“Through many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss

But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.” 

– Bob Dylan, With God on Our Side

Aspiring politician, religious lobbyist, and former managing director of the Australian Christian lobby, Lyle Shelton, has spent his life fighting for what he believes is right. In these battles, Shelton believes fervently he is doing God’s will; that he has God on his side. And yet, isn’t it peculiar that every battle Lyle takes on ends in abject failure? 

There are three possible explanations for this.

1. 1. 1. There is no God
      2. There is a God, but he is not, in fact, on Lyle’s side.
      3. There is a God and he is using Lyle in much the same way he used Judas Iscariot.

Of course, my preferred option is “(a)”, but I have been wondering, of late, how Lyle reconciles his abysmal track record with his dogged belief that God is a member of his cheer squad. Surely, if God were on Lyle’s side, he would emerge triumphant – at least occasionally.

Lyle Shelton was raised in a cult – the Logos Foundation. By definition, cult members believe they are God’s chosen people; that they, alone, understand God’s will. So, I have some sympathy for Lyle. He was conditioned from an early age to believe it was his mission to ensure God’s will prevails.

Through no fault of Lyle’s, the Logos Foundation was a monumental failure. Founded in New Zealand in the 1960s, Logos later relocated to Australia where it fell under the leadership of former Baptist minister, Howard Carter. At its peak, the Logos Foundation boasted around 150,000 members and was linked with various international dominionist movements. Under Carter, Logos took on the “overt theological-political paradigm” of the “post-millennialism of Presbyterian Reconstructionist theonomy” – a movement which effectively calls for a Christian coup of the world’s governments in order to reinstate divine law and justice. (See my article on the Australian Christian Lobby and dominionism, here.)

With Carter, Lyle’s father, Ian Shelton, was a leader of the Logos Foundation, so this was the world-view and Christian mission into which Shelton junior was indoctrinated. One can certainly imagine that when a young person is told their family was chosen to help return the world’s governments to God’s stewardship in order to create a world fit for the second coming of Jesus Christ, it has a profound impact. It’s an entirely more beguiling prospect that following Dad into the family plumbing business!

But, it appears, God was not on the side of the Logos Foundation. 

In the 1980s, the cult moved to Queensland where Carter and Shelton senior became involved in the 1989 Queensland State election. (Lyle was, then, 19 – old enough to understand what was going on in the ‘family business.’ Logos lobbied heavily for candidates to adhere to Christian principles and biblical ethics, oppose pornography, homosexuality and abortion, and perversely – given their strong ‘pro-life’ position –  return capital punishment in line with Old Testament law (not just for first-degree murder, but for homosexuals as well). 

This approach backfired spectacularly in uniting Queensland’s Christian forces to reclaim the Queensland government for God. Instead, mainstream churches recoiled in horror, distanced themselves from Logos and denounced the campaign. 

Soon after, Logos leader, Howard Carter (supposedly anointed by God), was exposed as living the high life on Foundation funds and was found in flagrante delicto with a female parishioner. The cult fell apart and, soon after, Carter died, of eye cancer. 

The Logos Foundation’s only surviving remnants were the Shelton family’s Toowoomba City Church, (established in the aftermath by Shelton senior) and a group called the Network for Christian Values (of which we’ll hear more, later). God, it seems, was not on the side of the Logos Foundation, nor had he anointed Howard Carter, after all.

As a young man, Lyle worked as a youth pastor at his father’s church, and still gives the occasional homily there. Later, he studied journalism and, for a time, worked as a reporter for a rural newspaper. But, not surprisingly, given his upbringing, Lyle aspired to a career in politics. 

“I had politics in my blood,” said Lyle in a 2019 interview with Lech Blaine of The Monthly. “Our family discussions around the kitchen table were about politics and religion – the two subjects you should never talk about in polite company.”

(There are many who would suggest that Lyle Shelton should never be let loose in polite company in the first place.)

In 2000, Lyle enjoyed one of his rare successes. He was elected to the Toowoomba City Council on a platform of expelling the sex industry from the city. Lech Blaine describes Lyle colourfully as “Ned Flanders with a country Queensland twang.” But, if God exists, he must have an extraordinary sense of humour. Because, at the same election, the good people of Toowoomba elected Dianne Thorley as their mayor. Blaine describes Thorley as an “independent feminist” and:

“… a lifelong underdog, a short-haired former pub chef who swore like a drunken sailor with Tourette’s. She didn’t wear make-up, jewellery or dresses. Her voice was husky from chain-smoking menthol cigarettes. At 19, she gave up a baby for adoption. Her platform featured personal honesty, empathy for the destitute and, presciently, environmentalism. 

… Thorley spoke publicly about surviving a violent marriage with a Pentecostal wife-beater, and recovering to become a successful businesswoman. She describes her ideology as “pro business with a social conscience.”

When Thorley confronted a local graffiti artist she told him if he persisted with his vandalism, “I’ll rip off your dick so hard you’ll have to piss sitting down.”

Undeterred, Lyle and his father attempted to persuade Thorley to join with them in doing God’s work in Toowoomba. She responded, “Fuck off Lyle! Just let me have a smoke and coffee in peace.”

You’d think if God were serious about helping Lyle do his bidding in Toowoomba, he wouldn’t have saddled him with Di Thorley as mayor!

Needless to say, Toowoomba’s sex industry survived the Sheltons’ best efforts to eradicate it. I wonder if Lyle ever considered that God was on the side of the sex-workers.

To be fair, Lyle did have a big win during his time as a Toowoomba City councillor. He successfully joined a fear campaign against a scheme, instigated by Thorley, to address the city’s chronic water shortage by recycling sewage. Spooked by a flood of misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories, residents voted against the scheme in a plebiscite. The defeat prompted Mayor Thorley to describe Lyle as “a duplicitous little shit.”  

If God was working on Lyle’s side, it seems God didn’t want Toowoomba drought-proofed with a scientifically proven, environmentally friendly method of water purification. If that’s the case, he truly does work in mysterious ways.

Emboldened by this victory, Shelton ran as a National Party candidate at the 2006 Queensland state election. He was roundly defeated by Labor’s Kerry Shine, 10,000 votes to 6,000, with Lyle’s candidacy prompting a 4.9 per cent downturn in the Nationals’ vote and a 1.7 per cent swing to Labor. Even God was not able to secure Lyle Shelton a seat in the Queensland Parliament.

I’ve been told by those who were around at this time that Lyle took the defeat hard – very hard. I have some sympathy. Imagine, being told from childhood that this was your destiny, that God and prayer would see you through, and then losing – badly.

Following the collapse of the Logos Foundation, former Logos members formed the Network for Christian Values, headed by the cult’s former national co-ordinator, Derek Brown. It was this group – strongly aligned with Christian dominionism and Australian fascism – which formed the Australian Christian Coalition –  later re-badged as the Australian Christian Lobby. So, with Lyle’s political aspirations in tatters, it only made sense that “Plan B” was to get him a job as chief of staff of the Australian Christian Lobby, serving under managing director, Brigadier Jim Wallace.

There is no denying the ACL had considerable clout under Wallace. But, as many of us fought back against the regressive and harmful positions of that organisation, its grip on power began to decline. Wallace helped us out by making several major strategic errors, including becoming embroiled in a firestorm over an ANZAC Day tweet. Unwisely, in what might have been dismissed as a drunken tweet were it anyone other than Jim, Wallace suggested Australian soldiers had not fought for “gay marriage and Islamic [sic].”  The public outcry forced Wallace into an embarrassing backdown.

Just as mainstream Christians were repulsed by the political machinations of the Logos Foundation, they rushed to reject Wallace’s take on the ANZACs.

“For what it’s worth,” tweeted Victorian Baptist minister, Simon Moyle, “I’m a Christian leader and @JimWallaceACL doesn’t remotely speak for me or any other Christians I know.”

If mainstream Christians feel that God is not on the side of the ACL, you have to wonder, “Whose values does this group represent?”

It wasn’t too long after the ANZAC Day debacle that Wallace retired and Lyle Shelton took his place as managing director. By then, the ACL was already a sinking ship and Lyle had none of the charisma or gravitas of his predecessor.

Lyle’s big opportunity to shine and re-establish the ACL as a political force was in the debate about marriage equality in 2017. Though, like King Canute, Lyle tried valiantly to turn the tide of public opinion, his campaign failed. Nearly 62 per cent of Australians voted “Yes” to marriage equality and the Australian Christian Lobby emerged defeated with their reputation in tatters. The ACL had offended all but the most conservative religious extremists with its harmful and dishonest campaign against what Lyle described, somewhat hysterically, as “The Yes campaign and their noisy rainbow-flag-waving storm troopers.”

You have to ask, “If God is on the side of the Australian Christian Lobby – if God anointed Lyle to represent his will on this issue – how is it that the ‘rainbow-flag-waving storm troopers’ won, and Lyle and his merry-band of theocrats lost. I’m sure Lyle was as perplexed as I am. 

