A landmark report released at Parliament House on Thursday found that nearly three-quarters of Australian Christians have felt pressured to conceal their beliefs in public, online or at work. The Christian Freedom Index revealed that 74 Acts of Parliament restrict basic freedoms.
by the Canberra Declaration Team
Australia’s first comprehensive audit of Christian freedom — drawing on the survey responses of 10,808 Christians, over 40 documented cases, and 74 Acts of Parliament — was launched at a breakfast at Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday morning, with cross-party parliamentarians and church leaders among those receiving a hand-signed copy of the report.
The inaugural Australian Christian Freedom Index (ACFI) found that 92% of respondents in its flagship survey felt it is riskier to affirm Christian beliefs publicly than it was five years ago.
The report traces this near-universal perception of deteriorating freedom to the acceleration of restrictive legislation across all eight Australian jurisdictions over the same period.
“The right to religious freedom is being plundered in Australia,” Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney Anthony Percy said of the report. “This Index lays the ground for some rearguard action.”
Seven of the report’s eleven authors addressed the breakfast, with parliamentarians and church leaders also attending.
Among those present were Liberal MPs Alex Hawke and Julian Leeser, One Nation Senators Malcolm Roberts and Tyson Whitten, and Labor MP Alison Byrnes — a cross-party attendance the organisers said reflected the high stakes of Christian freedom in Australia.
A nation under legal pressure
The report’s legislative audit counted at least 74 Acts across Australia’s nine jurisdictions — six states, two territories and the Commonwealth — that affect Christian belief and practice, with nearly half enacted in just the last five years.
Between 2000 and 2020, an average of two such Acts passed each year. From 2021 to 2025, that average jumped to more than six per year — a more than threefold increase.
The ACFI Restriction Index, derived from an audit of 20 specific legislative restrictions, ranked Victoria as the most restrictive state by a wide margin.
Pastoral conversations and certain forms of prayer are now criminalised under Victoria’s conversion practices legislation; sermons on biblical sexuality can attract vilification complaints; and Christian schools face narrowed hiring exemptions.
Western Australia ranked as the least restrictive state, having resisted many of the impositions that have taken hold on the eastern seaboard.
The report identified six primary drivers of discrimination against Australian Christians — four external, two internal.
The first three work in sequence: secular progressivism has recast biblically orthodox belief as social harm; an expanding state apparatus has given that moral vision legal teeth; and the combined effect is a legal asymmetry in which religious freedom rests on narrow exemptions that can be litigated away or later repealed.
The sixth driver is Islamist extremism — documented in the high-profile 2024 stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel.
Two further drivers operate from within the church itself: doctrinal drift, where institutions have accommodated secular-progressive values at the cost of legal protection for those who will not; and what the report terms “misplaced meekness”: the belief that Christian humility requires silence in the face of injustice.
The silence gap
Survey findings revealed what the report calls a “silence gap” — the distance between Christians who had felt pressured to keep their beliefs private and those who had actually experienced formal marginalisation.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents — 73% — said they had felt pressured to conceal their beliefs in public, online, or at work. Only 25% reported having actually been denied opportunities or marginalised.
The chilling effect — where the fear of consequences reshapes behaviour before any penalty arrives — is outrunning formal discrimination, the report noted, with cultural pressure doing much of the work that law has not yet needed to do.
The survey also mapped the gradient of Christian freedom from the sanctuary to the public square.
Nearly half of respondents — 49% — rated Christians as somewhat or very free to conduct church ministry and worship. That figure fell to 24% for sharing faith in public, 19% for Christian education, 13% for workplace settings, and just 8% for Christian healthcare.
Asked specifically about Christian hospitals, 92% rated them as restricted, heavily restricted, or not free to operate according to their beliefs.
The report documented over 40 named cases spanning the first five of eight stages on an internationally recognised persecution scale, from ridicule and discrimination through to attack — the latter of which included the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari and the ACT government’s forced acquisition of Calvary Public Hospital in 2023.
The baseline is now set
Former Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Glenn Davies said the report “carefully analyses the erosion of freedoms in our country over forty years or more,” and called on parliamentarians and religious leaders to read it.
Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher said the index brought
to light “recent attempts to minimise the role of faith in everyday life and exclude it altogether from the public square.”
The report also noted defensive wins.
In the Northern Territory, partial hiring exemptions for Christian schools were restored in 2025 after earlier amendments removed them. In New South Wales, pro-life groups and medical professionals worked together in May 2025 to defeat proposed extensions of abortion legislation that would have forced Christian hospitals to perform abortions. In Melbourne, the Royal Show reversed its decision to ban the Good News Booth — a Christian exhibit with 108 years of continuous history at the event — following concerted advocacy from Christians across Australia.
The report describes the Restriction Index and its companion survey data as a baseline against which future annual editions will measure change.
The index is designed to be published annually, with the next edition tracking developments across all Australian jurisdictions.
The report is available at australianchristianfreedomindex.org.au.
The Australian Christian Freedom Index is an initiative of the Canberra Declaration.
Republished with permission from The Daily Declaration. The Daily Declaration is Australia’s largest Christian news site. It is dedicated to providing a voice for Christian values in the public square. Its vision is to see the revitalisation of our Christian values for the common good.