The radical secularist strategy to demonise Christians in politics

This article takes the form of an interview by Neil Johnson with Dave Pellowe on Vision Radio, broadcast 22 July, 2024.

Neil

You’ll be familiar with the Church And State conferences. Well they’ve become a significant date on the calendar over the past seven years as so many have been awakened to the relationship between Christians and politics, and Church And State events have become must-do opportunities around our major state capital cities to connect the nation’s values with Christian action. And now it’s going to be Perth’s turn next with a Church And State event that’s coming up on Saturday the 10th of August.

It is an election season that we are in and there’s likely WA election even coming as early as March next year. Now let’s not discount the fact that there’s a Northern Territory election, an ACT election, a Queensland election. It may even be, who knows, late this year a federal election and that’ll be either late next year or early next year.

So there’s elections that are coming. Some of them we know the dates, some of them we don’t. But we’ll be talking about values and politics and Christians over this next hour and Dave Pellowe is back with us.

He’s the founder of the Church And State Summit, a Christian writer and commentator. He’s also the host of the Good Sauce’s weekly, The Church And State Show.

Dave Pellowe, a special welcome back to 20Twenty.

American Politics

Neil

Hey, let’s go beyond our shores, no matter what state or territory you are in, just for a moment. The US election campaign, it’s such a circus, a major distraction to what’s happening here in Australia. It always surprises me that oftentimes we know more about an American political process than we do our own Australian processes, whether it’s federal or state.

And so when you’ve got an election that’s going on and all of the to-ing and fro-ing, all of the changes that are going on in the US, it’s easy to be distracted, Dave. Australian politics, though, needs to still be our priority, doesn’t it?

Dave

Certainly. On where our priorities should be, there’s a verse in Scripture which I think is instructive to us on how to rightly prioritise the way we think about people and nations overseas. And that is, he who fails to look after his own household is worse than an unbeliever.

And I think it’s not any leap of logic or interpretation to say that there are concentric circles of responsibility that we have. First of all, we’re responsible for self-government and keeping our bedroom tidy, as one contemporary thinker might like to say. But then: certainly the people in my family, the people in my household, the people in my extended family, the people in my church community, the people in my broader local community, the people in my state, the people in my nation, the people in my part of the world, the people of the world.

I think we are called to care about all of these people, but it would be silly to say we’re called to care about and take responsibility for all of them to the same degree or with the same level of responsibility.

But maybe it’s actually been good, what’s been going on in America, because it’s true. We know more about the Electoral College in America now than most Americans knew 10 years ago, care of Donald Trump and things like the popular vote versus the college vote.

There’s a great deal of education that has happened there. And you’re also right that it would be good if that translated more to the domestic political scene. But people have been wakened up and there is a degree of people for whom that translation is working, and they are taking interest in how do our preferences work, and what’s the security of our balloting systems?

Silencing Christians

And there are questions that people are taking more interest in now, and that’s the whole mission of Church And State is how do we steward our political context, the freedom and the opportunities that God has given us? And the title itself was always meant to be provocative, not in an inflammatory way, but to provoke people to think, what does that phrase mean, separation of Church And State?

Most people will have heard of it. Some won’t have, but most people will have heard of it in an inverse understanding of what it actually means. And what it actually means is that the government cannot regulate religion.

It has no restraint at all on a religious person’s freedom to engage in politics and to articulate and express and act on their conscience. But that is something that up until maybe 10 years ago, even more recently than that, with debates about marriage and gender and abortion and euthanasia and other critical moral issues which affect not just ourselves but all of our neighbours, there’s been a degree of self-silencing in Christianity for many decades, almost a polite refusal as if we need to keep religion and politics siloed and separate.

The Bible in particular and religion generally informs two different broad categories of life. Our relationship with God: it teaches us how to relate to God. And our relationship with people and each other, society: it teaches us how to relate to each other.

Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, don’t commit adultery.