The rainbow-hued defeat seemed to turn Lyle a little loopy. He has subsequently campaigned against the depiction of cartoon lesbian ponies in the TV show “My Little Pony” and had an absolute conniption when a path in Alfred Park, Sydney, was painted in rainbow colours to commemorate the third anniversary of the national marriage equality vote.

“To all the children who might see this in Prince Alfred Park, Sydney,” tweeted Lyle. “Your mother is not a ‘birthing parent’, she is not a ‘chest feeder’, you were not born in the wrong body, & no adult for lifestyle reasons has the right to deny you the love of your mother & father.”

Okaaay. Step. Away. From. The. Rainbow. Path. Lyle.

While it’s impossible to know the conversations that went on at the ACL after the defeat of their campaign against marriage equality, the fact that Lyle departed in 2018 suggests there was a (mutual?) agreement that he wasn’t the man for the job. Geez, if you can’t win a political battle with God on your side, something is very, very wrong. And I’m betting the ACL weren’t about to blame God. 

Since then, Lyle has failed to find traction in his life-long mission to bring us under the thumb of a Godly government. 

After leaving the ACL in 2018, Lyle joined Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives as their communications director.  In 2019, he ran for the Senate. But, despite Lyle’s best efforts, the Australian Conservatives’ performance was woeful; they failed to get a single candidate into parliament. In June 2019, Bernardi announced that he would deregister the party – apparently closed due to lack of interest. Where the f#ck was God?

Questioned about the dismal result Shelton said, “Sadly, we have not done well. It was not our time.”

You’d think God might have let them know that before they put in all that effort! 

If God can’t communicate clearly with his earthly representatives about when they should run for parliament, you have  to wonder whether there are other communication breakdowns between Yahweh and his chosen ones. Maybe God wasn’t against marriage equality, after all? Maybe Lyle just got it wrong.

Just as Lyle failed to get into the Queensland parliament in 2006, he failed to enter the federal sphere in 2019. If God wants Lyle in politics, he has a very funny way of showing it. 

Defeated once again, Lyle worked as part-time staffer for Queensland LNP politician, Mark Robinson. 

During this time, Lyle became embroiled in a ding-dong row with a couple of drag-queens who were innocently reading fairy tales to children in a council library. The furore resulted in a (gay) religious protestor taking his own life and Shelton being sued $20,000 for defamation. It was all very tacky, and it’s hard to imagine the Creator of the Universe looking down and feeling proud that Lyle was “doing God’s work.”

In April 2021 it looked as if God had finally decided Lyle’s time had come. With veteran religious bigot, Fred Nile, forced to retire from his own party, Lyle Shelton was to be ‘parachuted in’ to take his place in the NSW upper house. Sydney MLA, Alex Greenwich, spoke for many when he was asked how he felt about the light-weight Shelton succeeding heavy-weight Nile:

“Letting a politically irrelevant blow-in fill your vacated shoes is a sad legacy to leave after 40 years in Parliament.”

But Lyle, it seems, has the luck of Job when it comes to his political career. Just this week it was announced that, riven by internal squabbles and financial mismanagement, Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party has been forced into receivership. Before Lyle even had a chance to get elected, the party seems to have crumbled beneath him. Although it’s probably unfair to blame Lyle – who came so late to the CDP table –  there has been some reference to his propensity for sending political parties down the gurgler. 

Lyle Shelton was raised to believe he was chosen by God to help transform the world’s governments to create a world worthy of Christ’s return. And yet, at every turn, he has failed in spectacular style. The Christian parties he has joined have crumbled beneath him. He has failed to win every major battle he has taken on. He has never succeeded being elected and, like his father’s cult, his homophobia, bigotry and anti-scientific stance has lost him the respect and support of mainstream Christians and their churches. 

It’s hard to believe that God, if he exists, could be so hugely inept at assisting his “Chosen One” to do his bidding. If God does have some great inscrutable plan in which Lyle is an actor, he seems to have cast Lyle as Judas rather than Jesus – the screw-up who gets everything wrong and lets the whole team down.

Perhaps it’s time for Lyle to consider whether God is really on his side – or whether God is looking on, appalled, with the rest of us. 

Chrys Stevenson

Many years ago, on behalf of Atheist Nexus, I wrote a submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission on Freedom of Religion and Belief in Australia. Pulling together statistics on religiosity in Australia took months. The research was both scant and scattered.

Now, my friend, Neil Francis, has filled the gap by writing a forensically researched report on Religiosity in Australia for the Rationalist Society of Australia.

 It’s a big read at 150 pages, but well worth the effort. I highly recommend you find a comfy chair, snuggle down with a cuppa, and devour the whole thing. You’ll also find a short summary of the research by Paul Karp in The Guardian.

The aim of Neil’s detailed, statistical analysis is “to help inform legislatures, governments, regulatory authorities, media and the public about Australians’ actual religious attitudes and behaviours.” It is not ‘opinion’, it is information based on statistics and sound evidence.

Neil shows, definitively, that the Australian Census does not provide an accurate assessment of Australians’ attachment to religious faith. The 2016 census suggests that 60 per cent of Australians identify with a religious denomination. But, the census question does not ask whether the respondent practices that religion, whether they believe in its tenets, or if they ever attend religious services. In fact, as Neil’s study shows, when asked expressly if they belong to a religious organisation, 62 per cent of Australians reply in the negative.

Remarkably, 48 per cent of Catholics, 44 per cent of Anglicans and 27 per cent of minor Christian denominations say they are not practicing members of their professed faith. Consistent with these statistics, 71 per cent of Australians say religion is not important to them – including nearly 50 per cent of Catholics.

In “Felons, Ratbags, Commies and Left-Wing Loonies”, the chapter I wrote for Warren Bonnett’s (2010) The Australian Book of Atheism, I charted the history of Christianity in Australia, I agreed that, while convicts, colonists, pioneers and those who came after them may have been nominally Christian, Australia, at its heart, has never been a ‘Christian nation.’ (I made a similar argument in a speech about Jeremy Bentham in 2014.) Neil’s research confirms this is as true in 2021 as it was in 1788. We are a nation in which a small majority of the population are nominal, but not practicing, or even believing, Christians. That should have real implications for political policy-making. 

Consider, if religion was an important factor in Australians’ lives, most Australians would choose – on what many consider the most important day of their lives –  to get married in a church. And yet, 80 per cent of weddings are conducted by civil celebrants, not ministers of religion. 

Further, Neil’s study shows, most Australians do not follow the conservative churches’ line on social issues. The majority of Australians support progressive social policies including abortion and women’s reproductive rights, voluntary assisted dying, marriage equality, the legalisation of recreational drugs and the need to address global warming. As Neil points out, the “Christian values” so loudly espoused by the Vatican, and from conservative religious pulpits around Australia, do not reflect the values of the churches’ own congregations. 

In 2018, 40 per cent of Australians claimed to hold no belief in either a specific deity or even a generic “higher power.” That makes unbelievers the largest ‘religious’ grouping in Australia. But an even more startling finding in Neil’s study is that: just 1 in 5 Australians – only 20 per cent –  are certain that God, heaven, hell, religious miracles, and life after death are real. That includes, on average, just 1 in 3 Catholics (32%), and around 1 in 4 Anglicans (23%) and Uniting/Methodists (23%).  

This confirms my argument in Felons, Ratbags, Commies and Left-Wing Loonies that, for many, attending church is about networking, social status, socialising, culture and tradition, and a sense of obligation, rather than any particular commitment to the tenets and beliefs of the church. 

With Neil Francis, the Rationalist Society of Australia has provided us with an evidence-based document that will help to counter the hollow propaganda of the religious right. Politicians who genuinely wish to represent the values of their constituents would do well to consider Neil’s findings.

Australia is not, and has never been, a ‘Christian’ nation and our governments’ policies should reflect the views of the majority, not the ideological propaganda of lobbyists whose views are not even consistent with those of the people they claim to represent. 

Chrys Stevenson

See:  Neil Francis, Religiosity in Australia –  Part 1: Personal faith according to the numbers, Rationalist Society of Australia, May 2021

Paul Karp,‘Australians are very sceptical’: Michael Kirby warns against ‘excessive protection’ of religious freedoms, The Guardian, Australia, 11 June 2021

You can read more of Neil’s research on voluntary assisted dying at his blog, Dying for Choice.

 

You wouldn’t know it by listening to church leaders, but the majority of Christians and Catholics support voluntary assisted dying (VAD). The latest Australian Electoral Study data, collected by the Australian National University, shows that 74 per cent of Catholics, 78 per cent of Anglicans and 81 per cent of Uniting Church/Methodists want VAD legalised.

