Christian Persecution or Political Spin? Conversion Practices and Who Actually Gets Hurt
The Family First Party published a media release on Facebook with the headline: "NOW THEY'RE COMING FOR YOUR PRAYERS."
The release claims that a Victorian government-funded booklet, published by the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, is telling faith-based parents that praying with their children is harmful and possibly criminal. It invokes Catholic mothers and Muslim fathers. It uses the word "intimidate." It frames the Allan government as having "declared war on parents."
It is, in almost every material respect, a misrepresentation of what the law actually says.
But the misrepresentation isn't the most important part of this story. The most important part is what the misrepresentation is designed to do, who it's designed to protect, and who gets erased in the process.
Let me be precise about all of it.
What the Law Actually Says
Victoria's Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021 bans practices that attempt to change or suppress a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. The Act defines a "change or suppression practice" as conduct directed at a person with the intention of changing or suppressing their sexual orientation or gender identity, in a way that causes harm.
The VEOHRC's own guidance is unambiguous: "The Act does not prohibit prayer and religious practices, except when they amount to a change or suppression practice. Your private prayer with your God can continue. You can continue to hold your own view on sexuality and gender."
Legal experts, including University of New England law lecturer Aileen Kennedy, confirmed that prayer itself is not a contravention of the Act. AAP FactCheck found the claim that the law bans prayer to be false, with legal experts stating that praying over an individual questioning their gender or taking them interstate for pastoral care is legal, only becoming illegal when it forms part of an effort to change or suppress gender identity and cause injury.
So what the booklet actually says, and what the law actually prohibits, is narrowly specific: praying at your child with the intention of convincing them that their sexual orientation or gender identity needs to be changed or suppressed is harmful. That's not the same as praying with your child. It's not the same as sharing your faith. It's not the same as raising your children within a religious tradition.
The distinction is not subtle. It is the difference between a parent saying "I love you and I'm praying for you" and a parent saying "I'm praying for God to fix what's wrong with you." Family First is deliberately collapsing that distinction. And they're doing it because the distinction is inconvenient for the narrative they're building.
The Architecture of "Christian Persecution"
What Family First is doing here has a name. It's a well-documented pattern in the sociology of religion and in the psychology of high-control systems: the persecution complex.
The persecution complex in fundamentalist Christianity operates like this. A group that has historically held significant social, cultural, and institutional power begins to lose some of that power, specifically the power to impose its values on others without consequence. Rather than naming this as an accountability shift, the group reframes it as persecution. Every limit placed on their ability to harm others becomes evidence that they are the ones being harmed.
Robert Jay Lifton's work on thought reform identified this dynamic as sacred science: the belief that the group's doctrine is so unquestionably correct that any challenge to it is not merely wrong but evil. When the external world pushes back, that pushback becomes proof of the group's righteousness. Suffering confirms correctness. Opposition confirms virtue.
Family First's press release is a masterclass in this logic. The government funds programs that help LGBTQIA+ young people? That's ideological warfare. The government publishes a guide explaining what conversion practices are actually prohibited? That's intimidation. The government hires staff to implement equity programs? That's bureaucratic excess. Every single measure designed to protect LGBTQIA+ people, including children, is reframed as an attack on faith.
What's invisible in this framing is the people the law was written to protect.
Who Conversion Practices Actually Harm
Conversion practices are not an abstract policy debate. They are a documented source of severe, lifelong harm to LGBTQIA+ people.
The evidence is not equivocal. Research consistently shows that people subjected to conversion practices experience higher rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, suicidality, and self-harm than LGBTQIA+ people who were not subjected to them. In Australia, conversion practices are disproportionately experienced by young people in faith-based communities, which is precisely why the Victorian legislation was enacted.
As someone who came out as queer after years inside a Pentecostal megachurch, I can tell you that the harm of these practices isn't theoretical. The message that your sexual orientation is a spiritual problem to be solved, that your identity is a symptom of sin, that God's love for you is conditional on becoming someone other than who you are, does not stay inside the walls of a prayer meeting. It travels with you. It shapes how you see yourself. It can take years, sometimes decades, of careful, supported work to untangle.
The law does not stop parents from loving their LGBTQIA+ children. It stops parents from using religious practice as a mechanism for telling their children that who they are is fundamentally wrong. That distinction matters enormously.
The "Parental Rights" Frame and What It Conceals
Family First's release centres parental rights, and this is where the rhetoric gets most sophisticated and most dangerous.
"Parental rights" sounds neutral. It sounds reasonable. Who could be against parents having rights over their own children? But the frame conceals a question that has to be asked: rights to do what, exactly?
