Christians should carefully pick which social issues to fight, Patrick Parkinson, the former Dean of Law at the University of Queensland, told Freedom for Faith’s “Freedom 25” conference. Speaking as a campaigner for religious freedom, Parkinson told the gathering that Christians should be careful in choosing which hills to die on.
“We’ve been trying to work constructively with governments in building compromises which will work for everybody in a multi-faith and multicultural society, Parkinson said. “But some of those battles we have lost. And this is not just true of Australia, it’s true of the UK, it’s true of Canada, it’s true of other countries as well. We’re experiencing now a much more difficult legal environment in terms of freedom. So how do we navigate that? How do we live wisely in that situation?”
Part of that wisdom will be choosing what causes to campaign on and which ones to avoid. “They must be about situations where we have to take a stand, and one of the worst things we can do is to be reckless and to die on the wrong hill,” Parkinson suggested that Christians under legal and social pressure should go back to the Sermon on the Mount in choosing how to respond.
Parkinson introduced five principles for wise campaigning, outlining several case studies from his new book “Unshaken Allegiance”, including several where Christians may not have been wise.
Principle One: Pick your battles carefully – example the Drag Queens case: Parkinson began with a recognition that not all of his audience of Christians active in the religious freedom arena would agree with his take on this topic. “My view is to pick your battles carefully. We’ve got to work out when we expend capital, expend resources, take risks and when we don’t. The very tragic story of Wilson Gavin, a student in Queensland, is illustrative of exactly this.
What is drag queens story time? It started in San Francisco around 2015. It has travelled all over the world, certainly all the universities, the world hosting events usually in public libraries in which little children come and a drag queen reads them a story. Now there’s no doubt about what the motivation is for this, which is why it has become such a big thing. The idea is to introduce small children to the notion of gender fluidity, the notion that being male or female is a choice, all sorts of categories and so on… Mums, dads as well, can take their four and 5-year-old kids to hear that story, to see the activity or they don’t have to.
“So it’s not something just being imposed in the classroom or state school necessarily, it’s that people can volunteer to attend. I haven’t been to a drag queen story hour. Has anyone [here]? No, probably not. I would imagine that the stories they tell are illustrative of those sorts of gender fluidity ideas about being transgender and all those sorts of things. But one of the questions in my mind of this is how much of that is going to be understood by a four or five-year-old child? …
“So there’s no doubt about the intentions of the drag queen story, how successful it is, I don’t know. And who is taking their children to these events? Probably, people are quite sympathetic to the movement anyway and we can’t reach them except with the gospel. So that’s my sense of it.
“There was a group of students from, I think, all from the University of Queensland, but certainly most, led by a man, Wilson Gavin, a young man, openly gay man, and devout Catholic as well. And he led a project to disrupt the drag queen story. And it must have been a little bit frightening for the children, to be honest, to have that happen. They were bewildered by it, but there was an enormous [response] afterwards on social media. He was just strongly attacked all over the country. Within about 24 hours, he had committed suicide. Now that’s tragedy, obviously for him, and a tragedy for his family. My point is this: Was it right to pick that battle? There are so many other battles we can fight. I suspect that disrupting a drag queen story act doesn’t actually do a huge amount of good. It certainly gathered a lot of negative publicity.
“Whatever we do, I think we need to be prayerful about when we engage in that sort of process, when we speak up, what battles we decide on and what we’ve done. We’ll not turn the culture around by our protests; we’ll not turn the culture around without people coming to faith.”
Principle Two, Don’t wave the red flag in front of the bull: the Citipointe story. Parkinson recounted the Citipointe School controversy. Just as the negotiations with the Morrison Government over a religious freedom bill were at a delicate stage, Brisbane’s Citipointe School provoked a strong public reaction by providing parents with a new contract to sign about the school’s conservative social beliefs two weeks before the beginning of the school year. There had been no consultation with the parents, the contract summarised the school’s beliefs about marriage and other issues, and required parents to sign, or they would be considered to have withdrawn their children from the school.
“It had significant negative consequences at the time for those of us who were engaged in trying to get a religious discrimination bill through the parliament,” Parkinson told Freedom25.
“It happened at just the wrong time.”
” You see, the problem was that it wasn’t just saying we have revised our school contract. It was saying your children will be expelled effectively unless parents sign up to do that. And there was, as you can imagine, outrage on the front pages of the papers. People were asked to comment on it, and it was very, very hard to defend the proposition that children should have to leave the school if the parents wouldn’t sign up to the contract. And one of the parents said in the media at the time, ‘Look, a contract is between two parties. If you’re going to renegotiate that contract, that’s fine, but you have to have discussions with the people you are contracted with.’
The school withdrew the contract within a few days, apologised and settled a Human Rights Commission complaint from parents.
“But what are the lessons from this? It wasn’t wrong for the school to say, ‘These are values.’ It wasn’t wrong for them to say, ‘Parents, part of the contracting or enrolling your children at this school is that you understand this is what we believe. We’re not asking you to believe.”
“But what you do is you’re going to share that with parents [in good time].. You get feedback and give them warning because in our current culture, a lot of the parents and a lot of the kids would not have agreed with some of this proposition. So we are gentle, we are kind, we are humble, and we say this is what we believe, and gentle and specifically in that situation, apart from giving people lots of notice and not having to ask them to withdraw their kids, you grandfather these students. What grandfathering is that you say all the kids that are currently enrolled, they’re under the old contract.'”