There’s some really good rules for getting on together and living in society. Politics is all about the latter.

It has nothing to say and should say nothing about the former. Politics cannot regulate our relationship with God, but politics is in itself a discussion about how do we get on, what are the rules for society. And so when you have a worldview and a system of thinking and a series of truth claims and ought statements which inform how we get on with each other, and when you’ve got a whole debate and question of thinking about how we get on with each other, it is absurd to think you would never let the two mingle.

Neil

Let me ask you about something you mentioned, the thought about Christians, and you said there’s been a self-silencing. And some might be able to point to some historic context there where Christians have withdrawn from the political spectrum and they’ve not had their opportunity to speak up those Christian values. When you’ve got not only a self-silencing, but you’ve got a cancel culture that wants to come from outside of your faith and control or silence the things that you have to say, somehow or other you’ve got to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

What are your thoughts on the fact that somehow or other there’s silencing happening from every side and Christians perhaps need to be evaluating what that really means and whether it’s time to actually speak up and put your head above the parapet?

Dave

Well, there was an article written about this ministry, Church And State, about our church-going Prime Minister, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and about a Labor MP, Milton Dick, who’s attended some Christian conferences recently. And this article was written by—it’s no exaggeration to describe them as—leftist activists, and they run a blog called Sydney Criminal Lawyers. And they essentially—I mean, the headline says, “Christian extremists continue attempts to infiltrate Australian politics”.

And of course, he’s talking about such Christian extremists as Labor Minister Milton Dick and Scott Morrison and Dave Pellowe. And it’s like, well—

Neil

I could tell when you walked in with a hat on that said extremist.

Dave

So, you know, these are people who, using those labels, are trying to cancel. They’re trying to marginalise. They’re trying to silence the people who—the worst crime is to disagree with them.

And, you know, I don’t know that—I probably disagree with Sydney Criminal Lawyers more than (I mean, the blog, not generally the category), but I probably disagree with them more than the other two. But it’s fair to say that Jesus predicted cancel culture would affect us throughout history.

And of course, that term wasn’t invented when Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount. And we’ve probably broadened it far beyond its actual definition to just talk about some kind of opposition. But yeah, we should expect opposition.

But that is not a proof that we shouldn’t be talking. That’s a proof that we’re in the category of people Jesus called salt of the earth and light of the world.

Spiritual, cultural and political reformation

Neil

You’ve had a theme going this year for Church And State events, and the theme has been spiritual, cultural and political reformation. Now, that word reformation, that makes, you know, for a lot of Christian ears and those who are a little educated in Christian history and understanding some of the challenges, that word reformation is a very powerful word. How have you gauged what’s been happening as you’ve seen these events?

This has been something of a theme. Are people catching the thought that, you know, reformation is where we need to be thinking about the things that are going on in our society, the things that if you don’t speak up now, you’re going to lose some of those freedoms that have been hard won by Christian believers of the past. What are your thoughts around this word reformation?

Dave

When I went through Bible college, one of my favourite Latin phrases that I picked up, and I didn’t pick up a lot, but was the one ecclesia semper reformanda est. And for anybody who remembers the 2000 Olympics, the theme song was Amigos Para Siempre, which means friends forever. That’s the word semper in Latin.

And ecclesia, obviously everybody knows, means Church; and the rest of it, ecclesia semper reformanda est, reformation. It means the Church is always reforming. And reformation here isn’t, in the sense of a school of theology, as much as a posture of constantly returning to the original, to the true, to the proven, to the faithful, to the orthodox, to the things that God established and God said, to the original and undefiled.

And so the theme of reformation for Church And State this year is how do we get back to what was good, what was successful, what was proven, what was original and undefiled. And that can be as simple as political reformation, getting back to the Preamble for our constitution, through which all laws and interpretations of the constitution should be interpreted. And that’s the lens that, “The people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, hereby resolve to form an indissoluble Commonwealth.”

The people humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God. It’s about the people, where the power resides. We need to understand that as voters.

