“FREEDOM24 conference will develop your understanding of threats to religious freedom in Australia from historical, theological and policy perspectives,” is the promise Freedom for Faith gave for their 2024 conference. It was a high-quality conference with well-qualified speakers, including Mark Spencer, Director of Public Policy.for Christian Schools Australia –a key player in the current discussions over Religious Discrimination legislation. Mark Sneddon, Executive Director of the Institute for Civil Society, gave an update on the intricacies of the legal debate. Videos of the Freedom24 papers are available on https://freedomforfaith.org.au/f24/
But a paper by John McClean, Vice Principal of the Presbyterians’ Christ College, caught this writer’s attention. Perhaps alone in a crowd of strong supporters of the right of Christian schools to chart their own path, this writer believes that the paper created doubts about such a resolute position.
While this article will reflect McClean’s paper accurately, it’s ownly fair to point out that he would not agree with the conclusions I draw from it.
As a good Presbyterian, McClean starts with the Westminster Confession of Faith. “The classic reformed position sets the civil authorities, the magistrate and the church in a close partnership as two independent institutions, McClean told Freedom 24. In “the so-called confessional state, Christians and churches should submit to the civil powers, but the magistrate’s power in relation to the church is limited. … The Westminster Confession says the civil magistrate may not assume to himself the administration of the word and sacraments or the power of the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And the theological basis for this view is that the church is established directly by Christ and is authorised by him and is ruled by him.”
“But it also held, civil authorities should promote right religion. So the Westminster Confession says that the magistrate has the authority and his duty to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies, heresies be suppressed or corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God, duly settled, administered, and observed. So while the magistrate should recognise and support the true church, the church isn’t to be directly controlled by the magistrate and therefore the church doesn’t need the recognition of the magistrate to exist.”
McClean traced the history of the retreat of the pure confessional state to today’s situation where the church is not established, and there is potential for some conflict between church and state. Now, “Christians can and should support a general freedom of religion, recognising that God has made everybody religious and that religious expression is an important part of human life and culture. And we shouldn’t expect the government to support a particular denomination and especially in a religious plural society, not expect the government to support Christianity particularly.”
He applied the Latin term “circa sacra” to the role of the state and “in scaris” to the independence of the church. “It’s a pretty simple distinction,” McClean pointed out. “It says the civil authorities have the right to regulate matters around the church. They’re well within their rights to regulate certain church activities, but they shouldn’t act in sacris if they seek to directly determine the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of the church, then they overstep what is a God-given limitation.”
However, the Freedom24 conference was focused on schools, which are also the focus of the current discussion about a Commonwealth Religious Discrimination Act, which is, in turn, centred on schooling.
So do schools fit “in sacris”‘” or “circa sacris”? It was an obvious question – so I asked McClean it at a break time. While he said that he had not covered that in his paper, he thought they probably were “in sacris.”
If schools are like churches – and it is clear that some low-fee schools have the characteristics of a church as communities formed around faith – then the use of their independence “in sacris” has a the making of a case.
There are two objections. One is that virtually every school, even the most religious ones, have a mix of Christian and non-Christian families. The school can arguably have a “church” established within it, but not every family is a member of it.
Secondly, many of the schools seeking continued independence from discrimination laws (maintaining existing exemptions in the Sex Discrimination Act) have high levels of government funding. If they are churches, then we have state-funded churches. This runs against the ethos of many of the denominations that founded the schools. It is not very Baptist or Brethren to be a state church. On the other hand, Lutheran churches in the nations of their birth are often state churches, but increasingly those states are saying who can be members or married in those state churches.
In a recent mailout, a coalition of these schools set out their demands.
“We have worked with other faith leaders and engaged in good faith with the Government to develop an approach consistent with international law that would allow a religious educational institution to:
- Act in good faith in accordance with its beliefs in relation to conduct that threatens to undermine its religious character and ethos,
- Protect its ability to teach in accordance with its beliefs and
- Require staff to adhere to and conduct themselves in accordance with the beliefs of the religion.”
This list is endorsed by Mark Spencer for Christian Schools Australia, Vanessa Cheng for the Australian Association of Christian Schools and Alistair Macpherson for Associated Christian Schools, representing the bulk of the low-fee Christian Schools sector. (Christian Schools is used here to identify those schools that commonly use that description – it does not include all identifiable Christian Schools, for example, the Sydney Anglican Schools.)
Of these three, the central principle is that schools and other religious institutions should be able to teach according to their doctrines. this is crucial for seminaries and Bible colleges, which are responsible for forming each new generation of ministers.
Pre HECS – student loans – these institutions existed on fees and church support and could do so again if necessary.
This writer fully supports the right of schools, both primary and secondary schools, to teach according to their beliefs and believes they should be able to hire at least a more significant proportion of staff that enable them to do so.
But for many schools, state funding is integral to their existence. This applies less to high-fee “church schools” where state funding is a small proportion of their income. but for many lo-fee schools, the reverse is true.
Yet these are the schools most insistent on demanding independence of the state. The platform of Christian Schools Australia, the Australian Association of Christian Schools and Associated Christian Schools is to remain exempt from anti-discrimination laws.
However, the first leg of their demands, as listed above, may be problematic. These schools maintain that they do not wish to expel LGBTQIA students, but to ban “conduct that threatens to undermine its religious character and ethos” may effectively amount to the same thing. A student might identify as gay and want to be able to tell their fellow students about that. A transgender student might want to transition socially. The “conduct that threatens” provision, if rigorously applied, would effectively cause those students to leave the school.
For other Christian educators – including some evangelicals in the established “church school” sector seek a different vision apart from independence from the state. One head of a well-known school explained to this writer that they see Anglican schools as linked to both church and state.
This implies real responsibilities to both. They don’t want to refuse to hire LGBTQIA staff while wanting to make sure they have plenty of Christians as role models. These schools teach the gospel. They know that a proportion of students will be gay or transgender, and they don’t want to set up rules that drive them from the school.
This halfway house is not often heard in the debate over christian schooling. But it would help the debate, particularly about the crucial issue of staffing, that only a proportion of religious schools will want to restrict staffing to adherents of the faith that sponsors the school.