Principle three: navigating anti-discrimination law. Parkinson described “a narrow ledge” in Victoria for schools wanting to employ Christian staff. In that state, schools can choose only Christian staff by making faith an “inherent requirement” of the job. But that narrow ledge needs careful navigation.
“If your policy is that you only employ Christian staff, and it’s not [simply to employ a lot of Christian staff], and you say that’s an inherent requirement and you’re not going to have to fill a gap in someone who doesn’t meet those criteria… You can do it.
“But you’ve got to be aware of the test you’re going to have to satisfy by doing it. And in country schools in particular, it can be increasingly hard to fill all jobs with people who meet the criteria of a Christian school.”
“So your job description might say that everyone is expected to attend prayers before school. Everyone is expected to be able to lead a prayer and need a bible study. So when you say it’s an inherent requirement that’s backed up by things in the job description that match that, that all teachers are expected to try to bring the Bible into their subject in some way or other, whatever they are teaching. All of those things will back up an inherent real requirement.”
Parkinson describes how a selection criterion might help support a preference for christian teachers
“If it means that we have a preference for Christian teaching staff [or a] preference for Christians to hold our senior executive positions, we need to back that up as well in some way. In Christian education, we might say that one of the selection criteria is an understanding, appreciation, and willingness to engage in Christian education. You don’t have to be Christian. … It’s not going to be easy to do [for a non-Christian].”
Parkinson raised the delicate situation where someone might have been a Christian with a framework compatible with a Christian school or organisation when they were appointed, but changes their beliefs afterwards.
“It’s not the school’s fault, it’s not the staff member’s fault, but there’s now an incompatibility in terms of the values of each. There may not be; it may be that things can go on, the person’s beliefs are tightly held and not shared with the kids. There may be no reason to turn that into a problem or dispute, but there will be situations where the school feels nervous, the person can’t reel it in, and in the great majority of cases, that is likely to be worked out peaceably if you take the right approach. If you take an adversarial approach, if you stand on your Christian values and so on and so forth, you’re likely just to create animosity in conflict.
“But in a situation where as Jesus said, if somebody sues you for your shirt, you give them your cloak as well. If you are counter-cultural and generous in the way you respond to that situation, very likely, very likely that can be resolved. If she or he needs to find a new job, well so be it. You might give them some means to tide them over and to bless them saying, ‘We are parting in peace. We don’t have conflict with you. We don’t want you to have conflict with us. We want to get to move on.’ I thinkhat’s what Jesus would want us to do.
Principle four: be calm and carry on. Parklinson told the story of a NZ school, Bethlehem College. Much like Citipointe, Bethlehem also wanted to issue a statement of its beliefs. “From a Christian point of view, again, it was about their beliefs. It wasn’t about requiring every child to believe that or every parent to believe that; it was simply clarifying what they themselves all hell broke loose.”
A media storm broke over the school, followed by an inquiry by the Education Review Office. In his book, “Unshaken Allegiance,” Parkinson described the school saying that they taught their students to respect other beliefs and model that in their own communications. When daily demonstrations by a mother and daughter not associated with the school started, the staff took them hot coffee on the cold mid-winter mornings, and told the media they respected their right to protest.
“Around this time there was a day of action against bullying … and there was some student throwing fruit at the school. It happened to coincide with this public controversy, and it was alleged that a few would be shouting ‘kill the gays’..
“The chair of the board said, ‘There are all these complaints [in the media] that we’re doing all these things. We are transphobia or sexist, we are racist,ablist. I haven’t heard those complaints, but if you have any, please contact the school. We would investigate.’ Secondly, they got their Christian school community to pray about the situation.The school’s message was “We care for all students, we honour all students and different beliefs. We encourage them to engage with their different views but we don’t engage in discrimination.”
Parkinson reports in “Unshaken Allegiance” that the ERO found that a small number of students reported feeling deeply hurt by their experiences at the school. These students believed they had been specifically singled out and targeted because of their sexual orientation.
He writes: “The Christian school should, of course, explain the Bible’s teaching on marriage, sexuality and gender where relevant to the life of the school. But it can do so while also presenting itself as a safe and respectful environment in which to explore these issues in an age-appropriate way.”
Principle five: negotiate quickly. Parksonson cited Jesus’ admonition to “Agree with your adversary quickly, while you are on the way with him, lest your adversary deliver you to the judge…” (Matthew 5:25)
He expressed the view that “in the end, the government doesn’t want a major conflict with its people of faith. It certainly doesn’t want to cause conflict with the Islamic community. It cares much less about conflict with Christians, sure. But it doesn’t really want a big conflict with the Christian community either, particularly a year from an election, for example…”
“Now there will come a point undoubtedly where we have to draw lines in the sand. There will be times when we have to say Here we stand if there is a threat to our capacity to live quiet and godly lives. An example is given in the conversion legislation in Victoria, the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission has something on its website which gives guidance to Christians, even praying on their own about what they’re allowed to pray for…
“I think one of the lines of the sand will be when a Christian organisation can no longer be Christian, and at that point, you are just an agency for the government that can be a purely secular organisation. If you cannot be any different from a secular organisation, that’s where we have a line in the sand. But there’s a very wise advice from Archbishop Fisher on this in a speech he gave two years ago, which said that’s the nuclear option. Closing Catholic schools, that’s the nuclear option. You can only do it once, and so we have to be careful before we threaten that.”
Unshaken Allegiance, Patrick Parkinson, Matthias Media 2025.
Available at The Wandering Bookseller $24.99