Violence in our churches
We must always condemn violence. There must be no tolerance for brutality, and we must take action to diminish violence whether it is tied to family violence, a chronic lack of support for crucial mental health work or to sectarianism. The stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel on the weekend during his church service, days after the Bondi stabbing, demands Australia focuses on solving the causes.
The youth in question has now been charged with a terror offence after a rapid declaration that the incident was terror-related. As commentators have pointed out, however, this designation is controversial. Dai Le MP, whose electorate this involved, condemned the choice of the terror label, explaining it would inflate community anxiety.
The deployment of 400 police to seize his teenage friends, with more terror charges laid, seems another case of police overkill, and not destined to calm the current sense in Muslim communities that the West sees their lives as either worthless or an implicit threat. In a moment of youth mental health crisis, it is hardly helpful to inflict night-time raids.
Notably the placing of a bomb-like object at a Sydney property flying a Palestinian flag has not been treated the same way, despite the terror the threat provoked. The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils noted the lacklustre police response to this and similar incidents. Repeated attacks on the properties of Hash Tayeh, owner of the Burgertory chain, do not receive the terror hysteria.
Bernard Keane underlines that the terror label gives police draconian powers as well as functioning as a “security blanket” that protects us from the apparent arbitrariness of violence. So-called “terror” attacks, he points out, are just as likely to relate to mental health issues.
Violence against women is also systematically connected to “terror” attacks, where there is misogyny and often an unchecked history of violence against women in men found guilty of terrorist violence. Kon Karapanagiotidis highlighted that the total number of Australians killed in terror attacks here since World War I is 16, while 642 women have been killed by male violence merely since 2014. Misogyny, as he reiterates, should be counted a much higher threat and a focus for action, not only because of its link to terror but also for the wellbeing of women.
There is an obvious reason, as Muslim community organisations have pointed out, that the attack on the Bishop was so rapidly labelled terror rather than a hate crime. Australians have a deep underlying predisposition to see Muslims and non-White people as terrorists, while our own contenders for the label are excused. It explains the electorate’s complicity with human rights-abusing treatment of our asylum seeker population over recent decades.
This predisposition underpins Prime Minister Albanese offering the “bollard” hero citizenship but neglecting the brave intervention of the two Muslim security guards in Bondi, one of whom gave his life. This refugee had come to Australia for safety and died just a year later trying to save others. It explains why Peter Dutton applauded offering “bollard man” citizenship for a display of the “Anzac spirit,” but said the response to the security guards must be “an issue for the PM.”
Andrew Hastie’s response to the two stabbings was even more illuminating. He demanded stronger national security steps from Prime Minister Albanese, because of the “strategic disorder we’re seeing in the Middle East,” reiterating his words from the “Securing our Future” National Security Conference at the ANU on the 10th of April. Hastie’s SAS time in Afghanistan or his Evangelical Christianity might feed in to this triggering of the “national security” trope, tying a deeply troubled teen to violence in the Middle East.
Hastie’s Christianity provokes him to oppose LGBTQIA+ equality. He famously delivered a “stinging rebuke” to Cooper’s brewery when it backed away from a controversial video where Hastie declared his rejection of marriage equality. While he insists on the separation of church and state, he echoes the American Christian Nationalist assertion that this is intended to keep the state out of interfering in matters of church (not the reverse). He also claims that the “Christian voice” must not be marginalised in Australia’s democracy.
The development of Christian Nationalism has been a concerted project strategised over decades in America and fostered globally in allied religio-ethnostate politics. The dark money that went into manufacturing islamophobia serves Israeli, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian Nationalists. The bigotry is accompanied by repressive morality.
The ex-communicated Bishop’s point of view is overtly in line with Christian Nationalist sentiments. LGBTQIA+ people, Emmanuel has stated, are not just sinners like the rest of us but that they commit “a crime in the sight of God.” In rejecting the Lord’s designated sex designation they commit, “the abolishment of human’s identity.” He appears to say that “LGBT” people, while he loves and prays for them, have rejected their humanity: “The moment you come out of that human identity, you are no longer in that human cycle.” In America, the dehumanising of LGBTQIA+ people is central to the project aiming to staff Trump’s administration.
The Bishop clearly identifies with the American Christian Nationalist movement that surrounds Donald Trump whom he states to be chosen by the Lord. In fact, he claims the Lord says a failure to reelect Trump in November will mean “you can kiss America goodbye,” and that “Christians will be persecuted beyond measure” if he is not elected.
After his imagined meeting with the reinstalled President Trump, the Bishop intends to fix Australia. Emmanuel will “sack everyone in the Parliament House,” and that “whoever comes with a suit, I’ll sack them.”
The people he says will run the country? “So all those big boys with muscles and tattoos, you’ll be the next ministers. The new Cabinet.”
This is deeply disturbing, even if it is meant as a joke. The excommunicated Bishop is apparently a much loved and unifying figure amongst the diaspora Christian communities who have found safe haven in Australia from persecution in the Middle East. This includes Middle Eastern Catholic, Maronite, and Coptic Christians as well as Assyrian. The Sydney Morning Herald conveyed how triggering the stabbing was to a network of communities whose sense of safety is fragile.
During the World Pride event hosted in Sydney in 2023, however, gangs of young men prominently featuring Maronite Christians were on the streets intimidating LGBTQIA+ festival goers, spitting in their faces, calling it “prayer.” Were these inspired by the “TikTok Bishop”?
It is not only LGBTQIA+ people who might be endangered by the renegade Bishop’s sermons. He also appears to spread misogyny. The UN he depicts as the “great harlot who corrupted the earth with her fornication.” In discussing technology, he expresses his shock at the women in entertainment who appear “fully not covered.” Apparently uncovered women “destroyed” the “human way of thinking.” It is evil, and little children “are no longer innocent” from seeing this material on social media.
The Bishop is a complicated man. Apparently he does much good but he also expresses his bigotry in his “humorous” caricatures of, for example, Koreans, as part of geopolitical fearmongering. He dismissed Islam in “many of his sermons.” The religious ethnostate and militarism are central to this Christian Nationalist worldview.
We must discuss the elements of Christian Nationalism that promote violence, whether in its demonisation of Islam and LGBTQIA+ people, or its inculcation of the misogyny that is connected to so much violence in our society.
There is no excuse for this stabbing. We must work to address the many causes, including heated rhetoric, that promote it.
A briefer version of this essay was first published in Pearls and Irritations as “The Bishop.”
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11 comments
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John C
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Phil Pryor
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Pete
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Andrew Smith
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wam
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SusieQ
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Max Gross
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calculus witherspoon.
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Canguro
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Clakka
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Bert Hetebry
Return to home pageAll organised religions are as equally bad as each other. The three worst by far being “the faiths of the book” who all believe in and pray to the same ‘abraham god’. Muslims recognise Jesus as the son of this supposed god and Mohamed as his prophet yet both religions despise everything about each other and a thousand years after the first crusades are still maiming and slaughtering each other. The jews steal muslim land claiming it as their own but throughout history they have always been a reviled and outcast people that nobody trusted or wanted anything to do with. They never had their own homeland so to be given Palestine was guaranteed to flame the fires of hatred already burning bright. If you believe bibles they killed Jesus so are hated by christians yet those same christians help them maim and kill more muslims. The whole human fantasy of believing in a mythical being as the ‘creator’ to explain our existence is the most flawed arguement there is for us being here. Science has proved beyond doubt our origins but our species never learn from our mistakes and will continue hating each other over insignificant differences. I doubt we will ever have to worry about saving our planet when we keep on killing each other in ever increasing numbers. We are a badly flawed species!
