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The Rising Christian Right

May.9, 2022

The Separation of Church and State - Part 1 The Australian Constitution

The Separation of Church and State - Part 2 The Rising Christian Right

The Separation of Church and State - Part 3 Secularism

The Australian Christian Churches (ACC), formerly Assemblies of God in Australia, is a network of Pentecostal churches in Australia affiliated with the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, which is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world.

The 'vision' of an ACC member based in Queensland, Church And State Ministry, is "to raise up Christians in every electorate to intentionally influence culture as Jesus would in our place - without blind loyalty to any politician or party but guided by a firm foundation on God's Word."

On the Church and State website, under the heading Arming Christians, the following statements appear:

Our nation needs the Church, the Ekklesia, to be salt (adding distinct flavour) and light (dispelling darkness) in the ongoing formation of our society's culture, institutions & legislative bodies.

Church And State encourages the Body of Christ in this historic mission. It's for every Believer who wants to better understand the times and be more effective in practically loving our neighbours through public policy: politics.

This nondenominational ministry is also nonpartisan, carefully teaching wisdom found in Scripture on how to approach important public issues & influence for good & just outcomes.

The Church and State website encourages regular financial donations (tithes) to assist their cause along with 'Direct Deposit Account Details':

Our nation needs a Gospel-based moral and cultural revolution.

Your one-off, weekly or monthly financial partnership helps the year-round activities & other initiatives of Church And State to equip Christians to hear preaching & teaching they've often never heard before, to get off the sidelines and intervene in issues that matter to their neighbours.

(Church and State. https://www.churchandstate.com.au/partner/ accessed 25 April 2022)

The political strategies encouraged by Church and State include:

Genuinely become an undecided voter.

This isn't hard. Just determine that instead of being on any side and giving any political party or politician your blind loyalty, you'll give your allegiance to Jesus only (even if you're a party member), and with an open Bible and sincere heart you'll prayerfully consider which candidate best represents the values of His Kingdom: justice, wisdom, Truth & freedom.

Church and State outline the...

"three easy steps praying Christians can take to powerfully promote God's kind of justice and wisdom in government."

The most important step!

It's not enough to find a good candidate and send them out to fight alone. They need an army behind them willing to back them if they are to have the courage to fight the big, important battles. That's our job. Together, we supply or withhold from politicians the imprimatur: the authority to speak what may be unpopular. You can be certain that many good politicians have been unable to hold the line when left to fight alone.

When you find the best candidate, you should also offer to donate what you can to their election campaign, as well as your front yard fence for their election sign. You have to go and vote, so volunteer in advance to stick around for a few hours and help handout flyers which will help other people to vote for who you’ve sincerely discovered to be the best candidate for the job.

Now if just 1,000 praying Christians in every electorate make this offer when emailing every candidate in the first place, every candidate will have the offer of...

1,000 new sign locations
1,000 new campaign donors
1,000 pre-polling or election day volunteers

Anyone who's worked in an election campaign knows that those three things are usually in rare supply. Politicians also know that for everyone prepared to write and ask about those deal-breaker justice issues there's probably 10 or 20 people who feel the same but can't be bothered writing. Add 10,000 - 20,000 votes to the chance of 1,000 signs, donors & volunteers, and that's a lot of pressure to do the right thing!

(From https://www.churchandstate.com.au/help/ accessed 22/04/2022)

Adelaide Case Study

Parishioners at one Adelaide Pentecostal church - Southland Church in Pasadena - held a service late last month attended by four senior Liberal MPs, including the local member Carolyn Power.

During the service, pastor Rob Norman told the congregation it was their "mission" to become party members to help block contentious 'anti-Life' legislation such as the recent abortion and voluntary euthanasia Bills.

"It's really simple - if Christians joined political parties many of these Bills would not even make it into parliament," Norman told the gathering.

(Richardson T. The Conservative Correction... Pentecostal insurgence.InDaily. 9 June 2021)

Purge of the Pentecostals-:

In June 2021, the South Australian Liberal Party terminated the membership of 150 Pentecostal Christians and has asked 400 more recently signed up members to show cause as to why they shouldn't be "turfed out as well."

The purge comes after more than 500 people signed up to join the SA Liberals earlier this year. This seemingly coordinated infiltration is significant as the total state branch membership is around 5,000. And it's been perceived as an attempt to sway policy in line with faith doctrine.

Conservative Liberal MPs requested last week that acting PM Josh Frydenberg step in and call a halt to the action, claiming it was an attack on religious freedoms, which will certainly add fuel to the attempt of Pentecostal PM Scott Morrison to see religious privileges enshrined in law.

