Former NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally, pointed it out on Facebook: “Ah, no SMH – Williams did not “take on God”. He took on the Commonwealth Govt. There is a difference.” She was referring to the High Court decision that federal funding of the school chaplaincy programme was illegal. The Sydney Morning Herald reported this with the headline, “The jazz singer dad who took on God and won”. The Saturday Paper went one further to describe Ron Williams as “the man who beat God” in an article titled, “The legal lion and the Christians”.

Headlines sell newspapers and probably shouldn’t be given too much weight, but there are some interesting cultural insights from these two.

First, God is seen as some kind of enemy to the “jazz singer dads” of our day. God (government) equals conservative, restrictive and punitive; and The People equals playful (jazz), expressive (singer) and Nice Family Guy (dad). How sad! If anyone plays jazz, it would have to be the God of the Bible: creative, spiritual, trustworthy yet hard to pin down, happy to put spirit and flesh together, happy to enter the fray and commotion of embodied life. I can’t guarantee the same for government.

Second, most Australians would have no idea what The Saturday Paper headline was alluding to. What’s a “legal lion”? Unless they have already been educated in the history of Christianity, they have no idea about the way Christians were unfairly persecuted in the early decades and centuries after Christ.[1] It could be called tasteless to gloat over the execution of your opponents by barbaric means, for nothing more than their beliefs. The same journalist who writes such a headline decries ideological violence in his next editorial.

Furthermore, it put me in mind of another story about lions and God-botherers, the biblical account of Daniel facing a den of lions but being protected by an angel from God.

In the Bible (the Old Testament book called Daniel, chapter 6, for any diligent journalists who are reading), Daniel (a Jew) is thrown into a den of lions for worshipping his God (rather than the foreign king he served). The king learns a lesson, as an angel of God protects Daniel and the voracious lions’ mouths remain shut. Even the foreign king recognises the true power of the living God, who honours Daniel’s faithfulness.

It is a beautiful tale of an ‘outsider’ (King Darius of Persia) discovering that God is not only powerful but also kind. The theological beauty of this wonderful ancient story is hard to convey in a headline, but let me give it a go: “King humbled by lion of God”. Those involved in current discussions about chaplaincy might take Daniel as a model for their approach to government (blameless before both God and human authorities, doing no harm, as per Daniel 6:22).

At Bible Society, we don’t have any skin in the game on federal funding of programmes such as chaplaincy. We receive no government funding ourselves. However, we have a big stake in making sure that the central text of our civilisation—the ancient Hebrew Scriptures combined with the writings of the early Christians, compiled in to what we called the Bible—has an appropriate place in the education of each and every Australian.

We need the Bible taught in schools, along with unbiased religious history and worldview studies, whether in the general curriculum or in special classes for those who want it—preferably both. Without an education in the Bible and the history of Christianity, even its opponents can’t get their message across.