Australia is right to be alarmed by the resurgence of antisemitism. Jewish Australians are facing harassment, intimidation, vandalism, and threats that strike at the heart of a pluralist society. Government action is necessary, but the form that action takes matters as much as its intent.

Parts of the Australian government’s proposed response to antisemitism (temporarily shelved) risks narrowing not only freedom of speech, but also freedom of religion and association – three liberties that historically stand or fall together. This is not a theoretical concern. History shows that when governments move from punishing violent conduct to managing belief, speech and ‘acceptable narratives’, minorities are rarely made safer in the long run.

Christianity’s forgotten role in free speech

Free speech is often portrayed as an Enlightenment invention forged in opposition to Christianity. In reality, many of the moral foundations of expressive freedom emerged within Christian reflection on conscience, truth and the limits of state power.

Early Christianity was a persecuted minority. It learned quickly what it meant for authorities to regulate belief. From this experience emerged a foundational Christian insight: faith coerced is faith corrupted.

The early Christian writer Tertullian argued that belief must be voluntary because it concerns the soul, not public order. Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas made a crucial distinction between sin and crime, warning that not every moral wrong should be punished by law. Overreach, he argued, breeds disorder, not virtue.

This was not libertinism. It was moral realism: an acknowledgment that governments lack the wisdom and purity to police conscience without abusing power.

That insight became politically explosive during the Reformation. When religious unity collapsed across Europe, attempts to enforce belief through law produced catastrophe. Out of this wreckage emerged a hard lesson: peace requires toleration, not enforced agreement.

Milton, Locke, and the Christian case for open disagreement

John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), often cited as a secular free-speech manifesto, is saturated with Christian theology. Milton argued that truth does not need protection from error. It is strengthened by contest. Suppressing falsehood, he warned, weakens truth itself.

This was not naïveté; it was theological confidence. To fear open debate was, in Milton’s view, to distrust truth – and ultimately, to distrust God.

Later, John Locke developed the argument that would shape modern liberal democracies. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Locke insisted that the state has no competence in matters of salvation. Churches, he argued, are voluntary associations. Faith cannot be compelled; belief cannot be legislated into sincerity.

From this Christian reasoning emerged three interlocking freedoms:

• freedom of expression
• freedom of religion
• freedom of association

They protect the same human reality: the right to hold, express, and live by beliefs without state approval.

When speech regulation expands, religion is never far behind

This historical pattern matters now because modern anti-hate-speech regimes increasingly blur the line between harmful conduct and unacceptable belief.

Australia’s antisemitism response includes elements that go beyond punishing violence or intimidation. It moves toward managing discourse through:

• official definitions tied to compliance
• monitoring of media ‘narratives’
• institutional report cards and funding leverage
• expanded powers over ‘hate groups’ and associations

Each of these measures may appear reasonable in isolation. Together, they risk creating a system where lawful speech becomes risky speech – and risky speech becomes punishable through administrative means rather than courts.

That is where freedom of religion and association enter the picture.

Religious traditions make truth claims. They draw moral boundaries. They teach that some ways of life are wrong. These teachings are often uncomfortable and sometimes offensive. Liberal societies historically tolerated this because offence was not treated as harm.

But when subjective offence is elevated into a regulatory category – when speech is judged not by its connection to violence, but by its ideological content – religious expression becomes vulnerable.

A sermon can be reclassified as ‘hate’.

A doctrine can be reframed as ‘exclusion’.

A faith community can be labelled a problem association.

This is not hypothetical. Overseas, hate-speech laws have already been used to investigate pastors, religious schools, and faith-based charities for expressing orthodox beliefs.

Association under suspicion

Freedom of association is the quiet casualty of speech regulation. If governments acquire the power to designate ‘hate groups’ based on ideology rather than violence, then belonging itself becomes suspect.

Historically, religious minorities know this terrain well. Dissenting Christian groups were once treated as extremists simply for refusing official doctrine. Jews have faced the same fate for centuries.

The logic is always similar: the state defines a belief as socially dangerous, then treats association with that belief as evidence of moral or civic unfitness.

Once that logic is accepted, voluntary communities exist at the pleasure of political authorities, not as a matter of right.

The Christian warning about power

Christian political thought has never assumed that rulers are benevolent angels. On the contrary, it begins with a sober view of human nature. Power, even when exercised for good ends, tends to expand.

The 20th Century Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr warned that moral crusades become most dangerous when they are convinced of their own righteousness. Good intentions do not immunise institutions against abuse.

This is why Christianity historically argued for limiting coercive authority, not moral indifference. The state should punish violence, protect persons, and preserve peace – but stop short of policing belief.

Antisemitism must be fought – without shrinking freedom

None of this diminishes the reality of antisemitism or the urgency of addressing it. Violence must be confronted forcefully. Jewish Australians deserve full and equal participation in public life without fear.

But history suggests a clear boundary: punish actions, not opinions.

Target conduct, not ideology. Protect people, not narratives.

When governments move beyond that boundary – when they begin monitoring speech, enforcing official definitions through funding or discipline, or regulating association based on belief – they build machinery that rarely stays confined to its original purpose.

Minorities are often the first to need protection. They are also the first to suffer when free speech, religious liberty, and association are weakened.

The paradox of protection

There is a tragic paradox at the heart of modern speech regulation: measures designed to protect minorities often undermine the very freedoms that allow minorities to survive.

Christian history, Jewish history, and liberal history all tell the same story. Societies that tolerate disagreement – even painful disagreement – are more stable than those that attempt to enforce moral consensus through law.

Australia should confront antisemitism with clarity and courage. But it should also remember a lesson learned the hard way across centuries: the state is a blunt instrument for moral reform.

Free speech, religious freedom, and freedom of association are not indulgences. They are safeguards – against fear, against overreach, and against the temptation to legislate virtue.

If we weaken them in moments of anxiety, we may discover too late that we have traded durable protection for temporary reassurance.