of liars and leaders

The year I was sixteen, my church had an Easter church camp. The theme of the camp was that We Would Face Oppression And Resistance As Christians. It's a reliable Evangelical theme, both then and now.

That camp, we got confronted by it quite directly.

At the Saturday night event, usually only filled with teenagers from 12 to 18, their over-18 leaders (up to about age 27, maybe), and maybe four adults/parents who were there to keep an eye on everything, a stranger walked into the event and started demanding to know why we believed. What was this Jesus thing all about anyway? How could we follow this thing so blindly? He was escorted out, and the evening started to go on but ground to a halt as the leaders realised that the teenagers were mostly too traumatised to continue. The evening was disrupted, and we were sent back to the main hall while the leaders conferred about what to do next.

About half an hour later, we were called back in and a handful of the leaders confessed: the stranger was a plant. Someone that they knew from their university Christian groups who'd agreed to be the 'challenger' to a bunch of sheltered, conservative teenagers of Asian background and Australian birth about the realities of the Christian life.

Most of us accepted this, I think. I don't remember much about my thoughts and feelings, except that it seemed like a reasonable idea that had gone way out of control. Also, some of the younger girls in my cabins - 12 and 13 years old - were rather traumatised by the sudden prospect of confrontation. One was really close to the guy when he stopped in the centre aisle to castigate the leaders, and she was trembling. These are kids from Sydney's North Shore, young and protected, upper-class, private school kids brought up in a Christian environment among family and friends. They've never known hardship or struggle or oppression - and money and status and power insulate us from those things, too.

She was struggling a lot, so we had one of the female leaders sitting on the bed and talking with her, with many of the other younger girls who were still struggling to process. This leader hadn't been part of the plan. In fact, her boyfriend - a grown man of thirty - had twigged that the challenger was someone from a university Christian group back in his day, and gone after the group of leaders who'd escorted him out to reason with him, only to find out that it was all a show. A performance with the intention of 'showing us how it really was'.

He was furious at the deception.

When I ventured that the leaders had our best interests at heart - preparing us for the world - though, John shook his head. "Selina," he said, "God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom."

God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom.

I don't know if John remembers saying that, but it has stuck with me for nearly thirty years.

What does this thirty-year old memory have to do with the now?

Simple.

Scott Morrison is a liar.

He may be a Christian, but he is also an inveterate liar. He takes no true responsibility. He bears no true burden of leadership. What he can deflect to someone else, he will. What he can obfuscate and deny, he does. He may very well be saved by the blood of Jesus, but he is a terrible ambassador for Christ in the political arena because he is not a man of honour and decency. He is the Aaron Burr of our times: "talk less, smirk more, don't tell them straight what you're against or what you're for..."

And Australian Christians are voting for Morrison and his party out of fear.

All the ranking church people I know in my denomination are behind the Liberal Party of Australia. For gender certainty. For religious discrimination. For 'decency' and 'uprightness' and 'a godly society'. To keep our society from 'falling to godlessness', to maintain our privileged standing in educational institutions and charitable institutions, because God's way is the correct way and this gives us the right to demand that other people listen to us and put up with us and don't question us and our methods...

The lies and falsehoods and squirrel statements that the leaders of the Liberal Party make? All in the service of God. All in the flourishing of the Christian faith.

All in the undercutting of Christian witness.

God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom.