A Canary in the Anglican Coalmine

05 Mar A Canary in the Anglican Coalmine

This article appeared in the March 2025 edition of Quadrant.

At a recent meeting in Germany, religious freedom experts from around the world warned of a climate of “increasing intolerance” towards people of faith in Western nations. Anja Hoffmann, Executive Director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, who was one of the organisers of the event, said:

It is very worrying that the peaceful expression of personal religious beliefs on matters relating to marriage and family has become the potential end of a political career or employment, or even the beginning of a court case … This is a serious threat to religious freedom and leads to widespread self-censorship among traditional believers in the West.

Australia is not immune from this slide into intolerance. In recent years there has been a slew of laws enacted around the country that limit religious freedoms. A case in point is the Victorian Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021, which took effect in February 2022. This Act bans conduct “directed towards a person” which could “change” or “suppress” their sexual orientation or gender identity, these concepts being understood very broadly. Sexual orientation, for example, includes sexual behaviours and relationships, as well as inclinations. As a result, the scope of behaviour potentially penalised as a “conversion practice” is correspondingly broad. The Act specifically targets religious practices, including prayer and therapeutic counselling. The consent of the person is declared to be irrelevant.

Other jurisdictions are also bringing in change-and-suppression laws. One is already in place in the Australian Capital Territory; New South Wales has passed a law that will take effect this year; South Australia is adopting a similar law; and a Queensland law bans change-and-suppression practices by medical providers.

The Victorian Act poses a particular challenge to churches due to its vicarious liability provision. In Victoria, if a church worker, whether an employee or a volunteer, engages in a “change or suppression” practice, church authorities can be found guilty as well, unless they can show they have taken preventive precautions.

Perhaps it was because of this that in 2023, the Melbourne Anglican Diocese added a rule to its Code of Conduct for Child Safety and Wellbeing. Rule 6.2(y) states that no church worker may “engage in any conduct to change or suppress a child’s gender identity or sexual orientation”. This was clearly in response to the Change or Suppression Act, which the Code of Conduct cited. In essence, the Act makes it mandatory to “affirm” and illegal to question or oppose a person’s preferred sexual or gender identity.

The Anglican Code of Conduct for Child Safety and Wellbeing applies to all church workers in the diocese, including volunteers. No one may welcome visitors at a church door, lead prayers, serve on a church council, vote in synod, play the flute in a worship band, visit someone in a nursing home on behalf of the church, or read the Bible aloud in a service without giving their assent to this Code of Conduct.

An internationally renowned activist for the persecuted church, Elizabeth Kendal, was recently forced to stand down from her roles serving in a small Melbourne Anglican congregation because she could not give her assent to this rule. Kendal firmly believes that the Change or Suppression Act threatens the health and wellbeing of children, and that to endorse 6.2(y) would mean submission to a bad, harmful law.

Elizabeth Kendal is not alone in her concerns. In the UK, the 2024 Cass Review reported a huge increase in children seeking gender services in recent years, but found that there is a weak evidence base for “affirming” medical interventions, which can have devastating irreversible impacts including infertility, sexual dysfunction, incontinence and osteoporosis. In particular, the Cass Review found that there is a lack of valid evidence that “gender-affirming” treatment reduces suicide.

Since the release of the Cass Review, the UK has banned new prescriptions of puberty blockers for the treatment of gender dysphoria, a decision that was upheld by the High Court. Meanwhile, other nations across Europe have also been winding back “affirmation” policies, including Finland, Sweden and Norway. France and Germany are now moving in that direction too.

Adding to concerns about harmful practices was the recent leaking of files from the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), whose guidelines have underpinned “affirmation” regimes around the world, including Australia. These files reportedly reveal that WPATH members knew they were performing life-changing, harmful procedures on patients who were too young or too unwell to give informed consent. In the US, a recent legal case has shown WPATH trying to suppress publication of the results of a review that they commissioned from Johns Hopkins University. Reportedly, WPATH leadership became “painfully aware that there are many gaps in research to back up our recommendations”.

Another driver of change has been lawsuits against gender-affirming clinics, including those brought by “detransitioners” who were guided into undergoing medical transitions which they later regretted. The Tavistock Clinic, the only NHS gender clinic for children in the UK, was shut down in the face of mass legal action over its medical “affirmation” of gender transitioning children, many of whom were same-sex-attracted girls with complex psychiatric problems. In the US a new law firm, Dallas-based Campbell Miller Payne, was established in 2023 to sue providers of gender-affirming medical care for causing health-care-related injuries. Law firms’ websites in the US and the UK are recruiting detransitioners to pursue litigation.