But we also need to understand that we’re not going to get a reformation in our parliaments or politicians – who a great deal of consider themselves the highest authority in the universe – until we repent of that pride and actually humble ourselves before God.

And so Australian culture, religion, and politics all needs to get to that place where we acknowledge that every decision and action, legislation and policy, whether it’s on a parliamentary level or on a private level, we are going to have to give account for that one day. And that humility and sobriety about making decisions, I think would greatly improve some of the ways that we’ve seen and objected to policy being made in recent election cycles.

Demonising Christianity

Neil

I want to move into some of those things that we might be able to identify as a demonising of Christianity. You might even broaden that to a demonising of religiousness. And we might be familiar with the fact of the very secularising influences in Australia that really want to push all religion to the sidelines.

And yet there are all sorts of elements that are happening and there are all sorts of particular thoughts we could have about different religious parties. Now, interestingly, there was a development, Senator Fatima Payman, when she resigned from the Labor Party. That was a religious issue and opportunity to be able to understand a little more about what’s happening with a very deeply secularised Australia and the issues that are going on around all religions.

What are your thoughts around, and is there a Christian response, a Christian commentary around Senator Fatima Payman? What were your thoughts, Dave?

Dave

Well, I thought Anthony Albanese covered himself in bigotry in his response to reporters’ questions, because as the Sydney Criminal Lawyers blog that we’ve mentioned this morning noticed, Payman is Muslim. And reporters quizzed the Prime Minister about the potential for a grassroots Muslim takeover of Western Sydney politics. And the PM responded to the questions:

I don’t want Australia to go down the road of faith-based political parties, because what that will do is undermine social cohesion.

Neil

And we ought to stop and pause and think about that for a moment, because if religious political parties mean the prospect of a Muslim Islamic political party, then the same concept also applies to Christian political parties. How closely do you think there’s an alignment there in if you group everybody under that same religious umbrella?

Dave

Well, I think it’s intellectually lazy to say they’re compatible, that the political agendas of Islam are comparable or equivalent to the political agendas of Christianity.

But I also think it’s patently ignorant of the nature of politics. The Prime Minister doesn’t know that the difference between left and right without a religious worldview is already incredibly lacking in social cohesion, incredibly divisive, as people wage war on the definition of marriage and the definition of gender and biology and climate change and energy debates.

We’re not united in any way at all. In fact, if there is a great way to unite us, it would be the Christian doctrine of humility. You’re not the most important person in the room or the nation.

Let’s agree and cooperate with objective morality, objective Truth – not my definition. I’m not appealing to an internal or temporal authority. I’m appealing to something outside myself, outside time, outside Australia. And if we can calibrate to that objective Truth, surely the most positive, healthy thing to do would be to cooperate with Truth.

But at the same time, I mean, there are religious-affiliated political parties in Australia. You’ve got Family First. You’ve got the Australian Christians. And to suggest that these parties are somehow “bad for the nation” is the prime minister indulging in political and religious bigotry and doing the opposite of social cohesion. He’s doing social demonisation and social marginalisation of the very people who surely form the majority of religious views in this nation and certainly the overwhelming substance of the foundation of this nation.

To marginalise all that and to say it’s unhealthy for Australia is incredibly ignorant. But in the presence of the constitution’s section 116, it is literally unconstitutional for the prime minister to suggest that there should be any kind of religious pass or fail test for engaging or organising politically in this nation. That is a fundamental, timeless, from the beginning to now, nobody has legitimately suggested we should erase that section from our constitution because it’s so tyrannical to suggest that Muslims aren’t allowed to politically organise or be represented in Australia.

If you bring in a large constituency, they have every right to organise and seek representations of everything that they believe and value.

Neil

And not wanting to take this down a path of an immigration conversation, the thought of talking about these things on a religious level and grouping everyone under a religious umbrella with the assumption that somehow or other they all believe much the same thing, all bad.