VAD is also strongly supported in the countries and jurisdictions where it is legal. In Belgium, for example, 53 per cent of the population is Catholic (compared with 23 per cent of Australians), yet, around 80 per cent of Belgians support their country’s very liberal law on assisted dying. Around 81 per cent of the Portuguese population is Catholic, but almost 60 per cent support VAD. So, although ‘the Church’ might oppose VAD, most Catholics don’t, and those who do are a fringe group, unrepresentative of the majority.

While the most vocal opposition to VAD comes from this Catholic minority, it’s not always obvious. Catholic opponents of VAD often take great care to conceal, or at least not disclose, the religious affiliation which dictates their view on assisted dying. This is similar to a climate scientist arguing against the contention that human activity causes global warming, while failing to disclose they work for an oil company; or a medical doctor warning the current MMR vaccine is dangerous while failing to disclose his investment in the development of an alternative vaccine. It is, to be blunt, unethical and dishonest.

Recently, when New Zealanders were debating whether to legalise voluntary assisted dying, a letter from the Catholic Bishops advised:

When Canadian film-maker, Kevin Dunn, produced, directed and starred in an anti-VAD documentary, Fatal Flaws, he failed to disclose that he is a devout Catholic, from a family of devout Catholics, his father was a ‘pro-life’ activist, and that his media company was formed expressly to provide ‘slick branding’ for pro-life propaganda. Neither does Dunn disclose in his documentary the information he provided when interviewed on The Eternal Word Television Network, a global Catholic news network:

“… When I turned 50, I said to the Lord, I said, ‘Lord, you know I’m doing all of this work and raising this family and I’m getting to mass and doing – but I want to do more.’ 

And a few people talked to me: ‘Could you do more for pro-life?’ 

And I thought, ‘You know what? I’ll do this!’ 

That’s where the impetus [for the documentary] came.”

All of this is concealed from the viewers who are meant to assume that Dunn is just an everyday guy with a passing interest in getting to the “truth” about VAD. He never tells you that his mind was irrevocably made up before he set out on a world-tour to discover “the truth” or that every person he interviews was carefully selected, edited, or counter-acted, to tell the story he wants you to hear.

This year, academic publisher, Springer, released a book called Euthanasia: Searching for the Full Story: Experiences and Insights of Belgian Doctors and Nurses. The blurb for the book notes that it is written by written by “ten Belgian health care professionals, nurses, university professors and doctors specializing in palliative care and ethicists who, together, raise questions concerning the practice of euthanasia.”

I should not have been surprised that a) they were all Catholics or that b) the word ‘Catholic’ does not appear anywhere, not even once, in the text, the authors’ biographies, nor in any kind of disclosure of their affiliations. But I was surprised. Stupidly. I am always surprised that the people claiming to inhabit the moral high ground are so willing to be deceptive.

Neil Francis, from the pro-VAD website, Dying for Choice, enlisted my assistance in searching for the “full story” on contributors to Euthanasia: Searching for the Full Story. As researchers, we are trained to inquire of any scholarly work: “Who wrote this and what, if anything, is their agenda?”

This project took Neil and me – two professional researchers – many hours, finding and reading articles and news stories in English, French, Dutch and German! A general reader has no hope of ‘stumbling’ across this vital information – and the writers rely on that.

Neil’s research on the Belgian book, together with some information supplied by me, is detailed in his blog post: Springer publishes polemical anti-VAD anecdotes. Scroll through the list of contributors and note how often the word Catholic appears!

As debates over legalising VAD in Australia continue, it’s important for politicians to realise that, when people, (often touting their professional expertise), argue about the ‘dangers’ of VAD, the ‘evidence’ they produce has, inevitably, been widely and soundly debunked. Scratch the surface and you will find their opposition is based on ideology, not evidence. Politicians must ask, “WHO is this person, and why are they making this argument?” If they do some investigation (or ask us!), they will find, as we so often do, that the doctor, nurse, bioethicist or university professor, loudly proclaiming the overwhelming weight of evidence in favour of VAD is wrong, is also a devout Catholic or evangelical Christian, Orthodox Jew, or Mormon missionary.

Christians have every right to object to VAD and to choose not to avail themselves of the law when it is introduced. But they do themselves, or their religion, no favours by being deceptive. Being deceptive – either by commission or omission – is dishonest. There should be no place for dishonesty about an issue which has such a fundamental impact upon people’s lives and the nature of their deaths. And it is outrageous and unconscionable that we have come to expect that professional people of faith will, knowingly, provide false and misleading information to public debates and inquiries while concealing the religious convictions which drive them to do so.

Please read Neil’s excellent appraisal of the Belgian book and join me in my outrage.

Chrys Stevenson

 

Most moments in our lives wash over us, quickly forgotten. The information which shapes and changes our views is often acquired incrementally –  we know what we believe, but it’s hard to recall how or when we came to form our opinions. But, on rare occasions,  a single insight, or piece of information, can transform your understanding of the world in an instant.  These tectonic shifts in perspective are so rare, they become etched, indelibly, in our memories and can change our lives forever. The revelation that changed my life and world-view was the statement, “Christians lie.”

Long before I was any kind of activist, long before I’d even started the university degrees which gave me the skills I now use as a professional researcher, I attended a party. The host was a ghost-writer for a series of famous detective novels, the guests, an eclectic mix of professionals, artists and writers, and a few ‘randoms’ like me. 

At that time, I had very few strong convictions. I wasn’t religious, but I was curious about the history of religion. I knew nothing about evolution – it wasn’t taught at the private school I attended as a teen. And, although I may well have agreed with the concept of voluntary assisted dying, it wasn’t a subject to which I’d been exposed. I might have described myself as nominally Christian, although I’d long since ceased to believe in an omniscient or omnipresent deity. Like most Australians then, and probably now, I thought of Christians and Christianity in general as ‘good’ – even if I didn’t buy in to the whole ‘God’ thing.

A young couple at this party stood out from the rest of the guests. Looking vaguely like hippies, I saw them locked in earnest conversation with a man in his 40s, who I knew to be a scientist. I didn’t like him much. He was abrasive and arrogant, but the volume of the conversation was escalating and I was intrigued, so I moved in as a spectator. 

They were discussing evolution. The young couple, recently converted to some fundamentalist faith, were arguing passionately that the theory of evolution had been definitively debunked; that only creationism could explain the complexity and diversity of life on earth. To my uneducated ear, they sounded well-educated, well-read and convincing. But, the scientist was better read, knew the sources they were relying on, and eviscerated their argument forensically. 

“Who says that?” 

“Based on what evidence?” 

“That’s not what that study says! Have you read it?” 

“You’re quoting that completely out of context? What he really said was …”

It was the first time I’d witnessed a clash between ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ and, at length, ‘belief’ was reduced to a lot of ‘humming and harring’ until, roundly defeated, it retreated to the buffet and affected a feigned fascination with the finger food.  

Talking to the scientist later, I said, “I enjoyed the argument, but they did seem really well read and well informed. What about all the evidence they talked about?”

The scientist looked me straight in the eye, and in a tone which reminded me of God instructing Moses from the burning bush he said intoned slowly,  but emphatically, “Christians lie!”

I was not, then, particularly well educated, but I was not stupid. I had, of course, entertained the idea that Christians might be mistaken in their beliefs. But, it had never occurred to me that people who aim to emulate Christ and inhabit the high moral ground might tell bald-faced lies. It would be another 20 years before I’d call myself an atheist, but this was a revelation which changed my entire view of the world. In fact, the idea that Christians might lie hit me so forcefully that every time I find evidence to support that assertion, I time-travel back to that long-ago party and hear the scientist’s words ringing in my ears.

Some time later, I came across research undertaken by Dr Martin Bridgstock. In the 1980s, Bridgstock was struck by the amount of ‘scientific evidence’ being put forward to support creationism. The material was sufficiently convincing that Bridgstock decided he should investigate it. Just as I had been at the debate at that party, Dr Bridgstock was taken aback to find the Christians compiling these academic arguments weren’t just mistaken – they were lying. 

He says:

“Anyone encountering creationist claims for the first time is bound to be struck by the amount of scientific evidence they produce. Major scientists are quoted, scientific papers referred to, and important findings detailed. Given the sweeping nature of the creationist challenge, it is logical to ask a simple, basic question: how reliable is the evidence that creationists produce? 

… I examined the creationist literature, and checked claims that creationists made. Two rough statistics summarise my findings. 

First, on average, each creationist reference to science has two errors: these comprise a minor error (e.g. a wrong page, date, or an error in a quote) and a major error. The latter is an error which gravely misrepresents, and changes the meaning of the evidence quoted. 

The second statistic is that roughly 90 per cent of creationist references to science have something gravely wrong with them: that is, they have major errors.

This result — repeated many times — shocked me profoundly. It meant, if correct, that creationist claims could not be believed without careful checking. It also meant that the normal give-and-take of discussion simply could not exist: how can you discuss something with people who have made so many errors?

