Israel Folau: indoctrination and the Tongan Fakaleiti

Facing the widespread criticism of his views, Israel Folau has doubled down, reasserting his position. This is a classic example of a human phenomenon anthropologist Mary Douglas once described – that people tend to embrace what is oppressing them when they can't see a way out.

Under pressure, Folau wept while giving a sermon at his church. You have to have some sympathy for him. He is one of the hundreds of thousands of targets of an indoctrination program that started two hundred years ago.

Appeals to his free speech to assert his religious views, about homosexuality, that are now becoming increasingly irrelevant in the Pacific, may not save him from the possible financial debacle that his religion has brought him to.

The full legal arguments are not yet on the table. If they are reduced to whether religious free speech can override secular agreement that may put law itself on the line. If the answer is 'yes', then agreements like the one Folau signed agreeing to curb his religious speech are worthless, and secular law itself could be compromised. Seen this way, it is a separation of church and state issue.

At the same time, in a free speech society, were there no contract involved, should Folau be free to parrot the ultra-conservative, centuries' old, homophobic views of the Christianity that has brought him to this point?

Yes, but the Biblical quote that Folau used was promising violent retribution, albeit indirectly, for gays, atheists and others in the future when they arrive in Hell for torture till eternity. I suggest that appears to cross the free speech line where anything can be said, so long as it does not encourage or approve of violence.

Second, it has been said in his defence that Folau was merely citing the words of the Bible, as if that lets him of the hook. Surely that is disingenuous. None of the many other Christian Pacific Island rugby players have felt motivated to say what Folau has said – twice – and against an arrangement not to do so.

In conclusion, I leave the last word to a Samoan activist who, unlike Folau has thought his way out of his indoctrination:

'The Polynesian atheist or free thinker is, I suggest, a much braver individual. He or she is a thick-skinned warrior to stand defiantly against the docile citizenry who will never accept the fact that they have been conquered by the white man.

They conform to the trappings and symbols of religious assimilation by wearing the 'whites' every Sunday as an act of racial contrition to a White Preacher Man's own contrived rules.

The Samoan goes meekly to his or her church in the middle of the village and is deeply humbled by the Beatitudes, and acknowledges that they are truly conquered.'