But this is what secularisation does, doesn’t it? Because it takes you out from having even the possibility of having that united understanding of a seeking after some level of social cohesion, because that’s what you only get from having a transcendence understanding that there is one God, one Truth, and one way that we all can actually live in harmony together.

So somehow or other, losing that and bringing into where our political parties are, and let’s not even be partisan, say it’s one side or the other, both sides are very secularised. And you might even then draw a conclusion that they’re all coming from a socialist base, even then that taking its pathway back to a Marxism, which says we have to organise ourselves without that overwhelming understanding of a transcendent God. I know there’s a lot there to digest, but this is the way we are, both sides of politics here in Australia.

Dave

Look, I think the really critical thing, which is probably one of the notes I wanted to have as a theme for our discussion this morning, is that what the Prime Minister has done here is try to recategorise Christianity. Christianity, as I said, is the substantial ingredient in the foundation of Australia. It is the substantial ingredient in the legal traditions we have inherited from centuries of jurisprudence in England, easily as far back as the Magna Carta.

It is to undermine the central tenets and values of the American experiment in democracy, which our founders paid great attention to. And to take that, which is still the dominant religion in our nation, and to try and recategorise it from a fabric and foundation of our culture to a mere ideology, and then a toxic ideology: is on equivalence with the kind of social destruction that we’ve seen majority Muslim nations achieve around the world.

That is so dishonest, but it is also not in the least bit accidental.

And this is why Christians who are listening now should be paying attention, is because there is a lie, and it is not even a theory. This is a published conspiracy to recategorise and recast and misrepresent Christianity as a harmful ideology, which is then easily outlawed, marginalised, and restricted and regulated in this nation, in gross violation of our constitution and the basic principles of freedom and democracy.

Seven Mountains

Neil

Dave, just before we take a call, there’s been some connection to what’s known as the Seven Mountains, and a lot of believers for a while might remember that when people have talked about seven mountains over the years and areas of influence that the Christian needs to reclaim, areas like politics and the media and arts and education and science, those sorts of mountains, you’ve come into a little bit of controversy of recent times, even with a logo that you have for your Church And State summits. Give us a thought here of what people have been talking about, the Seven Mountains, and how that might actually be the foundation for people coming and trying to regulate Christianity.

Dave

Well, I mean, controversy is courted if you’re just Christian enough, but the controversy is entirely in the mind of god mockers and their bathroom. It’s not real. It’s entirely confected, but they believe there’s some kind of modern conspiracy to infiltrate and overtake politics, and that somehow this is a nefarious agenda to subvert… I don’t know what.

What I’ll admit to is I want to subvert wickedness, evil, injustice, unrighteousness, and the harms of all of the above. But we’re in a democracy where everybody’s invited to participate and bring influence and organisation to the political sphere, so there’s nothing illegal or unethical or unscrupulous going on here.

But as to the “conspiracy”, I would admit that there is absolutely no intention in the Church And State logo trying to tip a hat to the Seven Mountains.

The brief to the graphic designer when we had our first summit in 2018 was to convey a flat image which signified the word summit. And so we have a mountain range with one mountain in the foreground higher than all the others, and that was the Church And State Summit.

That’s the level of thought that went into the logo, but that’s not to distance myself from Seven Mountains.

Far from it, Jesus preached that we are the salt of the earth. Salt is meant to—the properties of salt, and we can expand this, but at least three of them—salt is meant to heal, salt is meant to preserve from decay and rot, and salt is meant to add flavour and change its environment. Jesus also preached in the Sermon on the Mount that we are the light of the world, and light is meant to reveal, expose, and illuminate.

Now, I don’t think Jesus thought that that should only be constrained to seven mountains or spheres of influence; but that we’re meant to change the environment and prevent the decay, illuminate the truth, and expose corruption everywhere.

Seven mountains is nowhere near enough. Let’s have a million mountains.

