In the wake of The Coalition’s cooked Religious Discrimination Bill, teachers and students across the country are opening up about their experiences of discrimination by the Christian school system.
For those who’ve miss the ongoing religious discrimination discussion, it centres around a controversial bill introduced by Scott Morrison into parliament last Thursday.
In essence, it’ll protect freedom of belief and expression of religion. However, the actual details of the Bill have been resoundingly critiqued by minority groups since its inception.
Core issues with the Bill include that it’d allow employers to hire based on religion, and protect people who make potentially bigoted statements if they’re rooted in some sort of religious doctrine.
Teachers and former students who allege that they were fired or expelled by Christian schools are now sharing their fears that the Bill will empower further discrimination.
KC grew up in regional NSW, in a town with a large Catholic community, which included her family and her school.
She fell pregnant in the early 90s when she was in year 10, and wasn’t allowed to return to the school for years 11 and 12.
Her mum told her the school wouldn’t allow her to come back.
“She said, ‘you’re not going back because they can’t have a pregnant girl at a Catholic school’,” she remembers.
“When you become pregnant at 16, it’s like this massive shift. Your world tilts a bit, and nothing is within your control. You just kind of roll with it. I mean, what can you do? You don’t have any power.”
The situations left her feeling disempowered and devastated, “like that opportunity was stolen from me.”
Now, as an adult, she also believes that situations like this can very easily “consign you and your child to a lifetime of poverty”.
Now that doesn’t sound very “love thy neighbour”, does it?
KC fears that the treatment of pregnant students is lost in the conversations around religious discrimination, telling PEDESTRIAN.TV: “I think teen mums are still hidden from the public discussion.”
One of the other central concerns for campaigners is how LGBTQIA+ teachers and students have been treated in Christian schools.
Karen Pack, a former lecturer at a Christian bible college in NSW, told PEDESTRIAN.TV that she was fired from her job in 2020 after she and her partner got engaged.
According to Pack, she was out at her workplace, however she alleges that the leadership team she worked under didn’t tell the school’s Principal about her sexuality. While she was teaching there, the school also introduced stricter teachings, including that marriage is explicitly between a man and a woman.
“After that came out, I was asked to step into another position and sign a new contract, I said, ‘look, I can’t sign this until you understand that I’m gay, I’m in a relationship. Obviously, knowing that you might choose for me not to work here at the college anymore’,” she said.
“They asked me about that provision in the code of conduct that stipulates that the Bible teaches that marriage is between a man and a woman asked me how I felt about that. I said, ‘I’m very happy to affirm that marriage is between a man and a woman. I think that’s a beautiful and a holy thing. I just don’t think that it’s the only kind of marriage that that God approves of. I also approve of same sex relationships and same sex marriage’ – and that was accepted at the time by that person.”
Things changed, though, when she and her partner Bronte got engaged in late 2019. People from the wider evangelical community began writing to the college, including a parent of a student she’d taught before.
“He wrote to the college, saying I’m a lesbian, that it’s demonic, that it’s sick, that I need to be publicly denounced.”
According to Pack, the matter was taken to the principal and ultimately, two letters were then circulated in the school: one to staff and one to students. The letter claimed that while Pack was an “excellent educator”, she was being fired because of her same-sex marriage.
Jill, a retired teacher in Adelaide’s Catholic school circuit, remembers staff members “disappearing”. They weren’t people she worked with, but staff she knew through Adelaide’s insular, tight-knit Catholic schooling community.
“One day they are in the school, and next day, they were gone,” she told PEDESTRIAN.TV. She remembers a male teacher who, in a year seven sex ed class, began discussing the experiences of gay people.
“He went into see the director one day and just was never seen again.”
There was the ambitious female deputy principal who was unmarried, but became pregnant and was subsequently hidden away in the Catholic Education office.
Then there was the principal of the small, rural school who in the early days of Facebook, was tagged in a picture at a visibly gay party.
“Someone in the community found out about it and complained to Catholic Education Office about it. And before they could do anything, he resigned. To me, it was just such a sad thing that happened, because he was fantastic.”
The last Jill heard of him, he’d left teaching altogether.
Scott Morrison has insisted that gay students and teachers shouldn’t be fired over their sexuality. However, given his long and storied history of blatantly lying, forgive me if I and other queer Aussies remain unconvinced.
“My biggest fear for [the Bill] is that the kind of stuff that happened to me…it’s already legal right now,” explained Pack.
“But this Religious Discrimination Bill, it kind of emboldens people in a whole lot of ways to continue that discrimination.”
Based on these kind of stories, religious schools in Australia seem to have used faith as an excuse to dismiss LGBTQIA+ teachers. These Religious Discrimination Bill isn’t creating a new protection for religious schools: it’s empowering them to wear their bigotry openly on their sleeves.
These experiences are a tiny proportion of the way Christian institutions are empowered to actively harm vulnerable people. It’s also evidence that what we actual need is more protection for the queer, gender diverse people and women in them.