Abraham, or IBRI, gave rise to a family of IBRIS, or Hebrews, and he broke idols and declared them useless.His son Isaac had a son, Jacob, or Israel. His children became known as Israelites. And, so, on to Moses, miracles, legend, stories of magic rods, promised lands, commitments, journeys to freedom. And, commandments. rises and falls, kings, falls from grace, captivities, prophets.
And so, on to Judaism, Orthodox christianity,Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, with endless triumphalism, certainty, dogma, script, supremacist drives, wars, crusades, pogroms, unciviised and unbending egofixated self delusion. Will this ever end, or at least improve?
The bishop in his own words on YouTube, 25th April 2024:
‘He speaks out: Everyone has the freedom of speech. | Bishop Mari Emmanuel’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiYSiKdSQGg&t=2s
Good article and don’t ever let anyone tell you that unconscious and old white Oz or WASP sentiments have never gone away….
Also highlights an issue with our media hollowing out i.e. less primary data gathering or reporting on the scene versus relying on others’ social media, but lacking context and understanding, can then lead to further inflammation.
Nowadays there is something to be said in avoiding noise of the moment in the media on current incidents as no one really knows or understands what is happening, when ‘scraping’ from the social media? Resources go to reporting politics, entertainment and sport, same thing?
Runs across the board when e.g. a car accident report, based on social media, has to be revised multiple times till they sort of get it right….without ever visiting the scene.
The police judge the action as ‘terrorism’ means there is most assuredly, a reason for the stabbing, Lucy, is that not an excuse.??
Did the victim accept the action with his forgiving???
Whilst I condemn the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, it must be pointed out that the bishop was not only a deluded supporter of the totally corrupt, self-serving political psychopath, Donald Trump – which, in itself, shows a total lack of rational discernment – but he was a notorious, rampant, blatantly racist and misogynistic extremist who was known to constantly preach toxic Islamophobia, homophobia and the subjugation of women! By preaching such “un-Christian” hatred and attempting to “normalise” intolerance, this dodgy “leader” of some questionable religious CULT turned himself into a huge target for anyone who was, perhaps, struggling with mental illness and duly angered by the bishop’s appalling outspoken prejudices! The young boy who stabbed the bishop was not a terrorist but, rather, a young Muslim with mental health issues seeking revenge against an equally irrational bishop who chose to use religious fanaticism as an excuse to spread malignant hate and intolerance!
There is absolutely NO ROOM in this supposedly egalitarian nation for such vile dysfunctional hatred, misogyny and racism to be preached from the pulpit of ANY church in an attempt to infect and corrupt others! This depraved “bishop”, who deliberately chose to use religion as a hypocritical cover to spread his hatred and disgust for anyone who does not share his insular, misogynistic, racist and very narrow view of the world, used his position as a bishop in this religion to preach a level of toxic hatred and venomous intolerance that is opposed to EVERYTHING Christ Himself espoused!
OK. I’ll say it in plain English. That so-called Bishop uses his pulpit for hate speech. That so-called Bishop provoked the boy who attacked him. That so-called Bishop incited his parishioners who attacked police and vandalised police vehicles. Even though he is clearly a fundamentalist RWNJ, that so-called Bishop should be NOT have been assaulted but he SHOULD be closely investigated by the AFP (If they can be bothered, since he isn’t a Muslim).
Max Gross, too true.
Look, it is a diversion.
Iin this case but there is underlying program of authoritarianism ramping up across the world. Things like Gaza show up the modern contradictions (ie children fitting in shock afrer saturation bombing by Israel Palestine)
-ugly- in modern lib democracies.
There was a time, as the oldies amongst us will recall, when speakers would get up on their soapboxes in Sydney’s Domain and have their say, attracting hundreds who’d gather to listen to the rabble-rousers, whack-jobs, eccentrics and political zealots all able to have a go as it were, in giving vent to their personal passions. A kind of free entertainment long before TV or the internet, but I don’t think the spectacle itself ever lead to the kind of outcome witnessed at the Wakeley church.
