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Mark Twain has had many quotes attributed to him, but surely one of the most insightful is that ‘No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.’ Australia at the moment is facing a plethora of religious freedom bills, equality bills, conversion ban bills, and any number of other attempts to defy God and institutionalize the wisdom of the world. Of course, they are not presented as dangerous overreaches; they never are.

The American ‘Example’?

The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 asserted: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ This was signed by 56 delegates from the thirteen colonies, but the driving force behind the document was Thomas Jefferson. Augustine might have called it ‘so much smoke and wind’, while George Orwell referred to political speech as ‘euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness’ – ‘humbug’ for short.

Jefferson wrote of the unalienable right of liberty while over his lifetime he owned 600 slaves, of which he released two. Perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt might attract us more with his 1941 speech on the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Yet it is not just Neo-Nazis and Neo-Marxists who trample on these freedoms. Modern liberal democracies are armed with an anti-discrimination approach to justice, underpinned by no discernible view of morality. Rather than working through the separate bills, let us make general points to cover the general approach.

Freedom is not the gift of governments

The time to be very afraid comes when governments graciously confer gifts on believers. It is God who sets us free in Christ (Gal.5:1), and who declares that ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29). Political machinations in parliaments do not do this. If governments manage to build bridges that can support traffic, we ought to be grateful.

There are competing freedoms in life

 In the Christian view, the freedom to sin is a bogus freedom, and is actually a form of bondage (John 8:35-36; 2 Pet.2:19). Augustine of Hippo called it ‘a truant’s freedom’. To curb any opposition to puberty blockers, for example, is not to expand freedom, but to constrict it. It is to be directed not by science nor reason nor faith nor any coherent system of morality, but by the loudest voice in the public square. The latest fad wins.

There are real limits as to what laws can achieve

The Soviet constitution of 1936, issued under Josef Stalin, guaranteed the right of all citizens to scientific, technical and artistic work. What it neglected to add was that not the slightest criticism of the Soviet dictator was permitted. An artist who wrote a novel dealing with life in the Gulag could not expect a medal for his contribution to the socialist utopia. Solzhenitsyn could write about the Gulag because he spent eight years in it.

Modern Western societies are burdened with over-bureaucratization

Those who are in any way optimistic about what laws and governments can achieve will flood society with bureaucrats to carry out their dreams. However, too often the result is more laws, but less justice; more legalese and more confusion. Only bureaucrats and unelected tribunals will find plenty to do in their spare time.

Law today is driven more by culture than by any sense of universal justice

The law still dresses itself up, on occasions at least, in the language of justice, and other appealing appellations like diversity, equity and inclusion, but in reality it is increasingly downstream from culture – which is where dead fish end out. Diversity is proclaimed, but conformity achieved. Freedom is the stated goal, but the strangulation of thought is the result. Law is central, but it is lawyers who benefit. Tolerance makes us what we are, but dissidents are not tolerated. Anybody who adheres to a system of universal morality – such as the Ten Commandments – is likely to be seen as linked to hate speech and coercion. That person is then subject to hate speech and coercion.

We have blown our own trumpets to bring down the walls of our own Jericho. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned: ‘Where there is no shared morality, there is no society.’ The notion that anti-discrimination laws will bring Australians together is a fantasy of the first order. Castles in the air crash.

– Peter Barnes