That’s the “conspiracy” Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount, but he also taught us to pray, “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

On earth, nothing excluded, certainly not excluding politics or the public square or legislation. There were no exceptions. Jesus prayed for God’s will to be done everywhere, and then Jesus commissioned us, and he said, “Make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”

There was, again, a universal, explicit comment here. So Church And State admits to at least seven mountains, and why so few?!

Neil

And what’s running through my mind is whose conspiracy are we talking about here? Because even as we mentioned in the opening segments there, if we trace our roots back to our foundations as coming with Christian foundations in Australia, you might even talk about those seven mountains being seven mountains that were established there by Christian believers. So there’s a sense in which the “conspiracy” – if it’s the accusation that’s coming against the Christians, your “conspirators” trying to overthrow our secularised system -well, actually, we might be more correct in saying that there’s a secularised system that has a conspiracy to overthrow our Christian foundations.

Dave

The name eludes me right now, but there is actually a published intent from one of the cultural Marxist philosophers of the 50s or 60s in the last century who said our job as Marxists is to infiltrate the institutions and turn them into Marxist entities. So we’re talking about the evidence and published intent and strategy of the Long March through the institutions is far from a conspiracy theory. It’s a documented conspiracy fact, but the leftists have no objection to that infiltration going on whatsoever.

Again, this is just democracy. I don’t know that the Marxists necessarily broke a whole lot of rules, and if they did, they surely can’t clutch their pearls and pretend to value some higher standard now that the takeover is so complete. All Jesus is saying, and all I’m agreeing with Jesus in saying, is: wherever you are, be there, and everywhere you are, be Christian.

Coming Events

Neil

You’ve got some Church And State events coming up, Dave. And I know there’ll be listeners in various states and territories around Australia. I know they’ve got an election coming up and you’ve paced yourself and you’ve got some strategic Church And State events that are happening ahead of those election campaigns.

I mean, we’re talking about you’ve got a Church And State event coming up in Perth, 9th and 10th of August. But you’ve got a few more coming up for Canberra and Queensland.

Dave

Look, we encourage people to not give themselves a lobotomy before an election. Don’t outsource your thinking and delegate it to a candidate or party or anybody else. You actually have to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength and mind. And so use your mind, do the research.

We have got conferences coming up six weeks before the election in Canberra in the ACT.

We’re doing a one night only conference in Brisbane City about six weeks before the Queensland election. And we’re going to be teaching with some great guest speakers from the Australian Christian Lobby, Church And State, Cherish Life and others. We’re going to be teaching on three key election issues, which we’re going to offer as suggestions for how to choose candidates. We’re not going to suggest any party. We’re not going to have any politicians there. It’s not a meet the candidate forum. It’s a meet the issue forum.

And we’re going to suggest, look, this is how you should be voting. Consider the issues that are breaking God’s heart and then vote for the person, not the party. So these issues are going to be great there. But the website for wherever you are in Australia is ChurchAndState.com.au/register.

And if you just go to the main website, you’ll find the links to register for events. You’ll see the events there listed in order of proximity and city. And you’ll be able to find a conference near you soon. And like you said, Perth, Canberra, Brisbane and Adelaide coming up at the speed of 1000 startled gazelles.

Neil

Dave Pellowe, always great getting your insights. I know that listeners can connect with you there at the Church And State website. They can also watch the Church And State show online.

And of course, you’ve got the Good Sauce, GoodSauce.news for listeners who want to connect with some Christian commentary around news stories as they are breaking. And no doubt there might be listeners who might want to connect on that level as well. Dave Pellowe, thanks so much for joining us and sharing your heart with us once again today on 2020.

Dave Pellowe is a Christian political educator & commentator, founder of The Good Sauce, convener of the annual Australian Church And State Summit and host of Good Sauce’s weekly The Church And State Show. Since 2016 Dave has undertaken the mission of arming Christians to influence culture through events from Perth to Auckland, videos, podcasts and articles published in multiple journals across Australia and New Zealand. [more]

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