Last night’s stabbing attack at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Western Sydney, after which four people were taken to hospital, has been described as a “terrorist act” by NSW Police commissioner Karen Webb. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was stabbed during a live-streamed sermon, allegedly by a teenager who was arrested at the scene. He was not on a terrorism watch list and police have said they believe he was acting alone. Emmanuel’s condition is critical while the other three members of the Assyrian Church’s congregation had non-life-threatening injuries.
Who is Emmanuel? Crikey looks at the history of the ultra-conservative church leader’s recent history. NB: there is currently no evidence the following views of Emmanuel’s had anything to do with the attack. So far, it’s unclear why the incident has been labelled a terrorism act.
Christian Lives Matter
Emmanuel is the leader of an ultra-conservative sect of the Assyrian Orthodox faith who has attracted “hardline Christians” in recent years with his anti-LGBTQIA+ sermons and pandemic scepticism. A recent video of a representative sermon is titled “Understanding Why LGBT Is A Crime Against God”. He has said that transgender people, in “choosing to be an ‘it'”, had forfeited their humanity.
He was the favourite church leader of the Christian Lives Matter (CLM) movement. Crikey has extensively covered the movement, which emanates from a Facebook group with more than 25,000 members.
CLM was started in 2017, ostensibly out of concern that “Christian brothers and sisters [were] being persecuted in the Middle East”, and frequently campaigns against LGBTQIA+ causes and figures. Its following initially grew around opposition to the passage of marriage equality in Australia.
In March last year, CLM achieved wider notoriety when violence — foreshadowed and then defended by the group — erupted outside a CLM-promoted event featuring then One Nation MP Mark Latham. Two men were arrested and riot police were deployed after LGBTQIA+ protesters with the group Community Action for Rainbow Rights (CARR) and police were attacked outside the event.
CLM denied any responsibility for the violence, joining Latham in blaming CARR. CLM went a step further, doxxing individual members of the protest alongside a post saying: “These evil people need to be held responsible for their actions!!”.
Pandemic scepticism
Emmanuel attracted new followers during the COVID-19 lockdowns for his pandemic scepticism. In July 2021 he called the lockdown restrictions then in place “mass slavery”. He claimed that the risks posed by COVID-19 had been “exaggerated” and that vaccines were unnecessary:
I believe, even though I am not in the medical field and I am not an expert, that stress is the number one killer of the immune system. The vaccine supposedly is to work to strengthen the immune system yet on the other hand we have made people go through so much stress and anxiety that it has destroyed it. Then what is the use of this vaccine?
