Is it riskier to be Christian in Australia today?

Millions of Christians across Australia are being forced to keep their religious beliefs secret despite society “championing” other religions, according to Australia’s first comprehensive audit of Christian freedom.

The Australian Christian Freedom Index report benchmarks legal, institutional, social and cultural pressures on Christians in 2026.

Its survey of 10,808 Christians found an overwhelming majority (92%) saying it is riskier to identify as a Christian in Australia today, than it was five years ago.

Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) CEO Michelle Pearse who is one of 11 co-authors, revealed 73% of Christians felt pressured to keep their religious beliefs private at work, online and in public.

“Christians are self-censoring, their freedoms are being eroded”

The ACL boss declared that in Australia, Christian beliefs underpin our values, our democracy, our way of life and Christians should not be discriminated against, persecuted or made to hide their faith.

But they are.

“Nearly half (43.9%) of all Australians are Christians who find themselves living in a country where they are self-censoring, where institutions don’t feel protected, and our freedom of religion and speech are being eroded,” Ms. Pearse observed.

The report which analysed documented cases of persecution and scores of Acts of Parliament from nine jursidictions, was launched at a breakfast at Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday May 28, with cross-party MPs and church leaders among those receiving a hand-signed copy.

Seven of the report’s 11 authors addressed the event.

“Prayer is criminalised, sermons attract vilification complaints”

According to the 108-page report, laws and regulations about healthcare referral mandates for euthanasia and abortion; rules and regulations about teaching and praying about sexuality; and vilification laws, have all contributed to a worsening environment for Christians.

It ranks Victoria as the most restrictive state in the country for Christians followed in order by the ACT, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

Western Australia was the least restrictive.

Pastoral conversations and certain forms of prayer are now criminalised under Victoria’s conversion practices legislation; sermons on Biblical sexuality can attract vilification complaints; and Christian schools face narrowed hiring exemptions.

“74 Acts of Parliament restrict Christian freedoms”

Human Rights Law Alliance Principal Lawyer and report co-author John Steenhof said a legislative audit found 74 Acts restricting Christian freedoms introduced in the past 25 years.

Almost half of them in the past five years.

“Legislative overreach has tripled in the past five years, and the Index reports more than 40 cases of discrimination and persecution of Christians across Australia,” Mr. Steenhof said.

“Workplaces are among the most high-risk [environments] with education and healthcare the most pressured sectors.”

“Public servants are sanctioned for their faith, HR depts are weaponised”

“We’re seeing public servants being sanctioned because of their beliefs and HR departments being weaponised to remove Christians from the workplace,” Ms. Pearse reported..

“We heard one story of a lady who wears a crucifix to work.”

“She was told by the leadership in her workplace that it was disrespectful for her to wear the crucifix when there were Muslims in the workplace.”

“The Muslims were allowed to wear the hijab, but she was confronted about wearing the cross.”

“Inclusivity stops at the point of including Christians”

“As a society, we champion tolerance and inclusivity as the greatest of values, but what’s come through clearly in this report is that Christian belief is not tolerated.”

“Inclusivity stops at the point of including Christians,” Michelle Pearse asserted.

A majority (92%) of Christians surveyed said hospitals and healthcare workers were restricted or not free to operate according to their beliefs.

Religious freedom is “being plundered” amid attempts to remove faith from public square

“The right to religious freedom is being plundered in Australia,” said Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney Anthony Percy.

“This Index lays the ground for some rearguard action.”

Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher said the Index brought to light “recent attempts to minimise the role of faith in everyday life and exclude it altogether from the public square.”

Former Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Glenn Davies said the report “carefully analyses the erosion of freedoms in our country over 40 years or more,” and called on parliamentarians and religious leaders to read it.

What action the report recommends

The Index makes 42 recommendations including a Register to document anti-Christian incidents.

Other recommendations include restoring religious hiring exemptions for faith-based schools and institutions across all jurisdictions, and ending compelled participation in abortion and voluntary assisted dying for healthcare workers and institutions with conscientious objections.

The report identified six primary drivers of discrimination against Australian Christians — four external, two internal.

Drivers of anti-Christian discrimination

• Secular progressivism has recast Biblically orthodox belief as social harm
• An expanding state apparatus has given that moral vision legal teeth
• The combined effect is a legal asymmetry in which religious freedom rests on narrow exemptions that can be litigated away or later repealed
• Islamist extremism as documented in the high-profile 2024 stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel
• Doctrinal drift where institutions accommodate secular-progressive values at the cost of legal protection for those who will not
• Misplaced meekness: The belief that Christian humility requires silence in the face of injustice.

