Historic ‘Christian Freedom Index’ launches at Parliament House

Published on May 28, 2026May 28, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

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.

Pastor in Northern Ireland fined for preaching near abortion clinic

Published on May 12, 2026May 12, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

A Northern Ireland court on Thursday (May 7) fined a retired Baptist pastor for preaching at a worship service near an abortion clinic, a move the minister called a “dark day for Christian freedom.”

by Chris Eyte at Christian Daily

Coleraine Magistrates’ Court ordered the Rev. Clive Johnston to pay £450 ($565) following his conviction under the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act 2023. Johnston, former president of the Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland, held an open-air Sunday service on July 7, 2024 within a protected “buffer zone” outside Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, County Londonderry.

The Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe) reported that the court considered Johnston’s conduct a criminal offense due to the “location and surrounding circumstances.”

The prosecution argued that because the service featured a large crucifix, hymns and a microphone, it amounted to an attempt to influence people accessing abortion services. Johnston maintained his sermon made no mention of abortion. Police body-worn footage showed Johnston’s group singing hymns and quoting Bible passages, including John 3:16.Stay informed with The Christian Daily NewsletterSign up

“The buffer zone legislation is so broad that holding a Sunday service has been found to be a criminal offense,” Johnston said in a statement after the hearing. “If someone is out there causing trouble, stirring up violence, harassing or verbally attacking people, then, absolutely, go ahead and prosecute them. But I wasn’t doing any of those things.”

The 2023 Act criminalizes conduct within designated zones intended to influence – or conduct considered “reckless” as to whether it influences – a “protected person” accessing abortion services. Judge Peter King found Johnston guilty of two counts: acting within a safe access zone with the intent or recklessness of influencing a protected person, and failing to comply with a direction to leave the zone.

King acknowledged Johnston as a “man of strong religious belief and good character” who has been publicly associated with anti-abortion views in the past. The judge concluded, however, that Johnston had “tested the law to the point where he broke the law.”

The court ruled that Johnston specifically chose the location because of the clinic’s proximity, meeting the legal threshold for conviction.

By Chris Eyte. Republished from Christian Daily under a Creative Commons license. Christian Daily International provides biblical, factual and personal news, stories and perspectives from every region, focusing on religious freedom, integrated gospel and other issues that are relevant to the global Church today.

Good news! An Easter meditation

Published on April 4, 2026April 4, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

This Easter meditation presents the essential Good News which helps us make sense of an increasingly desolate world. It reminds us that the answers to all our problems are found in Jesus Christ Who died for us. The source for this meditation can be found here.

Christ was made sin for us

When the Divine Word offered Himself to redeem mankind, there were before Him two ways of redemption – the one of joy and glory, the other of pains and insults. It was His will, not only by His coming to deliver man from eternal death, but also to call forth the love of all the hearts of men, and therefore He rejected the way of joy and glory and chose that of pains and insults.

In order that He might satisfy the Divine justice for us and at the same time inflame us with His holy love, He was willing to endure this burden of all our sins, that, dying upon a cross, He might obtain for us grace and the life of the blessed. This is what Isaias intended to express when he said, “He Himself hath borne our pains and carried our sorrows.”

Of this there were to express figures in the Old Testament: the first was the annual ceremony of the scapegoat, which the high priest represented as bearing all the sins of the people; and therefore, all, loading it with curses, drove it into the desert, to be the object of the wrath of God. This goat was a figure of our Redeemer, who was willing to load Himself with all the curses deserved by us for our sins, being made a curse for us in order that He might obtain for us the Divine blessing.

Therefore, the Apostle wrote in another place, “He made Him to be sin for us, who knew not sin, that we might be made the justice of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). That is, as St. Ambrose and St. Anselm explain it, He made Him to be sin who was Innocence itself – that is, He presented Himself to God as if He had been sin itself. In a word, He took upon Himself the character of a sinner and endured the pains due to us sinners, in order to render us just before God.

The second type of the sacrifice which Jesus Christ offered to the eternal Father for us upon the Cross was that brazen serpent of the Old Law which was fixed to a tree, by looking upon which the Jews who were bitten by fiery serpents were healed. Accordingly, St. John writes: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that every one who believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 4:14).

We may here notice that in the Book of Wisdom the shameful death of Jesus Christ is clearly foretold. Although the words of the passage referred to may apply to the death of every just man, yet, say Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Jerome and many other holy Fathers, they principally refer to the death of Christ. It is said: “If He is the true Son of God, He will defend Him, and will deliver Him from the hands of his enemies” (Wisdom 2:18).

These words exactly correspond with what the Hebrews said when Jesus was upon the Cross: “He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him, if He will have Him; for He said, I am the Son of God” (Matt. 27:43). The Wise Man goes on to say, “Let us try Him with insults and torments,” that is, those of the cross, “and let us prove His patience; let us condemn Him to the most shameful death.”

The Hebrews chose the death of the cross for Jesus Christ because it is shameful, in order that His name might be forever infamous and no more held in remembrance, according to the other text of Jeremias: “Let us put wood on His bread, and cut Him off from the land of the living, and let His name be remembered no more” (Jer. 11:19). How, then, can the Hebrews of the present day say that it is false that Christ was the promised Messiah because His life was ended by a most shameful death, when the prophets themselves foretold that He should die with a most dishonorable death?

And Jesus accepted such a death. He died to pay the price of our sins: And therefore, as in the case of sinners, He desired to be circumcised, to be redeemed with a price when He was presented in the temple, to receive the baptism of repentance from the Baptist and lastly, in His Passion, to be nailed upon the Cross to atone for our guilty wanderings, to atone for our avarice by being stripped of His garments, for our pride by the insults He endured, for our desires of power by submitting Himself to the executioner, for our evil thoughts by His crown of thorns, for our intemperance by the gall He tasted, and by the pangs of His Body for our sensual delights.

Therefore, we ought continually, with tears of tenderness, to thank the eternal Father for having given His innocent Son to death, to deliver us from eternal death: “He sparred not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all; and how shall He not also with Him give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). Thus said St. Paul, and thus Jesus Himself said in the Gospel of St. John: “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16).

On this account, Holy Church exclaims on Holy Saturday, “Oh, wonderful is it which Thy love has done for us! O Inestimable Gift of Love, that to redeem a servant, Thou shouldest give Thy Son.” O infinite mercy, O infinite love of our God! O Holy Faith! How can he who believes and confesses this live without burning with holy love for God, who is so loving and so worthy of love?