Time brings change. We live in a different time space now than the yesteryear many of us older bodies experienced, possibly much more insular, deprived of the smoothing and polishing of broad social interaction and often spending way too much time alone, glued to a smartphone or computer and no filters in play to caution us in regard to where we’re at, what we’re doing, thinking, worrying about, getting worked up over; the stewing of the brain likely leading us into dangerous territory and no lifesavers at the ready to throw us a tube and say ‘hey, grab this, you need to get out of these waters now.’
The kid attacked the bishop. Chicken & egg. The bishop is clearly an extremely off-kilter and dangerous individual, given the rhetoric he is fond of using; the kid, sadly, also mentally disturbed. Kind of a car-crash scenario … predictable but impossible to foresee. The ensuing reaction… mob mentality wanting to kill the kid, police then in the firing line … all the classical elements of crowd emotionality and zero ‘take ten deep breaths before doing anything’ positioning, all symptomatic of the current times; overheated, stressed, reactive, mindless, angry, less caring & sharing, much less than best practice behaviour.
Dogma has always been around looking for a place to insert itself. And if times are not ripe for dogma, it will search for cracks, and be reinvented so as to not waste an opportunity in its power quest.
It would seem that dogmatists are most often lazy or not willing to contribute by ordinary toil, preferring a cop-out word salad of divide and conquer over the rigors of real inquiry.
Perhaps the original opportunity was in the genetic imperative and misogyny. Whilst trading of souls and dowries sought to ensure essential diversities, by way of example, in the writs of Abrahamic religions, the so-called (monkish) scholars subverted the necessities of nature and nurture to lore (then law) focused on ownership, property and dominion – by force – the realm of men. In the bible, for example, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, original sin, and the book of Genesis. At the same time as elsewhere giving lip service to equality. In that regard it can also be seen in other cultures as sacrificial rites involving children and virgin women. Whilst men make war.
It is notable, that through intense inquiry and research, both Freud and Jung observed almost universal characteristics of psychological dilemmas plaguing man (and separately woman). Freud in the Oedipus and Elektra transitional paradox, and Jung, most brilliantly rendering the base archetypes; persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the self to stories of, eg. Aphrodite, Psyche, Medusa, Parsifal (and his sword) and the Grail Castle.
Of course there are several other such explanations in other cultures for the human condition rendered via mythologies giving rise to their traditions and their aberrations.
Suffice to say that the days of glyphs, parchments, sculpture, painterly depictions and theatre, have in modernity given way to the wiles of Holywood, then TV, computers and the internet and most recently juvenile thrills of animated war / hero and interstellar games, live graphic pornography – all no holds barred, creating a separate reality to consume social media, and now AI.
The paradoxes and vulnerabilities of the human condition have always been evident, and so too the existence of those that would manipulate to profit by them, especially via the young. What hope, even for those of the purest of parenting?
As we’ve been increasingly encouraged to abdicate our individual responsibilities to the state and its flunkies and commerce to guide us to utopia, we seem to have abdicated our children to them too. But we now wail as it seems its all going awry. It is also evident that in multi-culturism, recent reversion to the battles of religions, will only serve, as always, to exacerbate false certainties against the paradoxes.
What is over the horizon? What price notions of freedom as diligence is supplanted?
Maybe, we could be left to mind our own business, or just cancel the future. Whatever.
Sadly religious leaders insist on the right to discriminate when selecting people who will teach in their schools, continuing the self righteousness their faith gives them reinforcing their sense of superiority as being of god’s people, which ever god is of their choosing, continuing the discriminations of thousands of years of bloodletting.
The Religious Discrimination Bill which is to be debated during the next sitting of parliament will only serve to give licence to continue the division and hatred which can lead to the ugliness of the recent stabbing as children are shielded from actually dealing with differences which are daily experiences in our world.