Bridgstock continues:

… Misquotes are not uncommon in creationist literature. More common is taking a quote, or some information out of context, so that its meaning is altered.

… It is quite common to find creationists quoting only part of a scientific paper, if the part they do not quote conflicts with the point they wish to make.”

And, once misleading academic-sounding documents are published, he says:

“… one notices also that they quote themselves and other creationists extensively.”

That is, having misrepresented legitimate academic texts, they then quote their own dishonest texts as evidence.

Bridgstock concludes:  

“As one works through the creationist literature, one constantly finds errors, changes and misquotes of this type. On top of these major errors, there is also a thick scattering of trivial errors. This suggests to me and to other researchers that creationist claims are not reliable. Ultimately, this lack of accuracy appears as a form of arrogance. The one thing any researcher needs is humility before the majesty and complexity of the universe. It is this lack which renders creationism a menace to scientific enquiry.”

Reading Bridgstock was another one of those “lightning bolt” moments in my intellectual evolution. It took me from the assertion that “Christians lie” to carefully documented and incontestable evidence that this was true.

By the time I read Bridgstock I was much better educated, having completed a university degree and post-graduate studies as a mature-age student. Concepts such as ‘evidence’, ‘credible sources’, ‘respecting the context of quotations’ and ‘being aware of ideological agendas’ had been drummed into me. With this rigorous training behind me, I was even more aghast that anyone with a tertiary education could betray the discipline of academic research and writing this way.

In 2013, I attended a debate in Brisbane between astrophysicist Professor Lawrence Krauss and Dr William Lane Craig on the topic, “Has Science Buried God?” Speaking first, Krauss, to the shock of both the audience and Craig, immediately launched into an impassioned speech about his opponent’s history of lying for Jesus. It was brutal, but Krauss didn’t just claim that Craig was a liar, he backed it up with video evidence. Speaking to Eternity News after the debate, Krauss explained:

“There’s no point in my debating William Lane Craig—he’s not going to learn anything from me or listen.

… I happen to think William Lane Craig abuses science and says many, many, many things that are not only disingenuous but untruthful, but recognises that his audience won’t know that. So one of the reasons I like to do these [debates], and certainly why I agreed to allow the first one to be videotaped, is to demonstrate explicitly examples of where he says things that he knows to be manifestly wrong, but also knows that the audience won’t have access to the information.

… I wanted to show that he was a liar. I think I did that, in my opinion, in the last debate. And I’ll do it again. I want to show what the science is. So I’ll show it again.”

Krauss continued:

“… when Dr Craig says ‘Scientists say this’ without any support, without any references, that it’s just some quote from someone, or no quote at all … [people] should be suspicious of what he says.

… I think he knowingly abuses science and other people’s arguments—distorts them— I think he does it because he believes in the end. He amazingly believes, wholeheartedly, in the scriptures. And I think his attitude is that because they’re right, anything goes to prove their right. But that’s not how we learn about the world.”

Around this time, voluntary assisted dying was becoming a hot topic of conversation and, as I heard the many arguments advanced in opposition to it, I started using the research skills I’d learned at university and had honed in the years since graduating to look into it. My research took me right back to that party in the 1990s where I was first introduced to the idea that Christians lie. I became such of an expert on the subject, I was invited to deliver the keynote speech to the Dying with Dignity NSW annual conference in 2011.

In my speech, I argued that Christians were not just lying about voluntary assisted dying, they were using the same dishonest tactics to argue on various fronts – about abortion, LGBTIQ people, and stem-cell research. Different topics, same strategy. I argued that the material emanating from pro-life and anti-gay advocates wasn’t just misinformed – it was blatant and deliberate lying. It was dishonesty and deception strategically employed for the purpose of achieving a religious goal.

I gave the example of The Family Council of Victoria (FCV) –  affiliated with a number of prominent Christians and Christian organisations including the Catholic Women’s League and Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party. At that time, under the heading “Abortion and Breast Cancer” the Family Council of Victoria’s website stated that: 

“The link between induced abortion and breast cancer is substantial … The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in the U.K. has issued warnings of a 30% greater risk of breast cancer via leaflets and the internet.” 

But, when I checked the website of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), it said:

“… there is now evidence to conclude that induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.”

And, it was not just that the FCV hadn’t caught up with the latest news. The RCOG’s statement had been on their website for eight years. 

Another example related to LGBTIQ issues. An anti-gay Christian group called the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuals had cited an article by Professor Lisa Diamond to support the thesis that sexual identity can be changed. In fact, her study said exactly the opposite. Professor Diamond pulled no punches in her public rebuke:

“… there’s no chance that this is a misunderstanding, or simply a different scientific interpretation of the data, that’s simply not possible. This is a wilful misuse and distortion of my research. Not an academic disagreement, not a slight shading of the truth, its wilful distortion. And it’s illegitimate, and it’s irresponsible, and you know that, and you should stop.” 

As I’ve developed as a researcher, I’ve learned that on issues such as evolution, abortion, stem-cell research, LGBTIQ issues and voluntary assisted dying, when you find a claim or an anecdote that is blatantly untrue, the source will almost inevitably be a Christian activist or organisation – although the link will almost always be concealed or undeclared. Dig enough and you’ll find that doctor is a devout Catholic or Mormon, that ‘neutral’ journalist is an evangelical Christian, that outspoken politician is even more outspoken when addressing her local Baptist church, that ‘secular’ bio-ethics organisation is funded by the Catholic Church, that MP’s presentation was authored by a religious ghost-writer with no academic qualifications, and that ‘not particularly religious’ opinion writer has strong family links to a fundamentalist church.

The lying, coupled with the subterfuge, is jarring – even after you’ve encountered it time after time after time. 

It should come as no surprise that opposition to voluntary assisted dying is almost exclusively linked to, or inflamed by, religious activists or organisations. In an interview with VAD activist, Neil Francis, Els Borst, the Dutch MP who first introduced VAD legislation to the Netherlands, reveals there was a time when the lies emanating from the Vatican were so egregious, the Dutch government sent a delegation threatening to cut diplomatic ties. 

Els Borst: Their journal, the Osservatore Romano, was writing, was publishing articles saying that in the Netherlands, people who went to a nursing home or an old people’s home, didn’t dare to do that any more because they were so afraid they would be killed by their doctor after a week or so.

And we were so angry about this, absolute lies, that we went together, to the Vatican, and we told them that if they didn’t stop that sort of lies in their journal, that we would stop diplomatic relations with Vatican City.

I can still remember the night Neil shared that, as yet, unpublished information to me, as we shared an Asian meal in Brisbane. I found I still had the capacity to be shocked.

One of the most scathing assessments of this religious strategy of dishonesty and deceit comes from John Griffiths, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Groningen. Writing in a scholarly book on Euthanasia and Law in Europe, Griffiths says:

“Imprecision, exaggeration, suggestion and innuendo, misinterpretation and misrepresentation, ideological ipsedixitism, and downright lying and slander (not to speak of bad manners) have taken the place of careful analysis of the problem and consideration of the Dutch evidence.”

I had Griffith’s quote in mind today as I was reading a document, recently published by Andrew Denton’s Go Gentle Australia (GGA) (for which, in full disclosure, I have done some work in my professional capacity as a freelance researcher.) GGA’s “A Guide to the Debate on Voluntary Assisted Dying” points to a ‘minority report’ opposing the introduction of VAD, by Western Australian MP, Nick Goiran. Goiran (a committed Christian) warns of the high number of wrongful deaths occurring in countries and jurisdictions which have legalised VAD. At face value, it’s a terrifying account. But GGA’s assessment of Goiran’s claims is strangely reminiscent of Martin Bridgstock’s critique of creationist literature, three decades earlier. GGA explains:

“Analysis shows the bulk of the evidence used in this report was not peer reviewed but instead came from abbreviated versions of official reports taken out of context, newspaper stories and anecdotes told by anti-euthanasia physicians.

A detailed investigation of 26 allegations of ‘wrongful deaths’ presented in the Minority Report shows that only six out of 26 cases (less than a quarter) related to patients who may qualify for an assisted death (under the legislation that was being debated in Western Australia).

Twenty cases in the Minority Report were entirely irrelevant because the subjects fell outside the proposed criteria.”

Among those cases found by GGA to have been grossly misrepresented in Mr Goiran’s account were: one rejected as ‘lacking veracity’ by the CEO of the health care provider in which the incident occurred; four in which the victim of the ‘wrongful death’ was still alive, and; two in which the subjects were not approved for assisted deaths and died by their own hands.

In short, the report was a tissue of lies, based on half-truths, misreporting and information taken out of context. And Goiran is far from the only culprit. This is not the exception, but the rule.

