Three years ago, I was fired by the evangelical college where I had worked as a programme leader and lecturer for seven years, for a single tweet which challenged evangelical reticence to see the severity of homosexuality invading the Church.
Despite having a good academic CV with over a decade of experience in research, lecturing, and leadership, despite numerous publications in internationally respected journals, and a long track record of excellent student feedback, to this day I cannot find suitable full-time employment as an academic lecturer.
When the twitterstorm was raging, I knew my career might be the price to pay for standing for truth. But despite all the stress and disruption the dismissal has caused for my family and I, I do not regret a single word of my tweet. There are times in a Christian’s life when the need of the hour is to speak the truth that needs speaking, when it needs speaking, how it needs speaking. As the apostles said before their accusers, “we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).
As ever, I am so grateful to be supported by the Christian Legal Centre. I still remember when I first came across Christian Concern some years ago. A liberal colleague of mine told me how one should not associate with them, how they were bringing Christianity into disrepute in the eyes of the world. How fitting that several years later, this “disreputable” organisation would be the one to come to my aid when I myself had become the “disreputable” one to that very college. God has a funny sense of humour!
My legal case is essentially about challenging compromise. Cliff College seems to think you can still brand yourself “evangelical” while thinking or saying nothing about the threat to the Gospel posed by the radical incursions of LGBT ideology into previously faithful denominations, churches, and colleges today. They fail to see that compromise is “a gospel issue”.
While the Employment Appeal Tribunal granted us a hearing on select grounds, this week’s hearing is about our refusal to compromise on the grounds of appeal hitherto denied us. This includes the relevance of the expert report that was compiled for the initial tribunal two years ago, and which demonstrated in detail how my tweet was not simply the expression of a fringe personal belief, but was what most evangelical Christians believe about homosexuality, sin, and the Gospel. In court, this report was summarily dismissed as irrelevant before the tribunal even began.
My lawyer Pavel Stroilov has now compiled an excellent case to challenge the denial of the additional grounds of appeal. A good deal of the details of this are, frankly, over my head, citing numerous legal precedents and parallel cases of discrimination and unfair dismissal to demonstrate the many holes in the opposition’s logic and in the previous tribunal judgment. One such case is the recent groundbreaking Kristie Higgs ruling (a case also supported by the CLC) where the judge ruled in favour of the school worker who had previously been dismissed for reposting an anti-LGBT perspective which contained far stronger language than mine.
One of the opposition’s defences is that my religious views were not discriminated against because their problem was not with my view itself but merely to the offence and subsequent disrepute it caused when expressed. As Stroilov aptly shows, however, the controversy generated was not the result of any desire of mine to cause pointless offence, but was due to an unjust rejection of the view itself.
Every time I return to the details of my case, I still can’t quite believe how we won’t win. I even thought that three years ago, as I sat scribbling my notes the night before my initial disciplinary hearing with the college. I laid out the logic of my argument in detail, citing Scriptures which say equivalent things to what I said, citing a multitude of positive student feedback, and a decade’s worth of peer-reviewed academic and popular publications where I had expressed in various ways the need for Christians to speak the way I spoke in my now-infamous tweet.
I thought, “I know they are going to want to dismiss me, I know there are people they care about placating who want them to dismiss me, but how on earth will they get away with it?!” The College had already taken legal advice prior to the disciplinary hearing and had probably worked out an intended outcome in advance. Despite the many hours of discussion for the day-long disciplinary hearing, the outcome was the same as it would have been if I hadn’t even turned up, as if I had no defence at all.
The same could be said of the tribunal in court a year or so later. We had seven days of back and forth, in which the college demonstrably contradicted itself on numerous counts, where its processes and logic were shown to be erroneous, where the injustice of the entire debacle was plain to see, and yet somehow the judge still ruled in their favour, with a judgment that basically restated the College’s case and hardly engaged with the particulars of ours, as if we had barely turned up. It seems other forces are at work.
“Perhaps you are just wrong! Perhaps you are just sore losers!” may come the retort. Well, if that be the case, they must also think God’s word is wrong, and that Christianity has lost. I am grateful that Christian Concern do not think so, and that they wish to fight on with me in this war against compromise. For too long we have allowed Christian truth to be gnawed at until it becomes barely recognisable from the beliefs and expressions of our forefathers. If Christians are free to speak the truth, we must also be free to challenge the invasions—however subtle—which seek to subvert the truth too.