However, senior SA Liberal, [Federal] Senator Simon Birmingham, has defended the move. The moderate said that he's aware of allegations that the suspended members were planning to campaign against endorsed candidates for the next election, while some didn't even support the party.

The infiltration of the SA Liberal Party by Pentecostal Christians isn't an isolated matter. At the Brisbane Church and State Summit held in February conservative members of the Christian faith met to discuss, amongst other things, how to gain more political clout in this country.

During the conference, Liberal Nationals MP George Christensen suggested that getting more Christians into the ranks of the Coalition would shift its direction, and the smart way to go about doing this would be to conceal some of their agenda until they're in power.

"Politics is all about numbers," the conservative member for Queensland was quoted as saying. "The more people that you have in that broad church that are from the conservative Christian wing the more it's going to lean in that direction."

The Christian Right has been on the rise since the passing of marriage equality laws in December 2017. And those at the summit further discussed that targeting transgender people was a prime way for them to pushback against the LGBTIQ rights movement.

Having abstained from the marriage equality vote in late 2017, he [Morrison] appeared in the press a fortnight later, then as treasurer, to announce he was pushing for greater religious protections in law.

By September 2019, this had transpired into the release of the first draft of the Religious Discrimination Bill, which purports to protect those of faith from biased treatment, while it actually seeks to bestow upon them the right to discriminate against others in the name of their faith.

Newly minted Federal Attorney General, Michaelia Cash, has recently indicated that her office is busy drafting a new version of the contentious bill, which has placed the religious freedoms debate firmly on the agenda for the next federal election. [Cash attended the Iona Catholic College and is a member of the National Right or 'Hard Right' faction of the Liberal Party]

The type of laws proposed in the bill could likely be used against the SA Liberals in relation to their recent dismissal of new members on the basis that those thrown out could claim to have been purged due to their Christian faith, rather than the political agenda they'd brought to the table.

(Gregoire, P. SA Liberals conduct purge of Pentecostalists after the infiltration of party ranks. Sydney Criminal Lawyers. 25 June 2021)

After becoming Prime Minister, Scott Morrison named religious freedom protections through a Religious Discrimination Bill as one of his first priorities. The LNP Federal Government's three attempts thus far to get the laws passed have failed.

The faithful were given more protection than any other group in Australia, giving them almost unfettered ability to make discriminatory statements. Human rights and LGBTIQ groups were worried it could legitimise discriminatory, homophobic behaviour and undermine efforts towards workplace inclusivity. Even the Institute of Public Affairs [conservative public policy think tank] hated it for blurring the distinction between church and state.

Napier-Raman K. Cash backs religious discrimination laws. Crikey. 17 June 2021)

The Separation of Church and State is in Peril

In 2020, Christian Brown, wrote the following in his article, Australia's Traditional Separation of Church and State is in Peril:

The Prime Minister can shift ground on almost any issue, I'd argue, with conviction, because his Pentecostal faith teaches him that, as a believer, God is always on his side.

One must understand that Morrison's distinctive, rather extremist religion stands outside the traditions of even evangelical Western Christianity. Pentecostalism has been likened to a cult; Australia is dealing with a faith that puts primary emphasis on the direct and transformational experience of what its adherents call "the Holy Spirit" over more traditional understandings of belief or faith.

In the viewpoint of this sect, God is in supreme control of what happens on Earth and man's intentions mean very little. This helps to explain Pentecostal disregard towards the urgency of climate change. While Pentecostals focus on the battle between good and evil, their certaintainty that all is in God's hands, allows them to remain oblivious to the innate harm to life from global warming.

Pentecostalists' lack of interest in climate change correlates with their belief that the End of Times is near, and that paradise will be attainable for believers, at whatever cost on earth. Pentecostals actively look forward to Christ's imminent return. This viewpoint allows for a laissez-faire attitude when mere earth burns up and mere animals perish.

(Brown C. Daily Clout. 14 February 2020)

Seven Mountain Mandate

In April 2021, Crikey's David Hardaker noted the following:

Scott Morrison's address to the Australian Christian Churches (ACC) gathering on the Gold Coast last week began with a roll call of Christian influence on the government.

The Seven Mountains (sic) mandate is a little-known Christian movement that aims to wield influence in seven key areas of society.

The seven key sectors are:
education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment, and finally media.

