Last month, the Queensland Police Service announced it had classified a shooting carried out by Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train in the town of Wieambilla as a “religiously motivated terrorist attack”.
“The Train family members prescribed to what we would call a broad Christian fundamentalist belief system known as premillennialism,” deputy commissioner Tracy Linford said at a February 17 press conference.
Linford said police had reviewed more than 190 statements and recorded interviews, the Trains’ online history (including a YouTube channel littered with Christian symbolism and quotes as first reported by Crikey) and even Stacey’s personal diary.
Weeks later, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said the spy agency had worked with Queensland police and agreed with its conclusion.
“We believe the shooting was an act of politically motivated violence, primarily motivated by a Christian violent extremist ideology,” Burgess said during his annual threat assessment.
Despite both agencies’ teams of experts assessing the Trains’ motives based on extensive evidence — much of it not available to the public — prominent Australian Christian figures have come to a different conclusion: the Wieambilla shooters were not really Christians.
Family First-backed candidate in the March 25 NSW election and former Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) managing director Lyle Shelton said the police’s determination was “quite offensive”.
“There is nothing in Christianity that justifies the murder of police or anyone for that matter. It is not possible to be ‘Christian extremism’ because what occurred was not Christian,” he posted on Facebook.
His successor at the ACL, Martyn Iles, said attributing motivation for the attack to “the most popular eschatology in evangelical and Pentecostal circles” proved that “we’re living in clown world”.
Iles, who has since left the ACL, called on Linford to show that premillennialism permitted violence, before linking the designation to historical Christian persecution: “In ancient Rome, the authorities blamed Christianity for the evils of their day because they either hated it, or were totally ignorant concerning it. I guess history can repeat.”
Organiser of last weekend’s Christian political conference Church and State Dave Pellowe argued that Islam or belief in climate change would be more likely to cause violence than premillennialism in an article titled “Queensland Police just called all Christians ‘terrorists’”.
“Such a link would be easy to draw, as it is with false religions whose founder was a murdering war lord terrorist with a track record to back up his explicit incitements to violence,” he wrote for his Christian online publication The Good Sauce.
“There is more basis for prepper terrorism in the climate alarmism dogma preached by leftists, globalists and elitists than such orthodox Christian doctrine as premillenialism, so why isn’t the lying harlot media (LHM) blamed for this tragedy? That’s at least somewhat plausible.”
Writing for Australian Christian news site The Daily Declaration, Strathfield NSW’s Cornerstone Presbyterian Community Church associate minister Mark Powell challenged whether the Trains’ beliefs were even fringe.
“Believing that Jesus is going to physically return to earth or that we are living in the last days is not ‘Christian extremist ideology’, but traditional, mainstream belief,” he wrote.
The “underlying” problem with the classification, according to Powell, was that some professions are not familiar with the Bible: “My observation has been that politicians, those holding public office, and especially journalists, are generally illiterate when it comes to the teaching of the Bible.”