Now, let me be clear. When I say “Christians lie” I do not mean every Christian lies. I don’t even mean that most Christians lie. But what I can say is that Christians who engage in ideological activism designed to curtail the freedoms of others, or impose their religious views upon those who don’t share them, routinely lie, distort, misquote, and present information out of context – and they do it deliberately. I know this because I have seen them corrected and directed to the correct information time and time again, and yet, they continue to pump out the same, old, discredited arguments. 

Further, not content with this outrageous mendacity, they routinely conceal, and, in fact, deny outright, the religious ideology which underpins their convictions. 

Call me naive, but even today, when I scratch the surface and find that a blatantly dishonest account has been authored by a Christian I am still as shocked as I was the first time the scientist at that party said to me, “Christians lie.” 

I still struggle to understand how people who claim to be fighting on the side of truth and morality are routinely willing to just make shit up in order to achieve their goals. What’s more, because I do not tar all Christians with the one brush, I know that many, perhaps most, Christians are appalled at what is being done, and said, in their name. It is, to put it in Biblical terms, an abomination.

Christians lie. In doing so they betray everything their religion is supposed to stand for. Conservative Christian activists are dedicated to defending the things they hold sacred, but they are all too ready to violate the one thing that should be sacred to all of us, whether we are people of faith or of none – the truth. 

Chrys Stevenson

 

This article appears in the Winter 2020 edition of The New Liberator, published by the Rationalist Association of NSW. Back issues of The New Liberator are available on the association’s website. Membership of the NSW Rationalists is very reasonable and includes 4 hard-copy issues of the New Liberator per year and the chance to participate in the ‘RATS’ lobbying efforts. Established in 1912, The Rationalist Association of NSW is currently headed by Meg and Max Wallace and Steve Maxwell. For membership and enquiries, email: nswrationalists@gmail.com. You do not have to live in NSW to join.

It’s been a hell of a year. We’re only half way through 2020 and already Australians have battled bushfires of unprecedented scale and ferocity, watched a global pandemic kill hundreds of thousands and send countries and individuals into self-isolation. Now, we’re looking on as America’s tinder-box of racial and cultural polarisation begins to ignite.

Crisis brings out the best and the worst in us; it throws trends which have been bubbling along in the background into stark relief. One of those trends is not new, but perhaps more prevalent as politicians and populations grapple with how to understand and manage a tsunami of apocalyptic challenges. There’s an old saying, “Opinions are like arseholes – everyone has one.” That’s never been so true. Today, the unqualified, unfiltered, and often unwashed denizens of social media fill our news feeds with their self-confident, and often contrarian, views on current affairs. Lately, the world seems to be full of Renaissance men (and, to a lesser extent, women) who appear to have in-depth, expert knowledge on any subject you care to mention. As an American Facebooker, Tyler Boshoven, recently observed:

“I think the coolest thing about this entire Coronavirus thing is realizing how many people I know have been secret expert virologists this entire time! Like, I know most experts are warning about the severity of the virus, but Johnny drop out over here says it’s no big deal!” 

What caused Australia’s bushfires? Climate change? That’s certainly the view of climate scientists and pyrologists. In November 2019, fire chiefs warned “the climate crisis was making bushfires deadlier and bushfire season longer.” But, because that narrative didn’t suit the Coalition and big business, the issue quickly became politicised. Murdoch journalists, coalition politicians and right-wing commentators deflected attention from climate change by pointing the finger at arsonists. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that this was not the case, people with no expertise in climate science or fire-fighting dug in.

What caused COVID-19? Virologists who examined the virus closely say it has none of the tell-tale signs of genetic manipulation. Yet social media buzzes with conspiracy theories that the virus is a Chinese biological weapon, deliberately released to bring down Western democracy. Some conspiracists argue that radiation from 5G phone networks has compromised our immune systems and that the virus is a ploy to introduce legislation for compulsory vaccination and inject us all with tracking chips. That this fear-mongering directly contradicts the views of experts matters very little. One in eight Australians now believe 5G is spreading Coronavirus and nearly half believe the virus came from a Chinese laboratory (Essential Poll, 2020).

Recently, when Professor Peter Doherty warned that Australians are becoming too relaxed about COVID-19, The Australian’s economic journalist, Adam Creighton, responded, “I’m concerned people aren’t relaxed enough!” Twitter wit, @DocMelbourne pondered: 

 “Hmmm. who to trust? One of Murdoch’s lackeys or a Nobel Prize winning immunologist?”

For those of us who value expert opinion, scientific consensus and the importance of evidence, the world seems to have become a Huxleyan dystopia in which experts are untrustworthy no-nothings while @WuhanWarrior from Twitter, a high-school drop-out who works at the local Higgledy-Piggledy, knows the ‘real truth’ because he’s ‘done his own research.’

Fire and pestilence are not the only crises we are confronting this year – we have been afflicted with a plague of ultracrepidarians – people who give (usually contrarian) advice and opinions outside their own area of expertise.

While ultracrepidarianism is a contemporary issue, it is far from a modern affliction. The etymological roots of the word ‘ultracrepidarian’ come from the story of the artist, Apelles of Koa, recounted by Pliny the Elder around 4BC. When Apelles put his art on show, the artist liked to hide behind his paintings in order to eavesdrop on people commenting about his skill. Apelles was a reasonable man. When a cobbler noted that Apelles’ rendering of a sandal was flawed, the artist recognised the man’s expertise and repainted it. Emboldened by the artist’s respect for his knowledge, the cobbler then ventured to suggest the subject’s leg could also do with some correction. This was a step too far for Apelles who rebuked the cobbler, “Sutor, ne ultra crepidam!” – literally, “Shoemaker! Not beyond the shoe!”

Photo:  Apelles fresco by Giorgio Vasari, Casa Vasari, Florence

Following Pliny, English satirist, William Hazlitt, recorded the word, ultracrepidarian in 1819. In a put-down that would not be out of place in a Facebook flame war, Hazlitt railed at a newspaper editor: 

 “You have been well-called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic. From the difficulty you yourself have in constructing a sentence of common grammar, and your frequent failures, you instinctly presume that no author that comes under the lash of your pen can understand his mother-tongue … There is an innate meanness and vulgarity in all you do.” 

It should come as no surprise that, 200 years after Hazlitt, ultracrepidarianism is taking over the interwebs. After all, the free world is now led by America’s ultracrepidarian-in-chief, President Donald Trump. Trump is the poster-child – the apotheosis – of ultracrepidarianism. Never, in the history of the world, has there been a greater ultracrepidarian! Trump (who lied about graduating first in his class), graduated from Wharton business school without honours. Six of his businesses were declared bankrupt between 1991 and 2009. Yet, he claims to have an almost super-human breadth and depth of superior knowledge. According to Trump:

“I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.”

“Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump.”

“I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth.”

“I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.”

“There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.”

“Nobody knows banking better than I do.”

“I understand the power of Facebook maybe better than almost anybody.”

“Nobody knows more about debt.” (That just might be true!)

Omnisciently, Trump even claims:

“I know more about Cory [Booker] than he knows about himself.”

Completely undeterred by his lack of medical training, President Trump recently astonished his medical advisers when he suggested that ingesting or injecting household bleach might be a good way to treat COVID-19. Why not? It works on your kitchen benches!

“I’m not a doctor,” the President admitted, but (pointing to his head), “ … I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what.”

While Trump clearly values his own expertise, he is not a fan of it in others.

“You know,” he said at a 2016 rally, “I’ve always wanted to say this … the experts are terrible!”

This anti-intellectualism is not confined to Trump. Climate-change denier, Myron Ebell, director of an American libertarian activist group, has derisively dubbed climate change scientists “the expertariate.” Ebell has a masters degree in political theory from the London School of Economics, but no expertise in climate science. Yet, he says:

“The people of America have rejected the expertariate, and I think with good reason because I think the expertariat have been wrong about one thing after another, including climate policy.”

For ideologues, hampered by the fact that science doesn’t support their views, inflating the frequency of scientific error in order to damage the prestige of (and public trust in) scientific institutions is a common strategy.

Anti-intellectualism is not a purely American phenomenon. In 2016, when ten Nobel prize-winning economists warned about the dire economic and social consequences of Brexit, conservative British politician, Michael Gove replied that “people in this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”

And it seems, Gove, who has no economic credentials (he read English at Oxford), was right. The nation’s leading economists were derided as ‘Chicken Littles’ and Britain voted to leave the EU – 52 to 48 per cent.

Anti-intellectualism flourishes in a world that has embraced a bastardised version of ‘cultural democracy.’ As Salon’s cultural critic, David Masciotra, explains:

“The true villain in a cultural democracy is the intellectual. The intellectual insists on standards of evidence, reason and logic when attempting to reach a conclusion regarding a matter of social import. She undermines the dogma that all nonsense is created equal, which renders her (or indeed him) unfit for participation in the increasingly masochistic rituals of liberty.”

