“There are really only seven passages in the Bible that refer directly to homosexual behaviour, and none of them are associated with Jesus.”



That’s Davis Lose from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. Lose goes on to contrast those handful of verses with the more than 300 passages urging believers to care for the poor and to fight for social justice.

Compare that to the priorities of the Australian Christian Lobby, the group leading the attack on the Safe Schools anti-bullying program. Its website reveals a constant, almost obsessive, preoccupation with homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

Jesus, a refugee and Palestinian revolutionary, once explained (Luke 6:24-25): “Woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.”

It’s not a sentiment reflected in ACL press releases, less concerned with warning the rich than fighting the queers.

That’s not to argue that the ACL isn’t Christian, so much as to suggest it represents Christianity rather as the Islamic State represents Islam: that is, it’s a particular political project, shaped as much by secular historical developments as by scripture.

Specifically, the ACL’s distinctive tradition comes not from the Holy Land but from the United States, where the American religious right first took shape in the early 1970s.

As Randall Balmer explains in Politico, Christian conservatism became a political force in the US at tail end of the civil rights era. Indeed, the religious right emerged initially to oppose desegregation – that is, to defend institutionalised racism against African Americans.

In 1971, the US government decided to withdraw tax exemptions from racially discriminatory schools. That included Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist college in South Carolina that claimed a scriptural basis for segregation. The university did not admit black students at all; later, it enrolled married black students but promised to expel any student who engaged in interracial dating (or who even supported an organisation that advocated interracial relationships).

The conservative political activist Paul Weyrich, working closely with the Reverend Jerry Falwell, rallied Christians in support of Bob Jones University’s right to receive tax breaks. Crucially, the campaign was pitched less as a defense of the college’s racism than as a matter of religious freedom: Weyrich roused a Christian constituency by warning evangelical leaders that the government was taking control their institutions. It was only later that Weyrich and Falwell redirected the anger at federal interference in Christian schooling into campaigns around “values” issues such as abortion and pornography.

The Australian Christian Lobby was founded in 1995, in fairly direct imitation of the Christian Coalition of America. There’s no suggestion that the ACL ever embraced the segregationist politics of Bob Jones. Nevertheless, you can still detect traces of that early history in the ACL’s persistent invocation of “religious freedom” when making its case against same-sex marriage.

As Ann Burlein has documented in her Lift High the Cross, by the 1990s the religious right in America had made a conscious decision to eschew overtly Biblical rhetoric in favour of more secular-sounding language about “values” and “rights”.

The ACL follows the same approach. In his study of the advertisements presented by anti-marriage equality groups such as the Australian Marriage Forum (to which the ACL is organisationally affiliated), Timothy Jones notes how campaigners “are attempting to hide religious and moral arguments in the Trojan horse of health and human rights discourse.”

You can see why. The ACL describes itself as “rigorously non-partisan”, a not-for-profit lobby group offering “a credible Christian voice in the corridors of power”.

But, as Marion Maddox points out in an important article in the academic journal Political Theology, many key ACL personnel have connections with political parties of the right: managing director Lyle Shelton stood for the Nationals in the Queensland state election of 2006; ACL co founder John Gagliardi worked as an advisor to Liberal prime minister John Gorton; ACL Chairman Emeritus Tony McLellan helps direct the Liberal party’s Menzies Research Institute.



More importantly, the theological underpinnings of the ACL are distinctly fringe. Gagliardi, the ACL co-founder and its first president, lays out his beliefs about the relationship between Christians and secular society in a book entitled The Marketplace: Our Mission, a volume endorsed by the national chairman of the Brisbane’s Christian Outreach Centre, a church to which many key ACLers belong.



The Marketplace, says Maddox, is “Gagliardi’s manifesto for Christians working in business.”



She writes:

[Gagliardi] uses an unusual term for such people: “kings.” Their destiny is to “rule and reign on the earth” in response to “the distinctive end-time call that is raising up a mighty army of kings. The Marketplace: Our Mission talks extensively about the need for Christian ‘‘kings’’ to take over designated ‘‘spheres’’ of government, such as business, politics, media, arts and entertainment, church, family, and education (known as the ‘‘Seven Mountains strategy’’). Gagliardi […does not] advocate the use of violence to achieve this. On the contrary, ACL’s enthusiastic embrace of electoral process through such activities as meet-the-candidate forums and distribution of voter guides, demonstrates a high level of democratic engagement. On the other hand, the expectation that authority will be bestowed by market forces following a miraculous ‘‘transfer of wealth’’ does suggest an alternative route to normal democratic processes: theocracy via plutocracy. Although ACL itself does not refer in its public documents to any of these ideas, they are elaborated (in far greater detail than was possible in this brief summary) in the book by ACL’s founding president and explicitly endorsed by the national chairman of the church with which a number of ACL’s founders and present board members are associated.

Most Australians support same-sex marriage. Very few Australians endorse corporate rule by self-selected Christian kings. On the contrary, Christianity of any kind is a rapidly declining force throughout the country.

In his recent book Post-God Nation? the Christian writer Roy Williams says bluntly, “of one thing there can be little doubt: religious belief in Australia is at its lowest ever level.”

The fastest growing religious affiliation in the census data is “no religion”, climbing from 7% in 1971 to 22% in 2011. A 2013 survey revealed some 38% of people nominated for “no religion”, while only 53% described themselves as “Christian”. That “Christian” identification should be taken with a grain of salt, since it includes alongside the true believers all those who identify with the faith on cultural or historical grounds.

Today, only about 8% of Australians regularly attend services of worship and, of course, not all of those are Christian.

Why, then, does the ACL enjoy such a privileged position in public debate?

Partly, the organisation exploits the media’s obsession with “balance” on subjects deemed controversial. The ACL can be relied upon for quotable content enabling the “on the one hand, on the other” format employed by traditional journalism. Such presentations implicitly elevate the ACL to an equal stature with its opponents, even in contexts when the ACL speaks for almost no-one.

Furthermore, while the churches might be in decline, their core supporters tend to be active and dedicated. In an era in which political parties have lost their automatic hold on their constituency, a small cadre can exert an outsized influence – which is why both Kevin Rudd and John Howard took part in an ACL-sponsored form in 2007.

Perhaps more strikingly, in 2010 the famously atheist and unmarried Julia Gillard sat down with the ACL managing director Jim Wallace for an extended interview, in which she discussed her Baptist childhood, her involvement with the Salvation Army, and how her “values were formed in a strong family, in a family that went to church”.

Her calculation seems to have been that the Australian Christian Lobby (and certain socially conservative union leaders) mattered more than the progressives appalled by the ACL’s stances since the former could swing a bloc of support. As a campus politico, Gillard had stood on a gay rights platform. As prime minister, she declared herself a “cultural traditionalist”, who opposed euthanasia and same-sex marriage on the basis of traditional values. “I think for our culture, for our heritage,” she explained, “the Marriage Act and marriage being between a man and a woman has a special status.”

In retrospect, that all stands out as a disastrous miscalculation, a massive overestimation of the ACL’s influence.



Religious believers are, of course, as entitled to present their views as anyone else. But, according to a Galaxy Poll in 2011, a majority of Christians actually support same sex marriage. A Crosby Textor poll in 2014 confirmed that – and suggested religious support had grown substantially.

Perhaps we could hear from those Christians for a change, rather than from the oddballs and reactionaries of the ACL.