Those who follow the Seven Mountains mandate believe that "before Christ can return" the church must take control of these seven spheres for the glory of Christ. Once the world has been made subject to the kingdom of God, Jesus will return and rule the world. That's how vital it is to get control.

Having Pentecostal Scott Morrison in the Lodge made him "the pin-up boy globally" of the mandate claims Pastor Bob Cotton - a sceptic of the thrusting political power of the ACC and the brand of "prosperity Christianity" it represents.

"The bible doesn't teach this stuff," Cotton told Crikey. "It's false but it works on people who are gullible."

The Seven Mountains mandate operates in some ways like a secret society. If you know the code then you're in the know. And then you're in.

One example is an annual gathering called the "Church and State Summit", which brings together prominent figures from politics, business, the media and academia.

The logo for the 2021 summit's website is a discreet graphic of seven mountain peaks which, according to Cotton, is "unmistakably" a Seven Mountains mandate symbol.

In 2019, Murdoch columnist Miranda Devine and Queensland Senator Amanda Stoker were listed as speakers.

Speakers at the 2020 conference included [Liberal] Senator Eric Abetz, Queensland LNP state MP Fiona Simpson, and Dave Hodgson, Hodgson is a former special forces commando and born-again founder of the Paladin group of companies valued in excess of $1 billion.

According to his bio, Hodgson is a "highly sought-after speaker at global summits and churches all over the world" who teaches how he learnt to do God's will, God's way, "resulting in a meteoric rise from $76,000 credit card debt to a $100 million business in 31 months".

Speakers at the 2021 summit included Cardinal George Pell, Australian Christian Lobby head - Martyn Iles, and [National] Senator Matt Canavan and [controversial] National Party MP, George Christensen in 2022.

A driving force behind the Seven Mountains movement is a US Pentecostal televangelist called Kenneth Copeland, who also has a major presence in Australia via the Kenneth Copeland Ministries in Mansfield, Queensland.

(Hardaker, D. Scott Morrison and the Seven Mountains mandate. How the PM is changing Australia in God's name. 27 April 2021.)

The Prayer Room

In March 2021, Samantha Dick of The New Daily reported on the controversy surrounding the use of the prayer room at Parliament House, Canberra, to 'engage in sex':

"Political staffers have held a sit-in in the Parliament House room where employees allegedly have sex during work hours, saying the building is a "disgusting" place for women to work.

A Channel 10 report on Monday alleged Coalition staffers took photos of their genitalia inside the parliament offices of their politician bosses, as well as airing claims staffers regularly brought sex workers inside the building for their MPs.

As revealed by The New Daily, calls went out on private social media groups for staffers to "occupy" the prayer room, which has been used - according to long-standing parliamentary gossip - by employees to engage in sex.

Two dozen staff - women and men - from Labor and the Greens attended, calling for urgent reform in making parliament safer and more comfortable for women. They were there for a short period before returning to work."

(Dick, S. Parliament staff on strike over safety... 23 March 2021)

Michelle Pini, Independent Australia Editor, reported further on the extent to which sexual depravity had spread within the Liberal Party and Parliament House.

"And then, just in case anyone had any doubts about the level of misogyny within the Liberal Party, former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop confirmed the existence of a boys' club, first alluded to by former Liberal MP Dr Sharman Stone.

Not the kind of club that plays golf or attends the footy without inviting female co-workers, though they may also do those things. This is a club made up of men - grown men, elected officials - who like to call themselves the "big swinging dicks". A club that existed, or still exists, in order for members to bully their female co-workers and keep them away from positions to which they believe only men are entitled."

(Pini, M. Big swinging dicks and the rule of law. 11 March 2021)

A Parliament House 'insider' came forward under the condition of anonymity to tell Channel 10's Political Editor - Peter van Onselen the following:

"Government staffers and even MPs would also often use a small room on the upper level of Parliament House - known as the prayer or meditation room - as a place to have "a lot" of sex.

"I can probably say there is very little meditation or prayer going on in that room," said Tom, confirming that he himself has used the room for that purpose.

Tom also revealed that he knew of female and male sex workers being brought into the building "for the pleasure of Coalition MPs".

He said, "a considerable amount of conservative staffers" were engaging in the acts."

(from Brown, N. Images show senior government staff performing sex acts at Parliament House. news.com. 23 March 2021)

Researched, compiled, composed, written and edited by Dr Steve Gration, April 2022.

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The Separation of Church and State - Part 1 The Australian Constitution

The Separation of Church and State - Part 2 The Rising Christian Right

The Separation of Church and State - Part 3 Secularism