Ironically, the blurring of class barriers and the democratisation of education and knowledge has not lead to a greater respect for expertise. Instead, says Professor Tom Nichols, author of the book The Death of Expertise, democratisation has fostered:

“… the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else.”

This is not a position of intellectual snobbery. The argument isn’t that experts are smart while everyone else is dumb. Nor is it an argument that people should not seek out information and voice opinions. The problem is not that people are stupid or uneducated, but that people have been encouraged to believe that having a degree, or professional expertise in any area, qualifies them to advance contrarian views beyond their own specialisation. Vocational education bares some responsibility for this compartmentalisation of knowledge. Now, students are educated to be specialists rather than receiving a broad-based education in humanities. An Arts degree is widely viewed as worthless because “it won’t get you a job.”

On Facebook, recently, I was put in my place by an anti-vaccination advocate:  

“A confirmed sheeple indeed! You would do well to research before making such ignorant statements!!! You’ve been blind-sided by incedious [sic] manipulation. As a Natural Health Practitioner, I have been directly involved with the victims of vaccines.”

I am not a scientist, but I am an academically-trained, professional researcher, with 10 years experience researching and debunking vaccination myths. I have actually done my own research.

“Do your own research” is the last resort of the online ultracrepidarian. The problem is that many have no idea how to do their own research and have no appreciation of research as a career in its own right, requiring years of training and professional experience. As Professor Tom Nichols says:

“I fear we are witnessing … a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers—in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.”

This will resonate with those who recently heard celebrity chef and self-appointed ‘wellness guru’, Pete Evans, opine that “doctors don’t know much about biology” while defending his promotion of a machine that flashes coloured lights as a cure for COVID-19. Palpably ‘fed up to pussy’s bow’ with ultracrepidarians like Evans, Michael Vagg, a clinical associate professor at Deakin University School of Medicine says:

“Of all the weasel words immunisation deniers use, I get most infuriated by the ‘do your own research’ trope. You don’t need to. Unless you’re a senior research scientist with your own lab, a posse of postdocs and serious wad of cash, we don’t need your help” (Vagg, The Conversation, 2017).

When people say ‘do your own research’, says Vagg, they want average people to be allowed to disagree with decades of rigorous, serious scientific effort. But, he warns, when relying on the internet: 

“The average person with high-school knowledge and healthy faith in human decency has no chance [of distinguishing fact from fiction].”

What drives people, with no relevant expertise, to dissent from the consensus opinions of those who have spent a lifetime gaining academic and professional credentials in their field? Research confirms Aristotle’s maxim: “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Similarly, psychology has identified the Dunning Kruger effect: “The less you know, the more you think you know.” Like the cobbler in Pliny’s story, when someone is confident in, or recognised for, specialist knowledge they do have, they tend to become hubristic about areas beyond their expertise. Psychologists call this ‘over-claiming.’

Learning new information makes us feel good. Thinking that we’re smart gives us a buzz. But having our opinions or beliefs challenged makes us feel bad. Psychology suggests humans have an innate need to think highly of ourselves – even if this requires a breathtaking level of self-deception. For example, someone can be as dumb as a post and still feel justified in pointing to their head to claim, “I’m like a person who has a good you-know-what.” This is called ‘belief-superiority’ – the conviction that your preconceptions are right, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And don’t be feeling smug! Who among us hasn’t stood on a bathroom scale, exclaimed, “That can’t be right!”, weighed ourselves again (maybe repeatedly), then insisted, “This scale must be broken!”

Belief superiority is nicely illustrated in the Netflix documentary, Behind the Curve. When proponents of the ‘flat earth’ theory invested a substantial amount of time and money into experiments to support their hypothesis that the world is both flat and static, every experiment they conducted proved the opposite. The flat-earthers acknowledged the findings but said, “We obviously were not willing to accept that.” If their scientific experiment had proved their assertion they would have crowed about being right. But when repeated experiments proved they were wrong, they insisted either the equipment or their methodology must have been at fault. As journalist, David McRaney (2011), says on his “You’re Not as Smart as You Think” blog:

“When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.”

Because of the ‘buzz’ we get from validation, people tend to seek out a ‘tribe’ that shares their views. The internet has facilitated that task. People with belief superiority congregate in groups that feed their confirmation bias. The result is the extreme polarisation we are witnessing in today’s ‘culture wars.’ Statistics show that, in America at least, fewer and fewer voters and politicians identify as moderates. The middle-ground is disappearing as people scream at each other across a deepening chasm; each side intransigently convinced they are right – often in absolute ignorance or contradiction of reliable data and evidence.

So what is one to do when confronted with an ultracrepidarian in the wild? While it’s true it’s almost impossible to sway the opinion of the person you’re arguing with, there is a good chance you might influence the bystanders. “Fight for the crowd” is a strategy which dates back to the gladiators in the Roman Colosseum. You are not fighting to win against your opponent, but to convince the audience that your argument deserves a ‘thumbs up.’ Argue to persuade the jury, not the person whose position is clearly entrenched. You almost certainly won’t convince them – but you might just persuade the onlookers that online ultracrepidarian is talking a load of old cobblers.

Chrys Stevenson

 

I come from a military family. 

My brother served in both the Australian navy and the airforce.

My cousin and his father served in the airforce.

My father served in the AIF in Morotai.

My uncles served in the Middle East, including one who was in the Rats of Tobruk

Both my grandfathers served in France in World War I.

My grandmother was a military nurse.

My grandfather, Harold Robert Norman Stevenson was the recipient of a Military Medal.

And yet, as the descendant of this military family, I am effectively excluded from attending Anzac Day commemorations because of the overt religiosity (often tinged with right-wing, religious fundamentalism) of the current commemorations. I am sure I am not alone.

I am an atheist. My father, whose service cost him his mental health, was an atheist – although he preferred to call himself a ‘Jumping Calathumpian’. Yet I cannot attend a commemoration without being assaulted with religious, prayers, sermons and a sanitised version of Anzacs as god-fearing, saintly heroes that would both amuse and horrify them. 

It’s time the RSL took religion out of Anzac services and made them secular. People of all religions and none, including Indigenous soldiers, served at Gallipoli and in other campaigns across time and place. We cannot continue to commemorate them in a way that distorts and dishonours this reality.

Australian defence personnel were not religious in the past, nor are they now. A report from Colonel Philip Hoglin of the Australian Army reminds us of the:

“… overlooked reality that the largest ‘religious’ grouping in the ADF no longer subscribes to, or is affiliated with, a religion.”

In 2015, over 47 per cent of ADF personnel had no religion. It is also likely that many of the remaining 53 per cent are only nominally Christian – do not attend church, believe in the power of prayer, or even believe in a supernatural deity. 

Religious ANZAC Day services certainly don’t represent the contemporary ADF. But, what of the Anzacs?

As a group, the Anzacs were not religious. After the war, Australians were profoundly uncomfortable as the church worked assiduously to co-opt the commemorations.

Last year, Ann-Therese King shared a letter from her grandfather’s French fiancée to his mother, describing her impression of the Australian soldiers who defended her homeland in World War I:

“… they are big, hard men, men, who live hard, fight hard, and think less of death than any other body of men I have ever met. They seem to be very irreligious, and sometimes uncouth, but they are brave and large-hearted, and though naturally we have men of all kinds with us, I think their code of honour is the most admirable, that is to be found.” (My emphasis)

This is confirmed by Australian anthropologist, Bruce Kapferer in his book, Legends of People, Myths of State. He says:

“Many of the soldiers … were irreligious virtually by intention. Christian religion was part of the disciplinary framework of the military and the officers of religion were part of that structure of domination which denied to the men a self-determining autonomy valued in egalitarian thought.” (My emphasis)

Similarly, in his book, Inventing Anzac, professor of folklore at Curtin University, Graham Seal, says:

“… the expression and observance of religious belief was discouraged within digger culture.”

What these historians are saying, is that religion is not just irrelevant, but antithetical to the Anzac tradition. 

Kapferer is clear: Religion was not just absent from Anzac culture – irreligion was ‘valorised’. In fact, the essence of Anzac, part of what became the ‘religion’ of Anzac was this irreligiosity. 

Historian, Michael Belcher, refers to the padres who accompanied the Anzacs as ‘poorly appreciated’. The Anzacs, themselves, referred to them as “Cook’s Tourists”.  As World War I veteran, Major Frank Valentine Weir wrote in his letter diary on 31 December 1916:  

“Note all you say re Parson Rogers Chaplains have a great time 1 in bed every night & only 1 parade a week Church – carry the rank of an officer & no responsibility – the free lancer every where they go & recognize no C.O.” 

After the war, says Belcher, most Australian clergy were reluctant to participate formally in Anzac Day commemorations because they did not want to glorify WWI as a ‘Holy War’. 

Indeed, as Carl M F Fischer wrote to the Courier-Mail in 1914:

“If these fighting nations were Christian nations they would obey Christ whose directions are, ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink.’” 