Parents do not have an unlimited right to harm their children in the name of belief. We do not accept this in any other context. A parent who withholds medical treatment from a sick child on religious grounds is not protected by parental rights. A parent who physically harms a child in the name of discipline is not protected by parental rights. The existence of a religious motive does not create a legal or moral shield around harmful conduct.
The VEOHRC booklet isn't telling parents they can't pray. It's telling them, in plain language, what the law says about conduct that causes harm to their children. That's not intimidation. That's information. And the reason Family First is calling it intimidation is because they want to preserve the right to engage in exactly the conduct the law prohibits.
The release invokes Catholic mothers and Muslim fathers as sympathetic figures being criminalised for their faith. This is strategic. It is designed to build a multi-faith coalition of outrage around legislation that, in reality, protects the children of those very families. LGBTQIA+ kids exist in Catholic families. They exist in Muslim families. They exist in every faith community represented in the submission Family First cites. Those children are not mentioned once in Family First's press release.
That omission is not accidental.
"Hiding Gender Transitions from Parents": The Rest of the Claim
The Family First release also repeats the claim that the Victorian government "hid gender transitions from parents in schools," packaging it as evidence of a broader pattern of ideological capture.
This framing requires interrogation. School policies allowing young people to use a different name or pronoun in school without mandatory parental disclosure exist because, for some LGBTQIA+ young people, home is not a safe place to come out. Research on family rejection of LGBTQIA+ youth consistently shows elevated rates of homelessness, self-harm, and suicidality when young people are outed to unsupportive families before they're ready.
These policies are not about hiding information from good parents. They are about protecting vulnerable children from the very kind of harm that the conversion practices legislation was also designed to address. The overlap is not coincidental.
Family First's framing treats every LGBTQIA+ young person as though they exist in a family where coming out is safe, where parents will respond with love and support, where disclosure carries no risk. For many young people, that is not true. And the ones for whom it isn't true are the most vulnerable. Mandatory disclosure policies in those cases don't protect parent-child relationships. They destroy children.
The Persecution Complex and High-Control Religion
I work with survivors of high-control religious environments, and I want to name something that this press release illustrates clearly.
One of the hallmarks of high-control religious systems, documented extensively by scholars like Janja Lalich and in Robert Jay Lifton's criteria for thought reform, is what Lifton calls "dispensing of existence": the belief that the group's truth is the only legitimate truth, and that those outside it are not just wrong but dangerous. In this worldview, any limit placed on the group's power to impose its beliefs on others is experienced not as accountability but as existential threat.
The persecution complex isn't just bad faith rhetorical strategy, though it can be that too. In genuinely high-control systems, leaders and members often sincerely believe they are persecuted. The belief is an artefact of the thought reform environment itself. When your framework tells you that your truth is sacred and unchallengeable, and that opposition is evidence of evil, then any challenge to your authority becomes persecution almost automatically.
What's important to name is who this belief protects and who it harms.
The "Christian persecution" narrative in Australia overwhelmingly circulates in contexts where the "persecution" being described is: the inability to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people without legal consequence. The inability to subject LGBTQIA+ people to practices designed to alter or suppress their identity without legal consequence. The inability to treat your LGBTQIA+ child as a spiritual problem to be solved without legal consequence.
Calling that persecution is an inversion of reality. It names the removal of the power to harm as harm. And it does so while the people who are actually being harmed, LGBTQIA+ young people subjected to conversion practices, LGBTQIA+ youth without safe homes, queer adults carrying the long tail of religiously-inflicted shame, remain invisible.
What Actually Protects Families
There is real harm in this conversation. There are real families navigating real tension. There are parents who genuinely love their LGBTQIA+ children and are trying to figure out how to hold their faith and their child's identity at the same time. There are faith communities working through these questions with integrity and care.
None of those people are the target of this legislation. The legislation targets a specific, documented, harmful practice. And the evidence is clear that the practice causes harm.
What actually protects families is not the removal of legislation designed to prevent harm to children. What protects families is honest information, access to genuinely affirming support, and the legal assurance that a child's identity will not be treated as a disorder to be corrected.
Family First's press release offers none of that. It offers fear. It offers the language of war and persecution and criminal parents. It offers a vision of faith communities under siege, which happens to require, as its solution, the removal of protections for LGBTQIA+ children.
I'm not interested in softening that analysis. When political rhetoric is designed to erode protections for some of the most vulnerable young people in Australia, naming it plainly is not a partisan act. It's a moral one.
Prayer is not under attack in Victoria. LGBTQIA+ children are. The law is trying to address the second thing. Family First is trying to stop it by claiming the first.
Those are not the same thing. And we should stop pretending they are.
If you're navigating the intersection of faith, sexuality, and identity, whether you're queer, a family member, or a practitioner trying to understand the landscape, then I offer 1-1 professional support. You can book a free 15-min chat here.