Church & State Summit Piques Christian Political Revolution
The main auditorium of the huge Rhema Family Church building in Logan, Queensland is full of silently attentive followers of Jesus Christ, as the final panel event draws near a close. Six of the Church and State Summit speakers are gathered in a row of stools answering questions from the audience, and the energy is positively electric.
To the far stage left is Dr David van Gend, who has earlier today offered an impassioned and empirically damning case against Daniel Andrews’ proposal to make illegal the voluntary counselling and treatment of religious men and women who wish to overcome unwanted same-sex desire.
To his left is Marijke Rancie (better known as “Political Posting Mumma” on social media), who elicited a standing ovation after rallying the audience to war in defense of Christian values against the relentless hostility of the murderous radical left.
Next in line sits Member for Dawson George Christensen, who has just stunned us all with his uncanny impersonation of Sean Connery, but much more profoundly has emboldened the Christian community to stop apologising for believing that their moral convictions are not only objectively superior, but worthy of wanting the whole world to enjoy.
Professor Augusto Zimmerman sits to his right, and through his thick Brazilian accent and with a wry wit has this weekend highlighted the Christian axioms upon which British Common Law was founded, and the necessity for acceptance of a law-giving God for a legal system to remain truly just.
Further down is Dr Stephen Chavura who has sat with face in palm, brooding intensely until erupting in a sudden outburst of profundity when the panel is asked “what is truth” by one of the guests. Stephen earlier educated the summit guests on the origins and nature of Cultural Marxism, and its pernicious ascendancy in the West today.
Lastly, between Dr Chavura and Church and State Summit founder and director, Dave Pellowe, sits I. With no doctorate to my name and only a very short history as a public Christian voice, I must admit that I do feel somewhat out of my league. Who am I to be telling lifelong Christians how to enact their faith in the world? How did I get here?
I first came to know of Dave Pellowe when he invited me onto a panel discussion for his conservative Facebook show “The Heterodox”. Dave had heard my personal Christian testimony; how Jordan Peterson’s Biblical lecture series had reawakened my Christ-curiosity, and reconnected me with the faith of my childhood, leading me from an atheistic libertarian podcaster into a passionate Christian conservative evangelist (of sorts).
Dave later got me a gig speaking about the powers of alternative media for the NSW Branch of the Australian Conservatives at their conference in Sydney in 2018. I had the pleasure of speaking alongside Miranda Devine (who was also on the bill at this year’s Church and State) for Cory Bernardi’s gathering of concerned Aussie conservatives.
Later, Dave Pellowe invited me to introduce Stefan Molyneux (one of my personal heroes) at his event with Lauren Southern in Brisbane. Clearly, Dave saw something in me, so when he asked me to speak at the Church and State Summit, I gathered my courage (and allowed a little hubris to puff me up) and I ran with it
That original Heterodox panel was also my first contact with Political Posting Mumma, in which she and I butted heads somewhat on the question of legalisation of marijuana. Given that I was stoned at the time of that conversation, I do see now that some of my identity was being defended in my approach to the question, and given that Marijke was from a background of tremendous childhood substance abuse, something she did not want any other child to have to survive as she had, I now see that her dog in the fight was diametrically opposed to mine.
But at the Church and State Summit, Marijke and I (along with the rest of the speakers across the busy weekend) stood in solidarity in the call to arm our fellow Christians with the tools and knowledge to not only survive the current cultural storm, but to flourish and regain control of a world which has slipped into levels of degeneracy not seen since the final years of the Roman Empire, or Sodom and Gomorrah.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the last speakers at the event, which afforded me the opportunity to listen closely to the words and ideas of my colleagues. What I heard across the day delighted me. Christians were being told to stop apologising for their faith and their moral values. They were being asked to stand up and become politically engaged in a whole new way.
They were being rallied to bear witness to the infinite power and glory of their Lord Jesus Christ by speaking up against the unmatched evils of mass abortion, rampant communism, and the persecution of Christians that the world has always known, but is only beginning to rear its ugly head once more in our fair country of Australia; a country founded on Christian faith and virtue.
Each of the speakers were undoubtedly experts in their areas, and when my time came to offer my defense of Jesus against the common accusation of being a communist, I chose instead to focus on encouraging the audience in the room, and those who were streaming the event to their televisions and computers in real-time at home, to reconsider their very notion of truth.
Christians accept the somewhat elusive concept that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. My proposition was to view Jesus as the absolute (capital-T) Truth who resides in eternity, and certainly out of our cognitive reach, and to view all other (lower case t) truths as a journey, and not a destination.
In a world of Settled Science™ and “Current Year” political presumptions about how our society ought to function, and how our citizens ought to behave to avoid the shaming labels of “bigot”, “homophobe”, “racist”, “Nazi”, or (heaven forbid) “sky-fairy worshipper”, I think it’s high time that we stop making grand moral claims and bandying highfalutin proclamations of absolute truths as though they’re as self-evident as existence itself, and start asking the right questions.
Questions like: what will the world be like if Christians keep pretending that Islam and Judaism are perfectly culturally compatible with Christendom? Has there ever been an example in history of multiculturalism that didn’t end in dreadful conflict?
Does Jesus really want us Christians to sit down and shut up, while the achievements of Christendom like the abolition of slavery and the sanctification of all individuals are trampled by “Safe Schools” programs, normalisation of open-slather late-term abortion, or the enforced acceptance of same-sex marriage as though it is precisely the same in function and social outcome as traditional heterosexual marriage? While we may differ in our answers to these questions, should we not ask them at all?
The pursuits of truth and moral virtue are what make Western Civilisation (in my reasonably well-informed opinion) the pinnacle of human achievement thus far, and to ignore Christianity’s essential part in that is a great folly.
The 2019 Church and State Summit was not only close to double the size of the prior year, but it was so powerfully engaging from start to finish, so commanding of standing ovations and enthused expressions of gratitude from those who attended, that I suspect we will see it grow exponentially in the years to come. I also suspect it will become much more than an annual weekend of lectures, but rather a Christian revivalist movement that will create profound ripples in the Australian political landscape.
The fight has only just begun, but Dave Pellowe’s curation of this conversation, as well as his own rousing contributions throughout the weekend are to be commended, and to be watched closely.
After the 2019 Church and State Summit, I think Satan and all of his agents in the Australian political sphere have genuine cause for concern. The Christians are coming, and if history has proven one thing repeatedly in the last twenty centuries, its that there is no stopping Jesus Christ, the Lord and Creator of this Universe, and his army of devotees. Australia, you’ve been warned.
Find out more about next year’s Church and State Summit here: https://churchandstate.com.au
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