After the war, the Protestant church worked hard to co-opt the Anzac Day ceremonies but there was a huge backlash from diggers and families of other religions and of none. 

By 1938, the Victorian RSL announced:

“An Anzac Day service without prayers which, it Is hoped, will be acceptable to all Churches …”

Their plan did not totally excise religion:

“The proposed new form does not Include spoken prayers or the Benediction, but the hymn ‘Abide with Me’ will be included. An opportunity for those attending the service to recite the Lord’s prayer will be provided.”

The Moderator of the Victorian Presbyterian Assembly (the Right Rev. F. W.Rolland)  responded positively to this mostly secular plan:

“Personally, I realise that the Returned Soldiers’ League desires to have everyone attend the gathering at the Shrine. It is almost Impossible to arrange a service that will suit everyone,and the question seems to resolve itself into securing the greatest good for the greatest number.”

Surely the RSL and the church, today, could be equally as magnanimous?

The extreme religiosity of many Anzac services is disrespectful to the memory and tradition of the Anzacs, to many of their family members and to many of those currently serving in the ADF. The conservative, right wing dog-whistling that takes place in some sermons (see, for example, my “Perverting Anzac Day for Jesus“, 2016)  is exploitative and excludes many of us who would like to participate.

Few would begrudge the opportunity for the faith community to agree upon an ecumenical prayer or observance, but, beyond that, Anzac commemorations must be secular so as not to exclude anyone, including the Anzacs who would not recognise themselves in the sanitised saintly soldiers who are honoured, today, in their stead.

Chrys Stevenson

In a speech presented at The Hollywood Reporter’s 2018 Women in Entertainment gala this week, Australian comedian, Hannah Gadsby, argued that, when it comes to sexual harassment, men – even self-defined ‘good men’ – should not get to define the position of the line that separates harmless human interaction between the sexes and sexual harassment.

The speech resonated widely with women, but I have seen numerous men criticising the speech for being ‘man-hating’ and for advocating a line that will proscribe even the most trivial flirtatious interactions between men and women.

Entertainment reporter, Peter Ford, for example, tweeted that Gadsby’s speech was ‘just sexist mumbo jumbo’.  

“I’m going right off her,” he said.

In an article titled, “Hannah Gadsby, I draw the line at women like you”, Jack Delaney sneers that Gadsby is trying to create a “radical feminist utopia”.

My take on Gadsby’s speech is that she was simply pointing out that men, lacking the lifetime experience of being female, struggle to understand how behaviour they consider to be   ‘acceptable’ can be considered, by many or most women, to be ‘crossing the line’.

They don’t understand how a man who truly believes he is a ‘good bloke’ because he has ‘never crossed the line’ may be viewed completely differently by the women he interacts with. Actions he deems to be ‘well within the line’ may seem, to women (within the context of their lifetimes’ experiences), to be creepy, intimidating, invasive, scary, manipulative, disrespectful and psychologically harmful. 

As I see it, men tend to look at their interactions with women in isolation, while women experience these interactions in the context of decades of micro-aggressions which often begin in childhood; think of ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’. 

Women quickly learn that minor aggressions are often the pre-cursors to even worse verbal and/or physical assaults. If you’re an abused child, your father doesn’t need to actually hit you with his belt to have you cowering in the corner as he slowly removes it from his pants. If your husband is physically violent, it’s hardly comforting that he’s put his fist through the wall and not into your face. You know what’s likely to come next.

Perhaps it’s easier to understand if we imagine an alternative universe, in which a man experiences a minor, affectionate gesture in the context of his lifetime’s experience of interactions with women.

Meet ‘Geoff’.

Geoff is a talented and reliable salesman, accustomed to drawing a modest income.  Until recently, Geoff’s income serviced a sizeable mortgage and monthly car repayments and helped support his wife (whose home-based business is not yet in profit), two school-age children, an elderly mother who lives with them, and a family pet. But Geoff has been out of work for some months now, their savings are dwindling, and he is in desperate need of a job.

This morning, his wife, Sue, sees him to the door on his way to a promising interview.

Before he leaves, Sue pinches Geoff’s cheek affectionately. 

“Go get ‘em tiger”, she says. It’s a loving and intimate gesture that Geoff enjoys.

Geoff boards a crowded bus to the city but, as he walks towards the rear of the vehicle, a random hand reaches out and lightly pinches his cheek. 

This isn’t the same as being pinched by your wife. While it’s not painful, it hits him like a physical assault, and makes him feel unsafe and uncomfortable.

This is not an isolated incident. In fact, Geoff’s cheeks are regularly pinched by women as he walks through crowded places. Geoff stopped going to nightclubs years ago because of the constant pinching – hands coming at him out of the dark like stinging mosquitoes. It made him feel like prey.

His female friends and co-workers don’t understand why it bothers him.

“It’s just harmless fun!” they say soothingly, “You should be flattered. I wish someone would pinch my cheeks!”

Even when Geoff is just walking along the street, minding his own business, women hang out of approaching cars and scream, “Great cheeks! Let us have a squeeze, love, eh?” then zoom past in a hale of cackles. They don’t think they’ve crossed a line. They’re just being nice, showing appreciation for a great set of cheeks. They assume Geoff will bask in the warm glow of their uninvited attention all day. He doesn’t. He finds it confronting and  dehumanising. It makes him feel vulnerable because there’s nothing he can do to stop it – it’s a hit and run attack.

As Geoff disembarks from the bus, a disembodied female voice behind him cat-calls, “Nice set of cheeks, babe.”

He feels embarrassed but he tries to pull himself together. He has to be calm for his interview.

“Well, Geoff,” says the female recruiter, “You seem well qualified but, what sets you apart from the other candidates, is that we’re looking for someone who’ll get on well with our mainly female clientele. With cheeks like yours, they won’t be able to say “no” to you!”

Geoff blushes deeply and shuffles uncomfortably in his chair. But, he really needs this job, so he laughs nervously and accepts the offer to start work the next day.

About a week into the job, (during which several female clients have leaned forward to pinch his cheeks as he closed the deal), Geoff delivers his first sales report to his female manager. 

“Great job, Geoff!” she says, rising from her desk to pinch his cheek playfully, “If you go on like this you’ll be looking at a pay rise and a promotion”, she says, jiggling his cheek between her fingers.

Following such glowing praise, Geoff thinks it might be a safe time to nip this ‘cheek pinching’ thing in the bud. It’s only mildly annoying at this point, but he worries that if he doesn’t ask to be treated professionally, management won’t view him that way.

“Thanks, Jan, I really appreciate it and I love the job. But,” he says hesitantly, “look …  I don’t want to make a big thing of this, and … well … perhaps I’m being silly, but I’m a married man and I’m really not comfortable with you – or anyone but my wife – pinching my cheeks. Can we just keep it professional?”

Jan is shocked and then angry. 

“Really? Seriously? Isn’t that a bit precious? Geez, you’d think I’d raped you. I haven’t done anything wrong. It was a pinch on the cheek, for Chrissake. Look, you’ve made a good start in the job, but if you’re going to have a melt-down every time someone brushes past you, you’re not going to go far or last long in this company. If you want that promotion you’re going to have to be a lot more friendly. Do you get my meaning?”

Geoff is rattled. He blames himself. Maybe he did over-react. Maybe he’s over-sensitive because of things that happened in the past. He remembers when he was at primary school – pre-teen. His step-mother started pinching his cheeks, and then his bum, and then … well, much, much more. When he complained to his father, his step-mother accused him of making things up, “You lying little shit! All I did was pinch your cheeks. I was just being affectionate! What’s wrong with that?”

His father believed his new wife and berated Geoff for ‘causing trouble’.

At high school and at university, Geoff was repeatedly the target of women wanting to pinch his cheeks – and more. They never seemed to think his permission was necessary – in fact, they almost universally assumed he should enjoy the attention. When he rejected their advances they either became angry or mocked him for being ‘sexless’ or ‘gay’.

But, Geoff reasons, that was all a long time ago. He gives himself a pep-talk. “You’re grown-up now. You can say ‘no’. You DID say ‘no’.”

He feels quite proud of himself, but he also feels nervous and insecure – unsafe, disrespected and objectified. But, then again, he can’t just quit. Jobs are hard to get and he really needs this job. 

From then on, anytime the boss passes Geoff in the hallway or runs into him in the printing room she pinches his cheek lightly and says, “There, that’s not too bad, is it? Go on! You like it! You’re just playing hard-to-get!”

Geoff doesn’t like it. Not at all. In fact, the stress is making him physically ill and he is suffering panic attacks. But he needs this job and he needs the promotion.

One day, in the printing room, Geoff’s boss backs him into a corner, puts one hand on the wall over his shoulder, pinches his cheek, then cups his balls in her hand and shoves her tongue down his throat. He is so shocked, he freezes. He feels himself morph into that vulnerable little boy whose step-mother abused him. 

