Islam is the only religion in Australia today with the problem of radicalisation, but in our rush to look tolerant, Christian church groups are being monitored. Are we risking the very freedoms we are trying to preserve? Michael Jensen writes.

The particular victory that terrorism seems to be winning is to make liberal society hostile to religion as such.

Only two days after the appalling slaughter of Curtis Cheng as he peacefully went about his work, a commentator on ABC News 24 was heard to say:

"We have to empower people in schools, people in mosques, people in churches to be able to see the beginnings of radicalisation."

This, perhaps throwaway, comment was evidence of a more widespread response to the threat of religiously-motivated terrorism. In NSW, the government has moved to audit school prayer groups of whatever faith, in order to prevent extremism. Voluntary religious activities must be monitored, and parental permission obtained before high school students participate.

Can you see what has happened here? A radicalised Muslim youth apparently commits an act of politico-religiously motivated terror. It is evil and repulsive.

But now it is not just all mosques but all churches (no mention of synagogues or temples, note) that have to take care to watch out for "radicalisation". The hotbed of radicalism that we have to check apparently includes your local Baptist youth group, that Bible study group that meets in the local high school, and the confirmation classes that my Anglican church runs.

Because it seems that Christian young people are being turned into violent extremists capable of committing random acts of terror against law enforcement officials, or catching planes to distant countries to take part in revolutionary religious wars. That pretty Presbyterian church on the corner in your suburb may look like it is busy with family barbecues, a choir, and helping the homeless in the local area. But if you look more closely, you'll see that firearms are being distributed around the congregation, and literature denouncing the treatment of Presbyterians world-wide is being distributed. Christian schools are a seething foment of rage and militancy. Special Religious Education classes are teaching kids how to make bombs.

Yes, it is absurd. But, in its rush to look tolerant and even-handed, the liberal commentariat has worked itself into a lather of confusion. It cannot name the thing right in front of its face. The truth is this: in contemporary Australia, it is Islam, and only Islam, that has the problem with radicalisation. Not the Sikhs, not the Jews, not the Buddhists, not the Christians, not the Greenpeace youth group that meets down the road.

That is not to say that these groups have never had a problem with radical extremism, historically. But the problem presenting us today is quite a specific one.

Of course, the numbers even within the Islamic community that are radicalised are still tiny. Picking on or vilifying Islamic Australians in retaliation for the violence committed by a small group within it is totally out of order, and likely to be counter-productive.

But by speaking in vague terms about "extremism" and "radicalisation" and introducing laws and processes to which all religious and ideological groups have to submit, we are risking the very freedoms that we are trying to preserve.

In conversations with the NSW Department of Education and Community about the removal of my book, You - An Introduction, from high school classrooms earlier this year, it was revealed to me that a mention of Christian martyrdom in the book caused particular alarm. Of course, there was no awareness from the bureaucrats at all that Christian martyrdom is about dying, rather than killing, for one's faith - something we honour in such heroes as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr, neither of whom sought violent death but experienced it in seeking to do a radically good thing. And yet, this was seen as the kind of radicalism that the DEC would like to discourage.

Words like "radicalisation" and "extremism" are relative terms, and we ought to beware using them disconnected from what we are actually trying to name. If we are talking about radical Islam, then we ought to say so. Otherwise, people who are on the whole just opposed to religion in general will use "extremism" to mean "any form of religious behaviour that is more enthusiastic than I would like".

It is pretty obvious from recent public discussions of the place of faith in public schools that completely orthodox, historic Christian teachings, held by the vast majority of Christian denominations, are held by some people to be "extreme". Recently, a fellow panellist on an ABC TV show "accused" me of believing that Jesus was the only way to God - which I do believe - as if this was somehow news, or evidence of cult-like weirdness. In another context, something I had written about the sinfulness of humankind - the most easily verified of Christian doctrines I would have thought - was thrown at me as if I had just called for a holy war. The NSW Greens Education spokesman John Kaye was aghast that Christian material taught sexual abstinence outside of marriage, again as if this was somehow evidence of the kind of radical extremism that we ought to use the force of law to stamp out.

Let us not then, in the right-minded attempt to loosen the grip of Islamic terror preachers on a small number of young people, squash the free dissemination and discussion of religious ideas - ideas that actually still today motivate people to contribute to building our society at a greater than average rate.

Rev Dr Michael Jensen is Rector of St Mark's Anglican Church, Darling Point and is the author of My God, My God: Is it Possible to Believe Anymore?