The Index is an initiative of the Canberra Declaration which produced it with the support of the Australian Christian Lobby, FamilyVoice Australia, the Human Rights Law Alliance, CitizenGo and the Australian Family Coalition.

It will be published annually.

Article supplied with thanks to Vision Christian Media – a non-profit, follower-funded Christian media ministry taking God’s Word to every corner of Australia and beyond through broadcast, online and print media.

Feature image: Canva

So a Canadian pastor got in touch with me a few days ago to say that he’d discovered my blog (always nice), and that he liked what I wrote (even nicer), and that it rang true for the Canadian scene as well (nicest of all!).

What “rang true”? Well many things, but increasingly the post-Christian frame in which a younger generation of never-churched people, with zero understanding of the Christian faith, are the new norm.

The technical term for not knowing that you don’t know something, is “unconscious incompetence”.  We move from not knowing that we don’t know, to knowing that we don’t know (conscious incompetence), to knowing that we know (conscious competence), to the final stage of “unconscious competence” where the thing is almost second nature to us. If you still don’t get it, recall the stages for how you learned to ride a bicycle.

When it comes to many things political and cultural, Canada and Australia have similar trajectories. And that means when it comes to Christianity many people – especially many younger people – are in the unconscious incompetence stage, they don’t know that they don’t know.

How are we like Canada here in Australia?  For one, like Canada, Australia is decidedly not the USA, even though many of us take reference points (rightly and wrongly) from the States.

But secondly, the progressive agenda that is antithetical to the Christian understanding of what it means to be human that Canada experiences (witness its huge uptick in euthanasia and the slackening of its boundaries) is also similar to ours in Australia.

And what about the big questions: What is a human? What is a human for? Who is a human for?  The whole anthropological tool-kit that the Christian frame gifted to the world is missing many of its tools in Canada and Australia. Meanwhile many of the tools that remain are mis-used for purposes the Christian frame did not intend. Read Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe.

We have moved well beyond assuming that Christianity gave the West a framework that secularism can take from here on in. We have moved to a point that we are becoming completely ignorant about the faith.

What were some of the signs for this pastor? Well he dropped some examples:

The pizza delivery guy who asked me what that giant “t” in the parking lot stood for. Then my wife and I were out for dinner recently, and I noticed a gold crucifix around the neck of our server. I tried to strike up conversation with the roughly 20 year-old young lady: “Thats a lovely crucifix!” I remarked. The server was a bit baffled but polite. “Thank you…what is? What’s lovely?”, she asked.  “The cross…your necklace” “Oh!” She replied, “This?” I asked her what it meant to her, or what the man on it meant to her. She sort of blushed and just responded “I just bought it because I thought it was pretty.”

The big “t”!

“it was pretty!”

That’s wild eh? Well it’s wild for us marinated in the faith and who are equally ignorant about niche anime movements emanating from South Korea (though some of you may be unconsciously competent about such matters!).

How far has the gospel imagination left our culture, that the very instrument of torture that Jesus died upon, and which was famously lampooned in the celebrated Alexamanos graffito, should be so devoid of meaning to a post-Christian?

How little do the artefacts of Christianity bear any weight to modern young people that they should buy our most precious artefact because it was pretty to them.  Or that, with no guile, they should  ask why the lower-case letter “t” is placed upon a roof?

We’ve certainly come a long way since crucifixion was a no-go subject in polite Roman society. Now this Canadian pastor, living as he does in a more urban area, knows that such unconscious incompetence is not the norm everywhere, and is less likely to occur in the “prairie” towns (the equivalent I guess of our Bible Belts and smaller, conservative regionals). But it’s a thing!

With the increasing urbanisation of our young populations, it will also become a growing thing. But here’s another thing: this unconscious incompetence has an upside to it.  And I hope as people involved in – or at least interested in – Christian ministry, you can see it.

For just as the Quiet Revival has brought a trickle of “never churched” back to churches in the UK (and seen a corresponding jump in what we can call ‘full-fat-faith” rather than the lame, liberal offerings of the past thirty years), so too elsewhere.

And indeed, there’s something kinda cute and worthy of a gentle giggle (if eternity were not at stake), in what this Canadian pastor went on to tell me.  Here are some of his examples about how this “unconscious competence” – or what he calls in a less pejorative way “holy naivete” is doing in his part of Canada:

The University student who live-streamed her workout run to visit a church for the first time in her life, literally jogging into our lobby to try church.