The LGB Alliance Australia believes that if children with gender dysphoria had been supported without being encouraged to transition, many would in time have reverted to their birth gender and “ended up lesbian, gay or bisexual adults”. In a letter to the Attorney-General of Victoria, the LGB Alliance claimed that the Act’s mandating of “affirming” health care is “a medicalised attack on our community” that is “transing away the gay”. From this perspective, the Act itself functions as a state-imposed change-and-suppression practice.

Another concerned community group is Parents of Adolescents with Gender Distress (PAGD). PAGD believes that most children who experience gender identity distress are also diagnosed with neurodiversity, and that most also have experienced trauma or suffer from mental illness. These parent activists have complained to the Victorian government that school staff have at times “intentionally excluded and alienated parents from discussions regarding their child’s gender distress and mental wellbeing”. They are especially concerned about schools starting their children on social transitioning without consulting parents. They say this has isolated children from their parents, harmed the children and increased their distress.

The Victorian Change or Suppression Act makes no exception for parents, and until recently the website of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (VEOHRC) was advising parents that it could be illegal for them to question their child’s gender transition. If a child is being supported into transitioning by a schoolteacher, and this is challenged by the child’s parents, the Act would protect the teacher—because “assisting” a transition is not a “change or suppression” practice—but it could convict the parents. This is double-speak.

The Melbourne Anglican Diocese’s Code of Conduct for Child Safety and Wellbeing declares that the Church is “committed to promoting and protecting the interests, rights, safety and wellbeing of children and young people”. However, 6.2(y) does the opposite: it requires church workers to “affirm” gender transitioning of children despite potentially disastrous consequences, and never challenge it, not even in prayer. With 6.2(y) the Church has endorsed an unsafe and harmful transitioning regime, with downstream impacts that can include mutilation and sterilisation of young, vulnerable people. Churches need to consider potential reputational damage if they embrace affirmation.

The Change or Suppression Act is Orwellian. It makes it a serious crime to cause “serious injury” to a person through a “change or suppression” practice, but it provides what are in effect exemptions for “affirmation” therapies, such as prescribing sterilising puberty blockers or surgically removing someone’s genital organs if, in the professional opinion of a health service provider, this is “necessary”. It is illegal to pray that someone’s unwanted sexual feelings go away, but perfectly acceptable to cause a child to be sterilised through prescribing puberty blockers.

This Act seeks to impose a revolution in sexual ethics upon society, not least upon people of faith. To this end, the VEOHRC has been providing resources for Christians and others to help them conform to the state’s demands, including instructions on how to pray. People of faith are told that it is illegal, in relation to sexual or gender identity, to pray for someone’s healing; or to pray that they not act on their sexual attractions; or to mention the word repentance in this context; or to pray that anyone be celibate. The VEOHRC has now become some kind of religious authority, instructing people on how to pray. Why bother going to church, temple, synagogue or mosque when the VEOHRC can teach us how to talk to God?

Suppose a child, after exposure to social media that valorises transgenderism, is contemplating socially transitioning. The child asks their Sunday School teacher for advice. The teacher is aware that children who socially transition are more likely to move on to puberty blockers and surgical interventions, which can cause sterility and sexual dysfunction, often with poor mental health outcomes; and the teacher is also aware that, on the other hand, various studies have found that most children who do not socially transition or take puberty blockers revert to their birth gender by the time they are adults. Is it really now to be church policy that this teacher and other church workers must not advise against transitioning or warn the child about the risks—because to do so would be a “change or suppression practice”—even when they know full well that medical suppression of the child’s birth gender has the potential to cause the child irreversible harm?

One of the Act’s goals is that all people can be “able to live authentically and with pride”. The VEOHRC declares that “denying someone their total self—their sexuality—causes serious and ongoing harm”. According to the mandatory “affirmation” regime, if someone having an adulterous affair asks their priest to pray that they gain control over their sexual impulses, such prayer could be illegal because it infringes on the person’s right to feel proud about their sexuality. Or if a sixteen-year-old approaches their pastor saying that they desire to remain celibate before marriage, but their boyfriend or girlfriend is asking to have sex, it could be illegal for that pastor to encourage the couple to remain celibate, for to do that would deny someone their sexual self.

At a recent meeting of the Melbourne Anglican Synod, a senior priest, Dr Peter Adam, brought a motion which mildly requested a review and clarification of 6.2(y), asking for pastoral guidelines from the bishops. In an extraordinary move, Archbishop Freier withdrew the motion on the grounds that a debate could present legal and reputational risks to the Church. Church practice, he said, should conform to the law.

