR: An earlier finding by the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal that Shelton’s comments did not amount to vilification has been overturned, and the whole thing grinds on.
Here’s how Shelton responds to this latest twist. “This new decision means my case has moved into a seventh year of litigation. While disappointing, importantly, the ruling does not make any finding of vilification against me, but make no mistake, the drag queens and the political activists backing their action want me punished and silenced. My concern has always been about child protection. I believe children should not be exposed to early sexualisation through sexualised role models, and they should not be exposed to role models who promote genderfluid ideology. I published confronting and unsavoury material from the drag queens’ public social media accounts. Some of this promotes the lifelong consequences of gender fluid ideology. Some of it simply reflects the sexualised worldview of LGBTQA+ plus drag queens. I wrote about the suitability of proponents of harmful gender ideology and radical LGBTQ+ sexual expressionism being appropriate role models for children.”
Shelton’s blog posts raised further complaints, and inevitably, litigation followed. While this writer does not believe that “free speech is dead”, as Shelton does, he provides evidence to suggest it is being throttled.
Shelton has a legitimate complaint; the process is the punishment, and this applies to both sides in the series of drawn-out culture war tribunals and court cases that seem to be the Australian way of sorting out disputes over vilification.
The Drag Queen case might be the reason that Against the Tide does not appear to have any difficulties with the tactics of any Christian social conservative activist. Even when their actions can reasonably be seen to be disastrous.
Take Citipointe School as an example. Here’s how Shelton writes about it. “In early 2022, the canary [Shelton is saying Christian schools are the Canary in the Coal Mine of the religious freedom debate] gasped for air. Citipointe Christian College, one of Queensland’s largest Christian schools, sought to clarify its enrolment contract so that parents and students understood what the school believed about sex, marriage and gender. The statement contained basic Christian propositions: God created humanity male and female, and marriage was between a man and a woman. These had been mainstream Christian beliefs for two millennia.”
The timing “early 2022” is significant. Three weeks before the new school year was to begin, parents were asked to sign an agreement that they agree that “any form of sexual immorality (including but not limited to: adultery, fornication, homosexual acts, bisexual acts, bestiality, incest, paedophilia, and pornography) is sinful and offensive to God and is destructive to human relationships and society”. Parents reacted strongly to the proposition that they had either to agree with the new deal or find their children a new school. Parents would also have to agree that their child identified with their natal sex.
Meanwhile, the Scott Morrison government was trying to give the Christian schools lobby what they wanted a delay to any changes to the Sex Discrimination Act exemptions they wished to retain, while bringing forward a religious discrimination bill. Citipointe smashed that with Scott Morrison telling Brisbane radio that “the bill that we’re going to be taking through the Parliament, we will have an amendment which will deal with that to ensure that the kids cannot be discriminated against on that basis [of sexuality].”
Professor Patrick Parkinson, a social conservative who supports the right of Chtristian schools to teach according to their convictions points out in his book Unshaken Allegiance, the school waved a red rag in front of a bull “to insist without notice and on the eve of a new academic year that the children of any parents who declined to sign the new contract would be treate as withdrawn nfrom the school.”
Shelton’s book will appeal to socially conservative Christians who see the lineup of Christian activists uniformly as heroes. None of them merits any criticism in Turn The Tide. But for those of us who think that occasionally some overstep the mark – as some of them themselves have come to think they have – or mix Christian social conservative issues, such as abortion or the freedom of schools to hire believers on staff, with issues such as limited government or weird Covid medication, might have to consider how to respond to each socially conservative activist with care. But Shelton’s book concentrates on the traditional conservative Christian issues, with Islam added to that mix.
In Turn the Tide, Shelton makes a case for Family First to get the votes of those who rank abortion, transgender, and, yes, freedom of speech as their top issues.
Turn the Tide: a letter tio the Antipodean Church LLyle Shelton. Locket Press, 2026.
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