Whole atheist families who through some realized but previously-unknown threshold for progressivism show up en-masse to convert to that which they barely understand.

The Wiccan woman who decides her whole family ought to convert to Christianity, shows up, front row, every week. Comes to saving knowledge and trust in Christ. Next thing you know she’s bringing complete strangers from Facebook Marketplace to church each week, because she’s trading her expensive occult supplies for church visits. 

That last anecdote is almost a mirror of Acts 19, where Paul brings the gospel to Ephesus, resulting in ignorance and superstition being evicted from the lives of so many. And like that Wiccan woman, the new converts in Ephesus burned their expensive magic books.

This Canadian pastor finishes with this:

It’s astounding how genuinely white the fields are for harvest, but the direction of the flow is so contrary to what we were ever told to expect in the West.

Yep. Something is definitely happening. And he’s right – so much of it has gone against the grain of how we thought we might reach the West again.   But that’s probably how God works, right? And we don’t want to overplay it and say that we are seeing wholesale revival.

The cloud on the horizon may only look like the size of a man’s fist. It could come and shower us in the West with revival’s refreshing rains, or it could dissipate altogether. But events in the world in recent years have pushed people to ask serious questions.

I believe that this was brewing just before COVID, and then the sheer scale of that event, the anguish and anger, and the deep politicisation it induced, moved things along rapidly. But we’ve also had the murder of an outspoken young Christian man, who for all the politics you don’t agree with, have a cheerful naivete about sharing the guts of the gospel to hostile crowds.

My mum told me just last week that a woman in her fifties turned up at mum’s tiny reformed, ageing, Baptist church after the Charle Kirk assassination. Turns out this woman has been going around the local churches in the weeks after that event, wondering if there is something to Christianity after all.

For those of you who didn’t like Charlie Kirk, then at least be like Paul in prison writing to the Philippians and rejoice that the gospel was preached whether for good intent or bad intent. If you can’t do that, then you may be more politicised and partisan than you care to admit.

So that’s unconscious incompetence.  That big “t” on your roof. That “pretty” pendant around someone’s neck. That Wiccan who suddenly realises there is a power beyond the dark arts that can liberate her. That fifty something Aussie woman suddenly wondering whether Christianity is real. Perhaps we should not be surprised though.   Isn’t this what we read in the Scriptures?

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:3-6)

Moving from unconscious competence is not a graft, it’s a gift!  Shifting from not knowing that you don’t know, to knowing, is about God’s gospel work. Always was. Always is. Always will be.

As the late Tim Keller would put it, “No one becomes a Christian, until they do.”  And when they do, they move from asking “What’s that big “t” on your roof?” to praising and glorifying God for what that big “t” has achieved for the cosmos.

Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine

About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. A former church pastor, he now trains church and ministry leaders, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture.

Feature image: Canva

In a targeted effort to help everyday Christians share their faith, CV (Christian Vision) has launched its new ‘yesHEis’ app.

The app, which drops on Monday, March 31, is a suite of practical tools, training resources, and interactive challenges, all designed to help believers in their evangelism efforts.

Features include a personal ‘evangelism tracker’, and a global map that displays evangelistic activity within the yesHEis community in real time. This map not only allows users to see their impact but also serves as a source of motivation – reminding them that they are part of a global movement.

Helping Believers Share Faith Confidently

YesHEis product manager, Frankie du Toit (pictured), said the vision of the app and its parent organisation was to help believers be intentional about evangelism.

“yesHEis is providing Christians with everything they need to make sharing Jesus a lifestyle,” he said. “Christians should feel inspired and be reminded every day that their actions are part of a larger movement. Through the app, we want to encourage them and support them, to stay motivated as they develop a lifestyle of evangelism.”

About CV and yesHEis

CV is a global ministry that exists to introduce people to Jesus, using a mix of broadcast media and emerging digital tech, with a history of innovating to reach new audiences. Their ‘yesHEis’ initiative is focussed on motivating and resourcing Christians to share their faith with confidence. They have almost 5 million followers across multi-language social media platforms.

To learn more, visit yesHEis on any major social media platform, head to the website (yesheis.com), or download the yesHEis app on the App Store or Google Play.

Article supplied with thanks to Christian Media & Arts Australia.

Feature image:  Unsplash