Folau, Folly and Football

Izzy and his wife put on a smile, walked away with a settlement, but his Australian career is over. Raelene Castle put on a brave face, but it’s a backdown of epic, and expensive, proportions for Rugby Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter FitzSimon’s put on a hissy fit, outraged that “gibberish” from the Bible was rewarded. The Australian Christian Lobby put on a party, but what was going to be a test case for religious freedoms has proven to be a damp squib.

Nothing has truly been resolved in what was one of the most divisive, and possibly most revealing cultural episodes in recent Australian history. You can say what you like about religion being a private affair, but in a great irony, as less and less people attend church, religion is more and more on the front pages.

At the same time the Folau affair was playing out the Federal Government, led by a very public Pentecostal, has dropped the ball with the proposed religious freedoms legislation it was looking to put to Parliament, with claims and counterclaims from all sides that it wasn’t clear, wasn’t liked and wasn’t going to pass.

How are we going to live with our deepest differences? Not everyone is religious. Many are. Not everyone wants to speak publicly about what religion says around sexuality, but some do. Whose rights trump whose? Are our freedoms to express ourselves, though many might disagree or be horrified, more important than the freedoms of others who do not wish to be spoken of in certain ways? After the Izzy affair we are none the wiser.

Writing for the ABC journalist and sports presenter, Mary Gearin, said this:

But while the end of the Folau Fiasco is an important line in the sand, all of these issues for rugby are still unresolved. The rifts are real and the challenge is huge. Meanwhile, the high ground it took with Folau will stay untested in the public domain.

It’s that last thing that is notable. Everything is still “untested in the public domain”. This Izzy issue became that important because it was going to be a test case for whatever else came next in the increasingly difficult relationship between the secular and the sacred. Most people were wishing for an outcome that was clearer one way or the other. As it is we’ve got to wait for the next thing, whatever that is. What it is, we don’t know, but that it will come, we can be sure. There will be a religious issue in the public square that will be a direct throw down to business or politics or education or law. And then it will be on again.

Christian blogger Murray Campbell summed it up well with a post headed This isn’t the final word. Campbell observes:

Part of the reason behind this legal mess is because Australian law was not framed to deal with a culture that turns against the very belief system which provided its societal and legal foundations. Like a game of Jenga, you can only remove so many blocks before the entire structure comes crashing down. Of course, that hasn’t happened as yet, but that’s part of [the] complexity facing many Western cultures today. How do we remove Christianity without destroying the very fabric upon which our culture depends?

And it isn’t just Christians saying that. Celebrated atheist writers such as Douglas Murray and Tom Holland are concerned that the West is throwing away its Christian foundations, or at least despising them, without realising how important they are.

And it’s pertinent in the Izzy situation, but increasingly more so the further down the line these matters go, that we are a culture that no longer knows how to do forgiveness. We don’t know how to deal with the hurts and angers caused by others. In his most recent book, The Madness of Crowds, Murray laments:

We live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption. We do not know who could offer it, who could accept it, and whether it is a desirable quality compared to an endless cycle of fiery certainty and denunciation.

Yes, that’s the world we live in. I recently spoke with a religious worker who presents seminars in high schools, and I asked her the top three concerns that students have. Number one; issues around identity. Number two; issues around meaning and purpose. No surprises there. But number three? Forgiveness! Students identified completely with what Murray was saying. They feared that if they fell foul of something or someone, there was no way back. It would be a bottomless fall. And that terrifies them.

The Christian faith says that we do know who could offer forgiveness, we do know who could accept it, and if the Izzy saga is any indication, it would be a whole lot better to pitch our lot with Him, than with the endless cycle of fiery certainty and denunciation we are experiencing. A cycle, I fear, we are set to repeat, whenever the next Izzy gallops in from across the horizon of this wide brown secular land.

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