A Synod debate would no doubt have brought to every Synod member’s attention that every person present was bound by 6.2(y). This may have come as a shock to some, not least clergy from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, many of whom would be opposed to 6.2(y) once they understood what it actually meant.

Archbishop Freier committed further to obtaining “full legal advice”. No doubt 6.2(y) was adopted by the diocese on the basis of legal advice, but apparently not the “full” advice now being sought. However, this is not merely a legal crisis: it is a theo­logical and pastoral crisis, so it is to be hoped that the diocese will give full consideration not only to the legal implications, but also to the theological and pastoral implications of 6.2(y). The Church needs to consider the likely pastoral consequences of excluding and silencing Christians who adhere to traditional biblical sexual ethics.

In reality, the originators of this Act are coming for churches’ theology, by cleverly repackaging it as “harmful ideology”. Nathan Despott, who was on the steering committee for the influential project “Preventing Harm, Promoting Justice: Responding to LGBT Conversion Therapy in Australia”, told a public hearing into Queensland’s Health Legislation Amendment Bill in February 2020:

When we think of what happens today … 99 per cent of the conversion practices we see happen in this realm of pastoral care … one of the major protective shields that the conservative communities hold up … is that the belief system that they have behind conversion practices is a theological religious belief system that is part of their religious freedom and religious right. Our opinion is that because it seems that Australian politics is quite hesitant to engage with anything to do with religious freedom … this idea of legislation and government delving into that theology is avoided. That is why we say it is not a theology; it is an ideology. It makes claims that are crossing the line and swimming out of their lane into claims that are actually psychological. They are pseudo-scientific.

The scandal of the Tavistock Clinic has shown that what is pseudo-scientific is mandating “affirmation”. What churches need to grasp is that this Act is not targeting their (alleged but unproven) “change and suppression practices”, but their theology of human sexuality and their pastoral care. The state is dictating to the Church what it can believe and how it must worship to stay out of legal trouble. Melbourne Anglican Diocese needs to approach this not simply as a legal compliance issue, but as a theological assault. The Change or Suppression Act is a blasphemy law in disguise, which is gunning for heteronormative theology.

Elizabeth Kendal, who is being excluded by Anglican subservience to this bad law, believes that the Victorian government has “overreached and is now violating the fundamental religious, professional and parental rights of Victorians”. The Bible teaches Christians to respect and submit to rulers, but submission is not absolute. Some unjust laws deserve to be opposed. Daniel kept praying to his God after King Darius ruled that prayer could only be to him. It was right to oppose, through civil disobedience, the racism of the Jim Crow laws in the US.

In the Australian Anglicans’ general code of conduct for ministry, Faithfulness in Service, clergy and church workers are told to obey the law unless this “is contrary to the Holy Scriptures, unjustly prohibits the practice of religion, or prohibits civil disobedience”. The Victorian Change or Suppression Act ticks all three boxes, yet the Melbourne Code of Conduct for Child Safety and Wellbeing declares that it overrides Faithfulness in Service, in effect prohibiting clergy and other church workers from exercising a conscientious objection to the Change or Suppression Act.

At this point, I still hold a “permission to officiate” in the Melbourne Anglican Diocese, and I have been contacted recently to renew the arrangement. However, like Elizabeth Kendal, I find myself unable to assent to 6.2(y), so cannot proceed with the renewal.

The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, has recently warned that the ability of Australians to “gather, speak freely, pray together and undertake works of service for others” is being reduced “slice by slice”. Over the past decade, Australians of faith have been challenged by a cascade of “progressive” state and federal laws that suppress religious freedoms in a number of creative ways. Will Christians wake up and grasp what it is at stake in this sustained assault on their freedoms? Are there some bold Christians left?

One of the lessons Elizabeth Kendal has taught us from decades researching religious persecution around the world is that when the state begins to clamp down on churches through legal repression, two things happen. First, many Christians comply, quietly letting go of their freedoms one by one, each loss softening them up for the next. Second, others choose to say “No”, but at a cost. They find themselves unable to continue as members of churches whose actions are “contrary to the Holy Scriptures”, who compliantly accept laws that “unjustly prohibit the practice of religion” and “prohibit civil disobedience”. This second group must find less-compliant churches, as long as they can be found, or they go underground. In this way, the state forces the conflict into the Church, by dividing it into compliant and non-compliant believers.

It is telling that Australia’s leading religious persecution researcher and activist, Elizabeth Kendal, has become the canary in the Anglican coalmine: a person of prayer who is no longer allowed to pray freely and openly in accordance with her beliefs and conscience in the church of her choice. This right has been taken away by her Church itself, in submission to an ever-encroaching state.

Mark Durie is a Senior Research Fellow at the Melbourne School of Theology.