HATE SPEECH PROTECTION - AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE

The Australian government has published an exposure draft of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, which would insert a new federal criminal offence of publicly promoting or inciting racial hatred, including by disseminating ideas of superiority over or hatred toward a person or group on the grounds of race, colour, or national or ethnic origin. The offence turns on intention and on whether the conduct would, in all the circumstances, cause a reasonable member of the targeted group to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety. The draft also provides that the offence does not apply to conduct consisting only of directly quoting from, or otherwise referencing, a religious text for the purpose of religious teaching or discussion.

Public controversy has coalesced around this treatment of religious texts. For some, it represents a necessary acknowledgment that religious traditions teach from inherited writings. For others, it appears as a loophole capable of laundering incitement through the cadence of piety. Australia’s peak Jewish body has publicly questioned the wisdom of such a carve-out, warning that it risks granting dangerous latitude to those who would shelter hostility behind quotation. From another direction comes the concern that the same drafting may chill legitimate debate while failing to capture the most effective forms of contemporary mobilisation. The dispute reveals the difficulty of legislating speech within a public culture structured by fragmentation, circulation and performance.

The Orthodox contribution to this debate lies not in seeking special accommodation but rather in questioning the assumption that Orthodoxy requires a clerical or scriptural exemption in order to remain faithful to its own theological commitments. Literalism has never functioned as a normative mode of reading within the Orthodox tradition. Within it, as opposed to other traditions, Scripture is received through an inherited discipline of interpretation whose purpose is to prevent the conversion of divine speech into an instrument of harm. Where the law struggles to distinguish instruction from incitement, Orthodoxy has long maintained that distinction internally, as part of its grammar of reading.

This position emerges early and decisively. Origen of Alexandria, writing in the early third century, articulated the tripartite structure of Scripture as body, soul and spirit. The literal sense belongs to the body. The moral sense shapes the soul. The spiritual sense discloses divine truth and directs the reader toward transformation. This schema establishes an order of authority rather than a catalogue of meanings. The spiritual sense governs because it alone fulfils the purpose of revelation, which is the refashioning of the human person. A reading that generates contempt or hostility betrays its arrest at the surface of the text, even where its language remains formally accurate.

Later Fathers deepen this insight by locating interpretation within moral formation. St Gregory of Nyssa describes Scripture as pedagogical movement, transferring what is contemplated spiritually into the life of the reader, so that narrative becomes a ladder for virtue rather than a quarry for assertion. St Maximus the Confessor insists that interpretation moves from multiplicity toward unity, from fragmentation toward the coherence disclosed in Christ. The letter remains indispensable, though it never exercises independent authority. Detached from its spiritual telos, it produces distortion rather than illumination.

St John Chrysostom brings this hermeneutic into the register of pastoral realism. Scripture functions as medicine administered within the Church, aimed at healing both reader and community. Accordingly, its purpose lies in the cultivation of humility, repentance and restraint. Saint Athanasius in turn, in his discourse on the Psalms, describes them as a mirror in which the reader encounters the state of the soul before presuming to address the world. Together, these witnesses establish a consistent Orthodox intuition: Scripture forms before it instructs, reshapes before it directs, and judges the reader before it authorises judgement of others.

This interpretive restraint is also reinforced structurally by Orthodoxy’s conciliar instinct. Authority is neither vested in the solitary reader nor concentrated in charismatic assertion. Instead, Scripture is received, tested and corrected within synodality, through councils, liturgy and the long memory of tradition. Conciliarity disperses interpretive power and subjects it to accountability. A tradition ordered in this way does not readily generate unilateral, literalist proclamations. Where interpretation remains communal and answerable, the temptation to weaponise isolated verses recedes.

A further distinction is required between offence and harm. Orthodoxy has never promised insulation from offence. Its saints endure insult, mockery and persecution without demanding protection, and its theology shows little patience for wounded pride elevated into moral principle. Harm occupies a different register. Speech that dissolves communion, dehumanises entire communities or habituates contempt strikes at the relational fabric Orthodoxy regards as constitutive of personhood. The law’s concern with intimidation and fear operates within this horizon. Restraint aimed at preventing harm does not conflict with Orthodox witness, because the tradition already treats disciplined speech as integral to faithfulness.

Thus the fragility of contemporary religious victimhood rhetoric is eposed. A tradition forged under empire, exile and marginality does not confuse the loss of rhetorical licence with persecution. Orthodoxy’s historical memory resists the inflation of inconvenience into martyrdom. It recognises that faith has often flourished under constraint, and that credibility erodes when every external limit is framed as existential threat. Proportion, therefore, functions as a theological virtue.

Underlying these questions lies a deeper divergence over the nature of free speech itself. Liberal discourse often treats speech as an absolute entitlement grounded in individual autonomy. Orthodoxy approaches speech ascetically. Words are acts. They shape the speaker as much as the hearer. Freedom of speech is measured by the capacity to speak without wounding communion. Silence can be an exercise of freedom. Refusal can be an ethical act. The highest use of speech remains blessing rather than assertion.

The legal controversy nonetheless exposes a genuine structural difficulty. Law and Orthodoxy manage meaning on different planes. Law operates externally, inferring function from intent, context, pattern and likely effect. Courts must determine whether an utterance operates as teaching or incitement using evidentiary markers available to them. The religious-text defence reflects this limitation. It gestures toward the existence of interpretive traditions without possessing the competence to adjudicate them from within. Orthodoxy regulates interpretation internally through discipline rather than procedure. The distinction the law seeks to draw already exists structurally within Orthodox practice.

The deeper issue, therefore, is neither whether the law protects Orthodoxy nor whether it threatens it. The law addresses effects that Orthodoxy has always treated as symptoms of internal failure. When interpretation collapses into assertion and Scripture becomes an identity marker rather than an instrument of transformation, it has already exited the Orthodox hermeneutical universe. Legal scrutiny arrives late, responding to consequences ecclesial discipline was designed to prevent at their source.

This returns the argument to the centre of the Orthodox position. Orthodoxy reads Scripture teleologically, ordered toward communion. The Gospel announces this in its very name. Εὐαγγέλιον signifies good news, proclamation directed toward repentance, consolation and reconciliation. When Scripture is mobilised to cultivate contempt for ethnic or racial groups, it has been severed from its Gospel telos, even where its wording remains intact. The tradition has always regarded such severance as spiritual disorder. St Paul’s diagnosis remains decisive: the letter kills, the Spirit gives life.

The ultimate question raised by the present controversy is inward rather than juridical. The Church does not depend on exemptions to preserve its integrity. It depends on its capacity to continue forming readers capable of restraint in an age that rewards excess. Whatever boundaries courts succeed or fail in drawing around incitement, the Orthodox responsibility remains unchanged: to refuse the reduction of Scripture to slogan, to resist the conversion of divine language into instrument, and to insist again that the highest reading of the text is the one that gives life.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 24 February 2026