For a long time, Australians lived in a country where lawyers barely gave a passing thought to religious freedom. By any global or historical measure, we enjoyed remarkable freedoms – to gather, to speak, to form associations – not merely to hold a faith but to live it out publicly, without attracting so much as a raised eyebrow from the state or the courts.

The law was so serenely uninterested in religion that, in my admittedly unreliable and distant memories of law school, I can recall only a handful of cases that even brushed against it: whether religious belief might excuse a man from conscription; whether the Commonwealth could act against pacifist Jehovah’s Witnesses during World War II; and whether Scientologists counted as a religious body for tax purposes.

Unlike the endlessly litigated American approach to freedom of religion, our own law was safe, dull, rarely tested and almost never the stuff of political or judicial drama. These were the footnotes of constitutional law textbooks. Students cramming for exams could confidently file the topic under “Safe to ignore – they’ll never ask us”. Those halcyon days are over.

Patrick Parkinson’s Unshaken Allegiance forensically charts how profoundly the relationship has changed between Australian Christians and the government. We are no longer in the 1990s.

Ideas once confined to the more eccentric corners of academic journals have, with startling speed, been adopted as corporate policy and then enshrined in legislation by an increasingly regulatory state. Christians now find themselves not merely out of step with the culture, but with the law itself. Perhaps nowhere has that been more clearly seen than in the change of cultural attitudes, and then law, towards same-sex marriage.

In the 1990s, the suggestion that Australian governments might one day regulate – let alone criminalise – certain forms of prayer would have been dismissed as fanciful. Today, it would appear the unthinkable has become thinkable.

Parkinson, who is Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Law at the University of Queensland, proves himself a trustworthy guide through this new legal landscape. Where others might lapse into nostalgia or thunderous lament, his tone remains calm and informed – the very qualities one hopes for when surveying such shifting ground. The omelette is not over-egged. 

A long-term advocate for religious freedom, he concedes that Christians have no right to assume that a post-Christian society will frame its laws with Christian assumptions in mind. When culture changes, the law follows; and so, Christians will need to learn the quiet art of persuasion – to make the case afresh for freedom, for tolerance, and for a society in which people of faith and of none may live together peaceably.

These are old questions wearing new clothes: when to obey, when to dissent, and how to do both without rancour. The Bible has been here before, even if our legal system has not.

One of the book’s great strengths lies in the clarity with which Parkinson dissects the law’s own metamorphosis. With deceptive simplicity he reveals how far Australia has travelled from its common-law inheritance of individual liberty towards a more managerial, regulatory mindset. 

Drawing on his student days in the former Czechoslovakia, he recalls Bible studies conducted in hiding from the secret police. No one would claim Melbourne in lockdown was Prague under communism, yet Parkinson invites us – gently but firmly – to consider whether our own laws now serve to guard freedom or to administer conformity. It is a question well worth asking, and few could pose it with such learning, balance and grace.

Unshaken Allegiance is no dry legal textbook, but a work written for Christian leaders and thoughtful laypeople alike. It will steady those feeling the squeeze of corporate policies grown less than friendly, or school councils puzzling over how to comply with the latest directive. It will also serve the parliamentarian, the lawyer or the law student seeking a clear framework for understanding religious freedom in contemporary Australia. 

The Christian publishing world is not short of books lamenting the post-Christian West, but few venture into the thickets of law and policy with Parkinson’s calm precision. At heart, this is no counsel of despair, nor a call to retreat from the world, but an invitation to faithful wisdom and shrewd engagement. 

In a time when freedoms once taken for granted are quietly shifting, Parkinson’s book is a timely companion – reminding Christians that thoughtful, principled action is always possible, and that love of neighbour need not be sacrificed in the pursuit of justice. It offers a compass for those hoping to reform the law – charting a course toward freer laws and ways of living that allow us to love our neighbours, even (and sometimes especially) when we respectfully disagree with each other. SC

The Rev Michael Kellahan is senior assistant minister at St Faith’s, Narrabeen.