What Rod Dreher Gets Right and Wrong About Australian Christianity

Rod Dreher is a conservative American journalist, a practicing Orthodox Christian, who has made a couple of trips out to Australia (I heard him speak in Melbourne once).

I find some of Dreher’s stuff very helpful (like his book Live Not By Lies) but some of his stuff I don’t find helpful (like his book The Benedict Option and his man-crush on Hungarian PM Orban).

More recently Dreher, in The American Conservative, wrote A Bellwether For Australian Christians, where (following Simon Kennedy’s commentary) he recounts the sad tale of how former banker Andrew Thorburn was forced to resign as CEO of the Essendon Football club because he was the chair of the board of a church named City on a Hill which has traditional beliefs on sexuality and abortion.

Thorburn was given an ultimatum, resign from his job at Essendon, or resign from the board of his church. He wasn’t attacked for anything he said or did, no cringy social media post, no complaints of any kind, it was purely guilt by association. And even if Thorburn resigned from the church board, I suspect he would then have been asked to resign from his church, or else be told to denounce it completely!

According to Dreher:

See, this is why I wrote The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies: to prepare Christians for this kind of thing. The woke elites in Australia drove this man out of his job in a single day, because he attends a church where a decade ago, the pastor criticized homosexuality and abortion. That's all it took. To his very great credit, Andrew Thorburn chose to stand by his faith, and resign his position. Are you prepared to do the same? Will your children be? Will you have a strong community standing by you to pick you up after the culture throws you out of the window onto the street? Can you say where the line is, beyond which you cannot be pushed, for the sake of the Gospel?

As we say in Australia, Yeah-nah! Let me explain what I mean by that!