A pistol was fired on a battlefield protected by bazookas.
In an age where gay is now okay, lumping homosexuality with paedophilia and bestiality in a list of sexual sins in a school enrolment contract struck a discordant note.
That and the go-it-alone strategy is what shocked when news broke of Citipointe Christian College’s well-intentioned plan to shore-up its Christian ethos in the context of hostile cultural forces.
The media pile-on was swift, vicious and is on-going.
Christian leaders will no doubt have their opinions about the wisdom and strategy of what was done.
Why did one school from one Christian movement charge the machine guns on its own? This and other questions need to be answered – and I offer this humbly as someone who carries the wounds of machine gun bullets from lone runs at their nests.
Even getting the nuance right far from guarantees immunity from attack, but that doesn’t mean we should not try.
The main problem though is that for too long Christian leaders have avoided the culture wars and eschewed politics.
They have also avoided the Biblical injunction to live together in unity, preferring to work in silos.
But not being interested in politics is no longer viable because politics is now very interested in the teachings of the Christian religion.
Not working in unity is no longer viable, as we are getting picked off.
Sadly, I’m not aware of any Christian leader speaking out in support of Citipointe, except the Australian Christian Lobby’s Martyn Iles.
None of us get strategy right all the time, but we all need solidarity, even when we make mistakes.
Scott Morrison and his education minister sided with the culture, not with the Christians, leaving us politically exposed.
The new sexual politics, promoted by the Greens, Labor and the “modern Liberals” and which Morrison defended yesterday, doesn’t like the idea that children should be encouraged to love the body they were born with.
This politics hates the Christian sexual ethic and the idea that children should be taught the virtues of heterosexual monogamous marriage and family.
Not even the #MeToo movement and the porn-fuelled epidemic of sexual abuse of women and domestic violence has caused politics and culture to look in the mirror.
It continues to mock the Christian sexual ethic with its emphasis on a morality of respect and self-sacrificing love, an antidote to so much of today’s dysfunction.
Ironically, the ethos Citipointe is trying to protect is more in line with mainstream Australia than the media and culture will allow to be known.
The sexual and gender radicals know this, hence the lashings of confected outrage.
Rainbow activists huffing and puffing about homosexuality being lumped with paedophilia and bestiality were silent when Peter Singer appeared on the ABC’s Q&A program promoting bestiality.
They were silent when USA Today last month sought to de-stigmatise those with paedophilic thoughts.
The rationale for this cultural flirtation by elites with de-stigmatising these taboos is the same “born this way” logic that paved the way for the cultural acceptance of homosexuality.
Hypocrisy runs deep.
What our Biblically illiterate culture does not understand is that Christianity lumps all sin together – as Israel Folau pointed out.
Liars, drunks, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality etc – it’s all sin in need of the Saviour’s forgiveness.
The true Christian believes there is no hierarchy of sin – we all sin, we all need Jesus. Thinking your sin is lesser than the other guy’s is not Christian, its hypocrisy.
None of this was controversial five minutes ago in history, but a new generation has grown up without knowledge of our cultural inheritance or the spirituality of their ancestors.
The new cultural gatekeepers are determined to keep it this way, that’s why they hate Christian schools.
Citipointe Christian College and hundreds of other schools like it in our nation are bucking modern cultural trends to rectify this and good on them.
How that project is defended in a confused and ignorant public square needs a re-think, because there is much common ground.
Most Australians don’t want biological males competing against their daughters at the school swimming carnival, let alone sharing the change rooms.
Yet this is what is protected behind the “trans kid” emotivist rhetoric laced in the Citipointe pile-on.
Also protected are the new experimental gender clinics which take vulnerable kids, often autistic girls, and ply them with puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to help them be “boys”. They the offer “top surgery”, a euphemism for removing their healthy breasts.
Parents who disagree with homosexuality should be allowed to have their children in a school community which teaches the virtues of the Christian sexual ethic.
Surely a diverse and tolerant society would allow this and I think most Australians agree with this proposition, even if they don’t follow Christian morals.
The leaders of the same-sex marriage campaign said this freedom would remain. They lied.
It needs to be pointed out that biology is not bigotry and disagreement on sexual ethics is not hatred of anyone.
Yet media, culture and politics conflate these things into a toxic brew that casts a spell, poisoning in the minds of Australians the motives of those of us who hold to the Christian religion.
There is a war going on and this week a pistol was fired on a battlefield protected by bazookas.
The firepower protecting rainbow ideology is might that is not right by any standard of objective analysis.
But better and united strategy, with a dose of courage, can win the day.
This is a setback, but it need not be the end.
Lyle Shelton is Director of Campaigns and Communication for the Christian Democratic Party. He graduated from a Christian school and his four children attended Christian schools.