But summoning all his strength, he steps away and says in a hushed but determined voice, “Don’t you EVER do that again! Don’t you EVER touch me!”

His boss arches an eyebrow and says calmly, “If you don’t want your cheeks pinched you shouldn’t flaunt them like that. I’m only human. I just can’t help myself. You should be flattered!”

Still, Geoff takes a stand. He reports the incident to Human Resources and they take it up with his boss.

At mediation she says, “This is ridiculous. All I’ve ever done is pinch his cheek occasionally. He’s over-sensitive. It’s just harmless fun. It’s an affectionate gesture for God’s sake. I haven’t crossed any line.”

When Geoff insists she did more than pinch his cheek – that she assaulted him – the mediator shrugs and says, “Look, mate it’s your word against hers, and she’s worth a lot more to the company than you are. If she assaulted you, why didn’t you call out? My office is close by, I would have heard you. She couldn’t have pinched you very hard – you don’t have any bruises.  It just sounds like an office romance gone bad, to me. I suggest you just chill out a bit and try not to antagonise her.”

Geoff can’t afford to quit. His family depends on his income. He thinks if he just tries to do his job and stay out of the boss’s way, everything will be OK. 

He is passed over for the promotion when it comes up, and his sales territory is gradually whittled away until it becomes impossible for him to meet his targets. Soon, he is told he just isn’t performing well enough and is given notice.

Without the income from his job, Geoff loses his house. The stress causes his marriage to break down. His mother has to go into residential care. He loses custody of his children. He suffers depression and PTSD and he isn’t able to work again. 

Trying to do something productive with his time, Geoff starts volunteering at a community radio station. But, one day, a female announcer who’s been increasingly friendly towards him, approaches him in the tea room and pinches his cheek, playfully.

Incensed, Geoff angrily slams her hand away from his face and shouts in her face, “Keep your fucking hands OFF me!”

“What????” she says, genuinely taken aback. “I didn’t do anything wrong! Hey, I’m a nice person. I was just being nice – friendly. I didn’t hurt you, I haven’t sexually abused you. I barely touched you! I haven’t crossed a line. Hey! I’m the good guy here! Wow! Talk about an over-reaction!”

“You DID cross a line,” says Geoff, shaking. “You crossed MY line. You don’t get to draw my line. I do.”

“Well,” she retorts as she sashays out the door, “Now, you’re just being hysterical.”

Chrys Stevenson

Late last night, a Facebook post from my friend, Australian author Margaret Morgan, grabbed my attention.

The image was so startlingly sexist and tone-deaf in the age of #metoo I could scarcely believe it.

Atheist Safehouse? The image shows eight rather intimidating angry men apparently ‘guarding’ this closed group of 42,114 members from unwanted intruders. 

And, last night, the unwanted intruder was me.

Eight men! Where were the atheist women? Was this some kind of “Playboy Atheist” men-only club where women serve only as brainless bunnies to bolster the egos of a group of Godless incels? Or was this simply an aberration that could be easily and elegantly fixed by the admins with an ‘Oops! Yes, we screwed up. We’re fixing it now”.

Not a bloody chance!

For the past twelve months I’ve been working, behind the scenes, at the coal face of the #metoo movement, documenting cases of domestic violence ending in death and looking at incidents and the consequences of trolling and cyber-bullying. I’ve come to understand that, as long as women are not represented and treated equally in society, their physical safety, mental health and financial security will be severely compromised. In short, casual sexism like this normalises the inequality of women. This has  serious consequences; the worst of which are poverty, gender violence and death. 

The equal representation of women in public and private spaces matters. It matters because saving women’s lives and maximising their wellbeing requires a tectonic cultural shift in our society that starts with recognising women’s contributions. It is, frankly, inconceivable that a group which prides itself on intellect and reason would choose a composite photo showing eight men – mostly white – to represent its mixed-gendered membership of 42,114 members.

I joined the group last night in order to comment. Naively, I thought it would be a simple matter of drawing the issue to the attention of the admins and getting the photo changed. 

“Why are there no women in the profile picture for this group?”, I wrote. “You do know there are atheist women, right?”

It immediately became apparent this was not a new issue for Atheist Safehouse. It also became clear the admins weren’t likely to take the elegant “Oops … we’re sorry!” option.

“Here we go again,” wrote a male member of the group. “Could not agree more, but have seen what moderators do about this.”

“O goodie, this again … ” groaned another, less supportive, man.

A female member said tentatively, “I did ask myself the same question.”

Emboldened, another woman chimed in, “Please put Tracie Harris and Annie Laurie Gaylor. Thanks.”

Others suggested Madalyn Murray O’Hair – but it took a few goes to get the name and the spelling right.

My friend, Australian atheist and intellect, Cushla Geary, confirmed what I was beginning to suspect:

“It’s one of the reasons I seldom contribute here – because the debates all too often echo the masthead.”

One male member said one might just as well argue there are no animals represented in the photo because ‘animals are atheist as well’ right? He went on to explain the image wasn’t sexist because the people represented in the photo had just been picked ‘randomly’. 

Soon an admin appeared – a female:

“Please read the pinned post at the top of the page, there’s a section that says the debate on this topic is currently closed, due to lack of consensus.”

(I imagine the big, brave male admins ducking for cover in the cyber-trenches while they sent out the female foot-soldiers to throw grenades at the tiresome feminazi interloper.)

Lack of consensus? About what? Atheist Safehouse is a group of 42,114 atheists and it’s 2018 for Chrissakes! We’re in the midst of fourth wave feminism and the #metoo movement – focusing on combating sexual harassment, assault and misogyny.  Yet, in a group of people who pride themselves on their intelligence and rationality , there’s a lack of consensus over whether an image that depicts eight blokes and no women sufficiently and fairly represents the atheist movement? 

A male ally raised a pertinent question:

“How do you get ‘consensus’ when you regard the topic as ‘closed’, I wonder.”

I agreed, remarking that, surely, the idea that men and women were equal, and should be represented equally, was uncontentious. 

At which point some genius suggested there should be a poll. Yes. Seriously. A fucking POLL!

It was suggested the matter should be put to a vote. Apparently, in this group, women’s equality is not a ‘given’, it is a privilege which can only be bestowed if the ‘consensus’ or ‘majority vote’ deems us worthy of inclusion.

“This is the most regularly asked question on the page,” said a jaded male member of the group, “and I guarantee you’ll be disappointed and dissatisfied with the vast majority of the answers. The powers that be have decreed that the subject is not up for discussion and a large portion of the group agree, so I’m afraid that’s how it’s going to stay.”

Naively, it occurred to me this group simply didn’t realise there were female atheist leaders. “Where is Polly Toynbee, Greta Christina, Karen Stollznow, Ophelia Benson, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Susan Blackmore, Sumitra Padmanabhan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Susan Jacobs, Margaret Downey, Ariane Sherine, Debbie Goddard and more?” I wrote.

But the admins were unmoved. Another female admin chimed in: 

“Chrys Stevenson, please go read the rules of the group and it will be explained as well as what is appropriate topics we allow. You are new but this topic has been hashed and rehashed. The banner stays as it is. Turning off comments for this post.”

Silenced.

Consider the gravity of this in today’s cultural climate:

The female admins of a group of 42,114 free thinkers shut down a discussion on whether women should be represented equally on their masthead.Not only that,they shut it down because people kept complaining and, instead of changing the damn photo, they preferred to just prohibit people from talking about it!

As a result of this ‘discussion’ I was quickly expelled from the group, as was my friend, Cushla, who stepped up to defend my position. Before I was banned – as I knew I would be –  I made it known I had taken screenshots of the conversation and would bring the matter to public attention. That post was deleted too.

There was a time when I would have kept these kinds of disputes ‘in house’.  I kept shtum for years over various atrocities within organised atheism for fear of bringing a movement I believed in into disrepute. But the atheist movement’s shameful stance on feminism is now well known. If organised atheism is seen as disreputable it is the fault of the misogynists, not those of us who call it out.  The men (and women) who prop up the mean-spirited, myopic misogyny of groups like Atheist Safehouse are solely responsible for the crumbling edifice of a movement which once had promise, but is now rotting from both the head and its core. 

If an atheist group of 42,114  (42,112 members now Cushla and I have been booted) cannot take the simple step of removing a single photo and replacing it with a more representative image, what hope is there that atheism can be rescued from the grip of the immature, socially inept, MRA man-babies who seem to have colonised the movement.

New Atheism is supposed to be about freeing the world from the irrational beliefs that hold back human progress. One of those irrational beliefs is that women are less deserving of equality, recognition and respect than men. And yet, in one of the largest atheist groups on Facebook, you cannot even discuss this issue – it is verboten. And 41,112 atheists choose to belong to such a group!

Tell me again how New Atheism is going to make the world a better place?

Chrys Stevenson