There was little in the public life of rugby union player Israel Folau to suggest that he was a fire-breathing fundamentalist. He was humble, reticent, even shy. He was never in the news for drunkenness, brawling, or hitting on women in bars – the usual fodder for off-field news about footballers. You might safely assume that he shared the quiet, conservative Christianity of many Australians of Pacific Islands background, but that was about it.

Then, in early 2018, Folau posted to social media the first of two incendiary comments about homosexuality. The first was simply an answer to a question about God’s plan for gay people. ‘Hell,’ he replied, ‘unless they repent of their sins and turn to God.’ Rugby Australia, his employer, counselled him and claimed that Folau had agreed to post no further material critical of gay people.

A year later, as Australia’s first Pentecostal prime minister was taking his government into an election campaign where religious freedom would potentially be a sleeper issue, Folau struck again. He reposted a meme that read: ‘WARNING: Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers, Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolaters. HELL AWAITS YOU. REPENT! ONLY JESUS SAVES.’ Rugby Australia sacked him, which led to more than a year of litigation that ended with a multi-million-dollar payout to Folau, apologies and ‘clarifications’ on both sides, and Raelene Castle, the boss of Rugby Australia, losing her job.

Israel Folau, 2020 (Laurent Selles, Dragons Catalans/Wikimedia Commons)

In the hands of a less intelligent, more ideological writer, the story of Folau and the crucial debate it stirred could have become predictable: Folau the ‘homophobic bigot’ who deserved to lose his job, his livelihood, and his reputation; or Folau the free-speech warrior, who vanquished a ‘woke’ mob. Malcolm Knox, an accomplished sportswriter and former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, offers a much smarter analysis. He avoids mountain-top style declarations about free speech but hints pretty consistently throughout the book that a pluralist society must live with words that offend it.

Knox is a liberal from establishment stock. An uncle was a knight and conservative deputy premier of Queensland, and he attended the exclusive Presbyterian Knox Grammar School. Malcolm is no believer, but if he likes Christianity at all it is the quiet faith of his grandparents. But he documents the hypocrisy that rippled through the liberal outrage at Folau’s comments. Four years earlier, the left cried foul when SBS fired a reporter, Scott McIntyre, for incendiary Twitter posts about Anzac Day. They also went to the barricades to demand the reinstatement of Marxist gender campaigner Roz Ward when La Trobe University suspended her for social media comments. But when the impeccably left-wing employment lawyer Josh Bernstein defended the right of Folau – and any employee – to post material on social media outside work, the social media left attacked him as a sell-out. ‘Clearly, there is a problem when Australian workers are being sacked for speech acts – both religious and non-religious – made in their own time,’ wrote Bernstein. ‘This represents a gross overstep on the part of employers, who prioritise the reputation of the firm over the right of the worker to employability.’

You would fill this entire review with names of commentators and Twitterati, who usually preen as ‘progressives’, who insisted that Folau’s case was different or special because his targets were ‘vulnerable’. But in 2021 few people are more vulnerable than employees of powerful organisations eager to make examples of them for political or commercial reasons. Knox sums up the ideological whiplash you experienced when following the Folau case. ‘Why were conservatives siding with the sacked worker and progressives with the corporation?’

Drawing on the perceptive commentary of ABC sports journalist Tracey Holmes, Knox argues that Rugby Australia sacked Folau at the insistence of its sponsors and, in particular, Qantas. The Qantas CEO Alan Joyce had donated $1 million to the same-sex marriage campaign and Rugby Australia’s chairman, former banker Cameron Clyne, made it clear that all the sponsors had threatened to abandon an already-flailing organisation if Folau stayed. ‘The corporations, meanwhile, won both ways,’ writes Knox. ‘They got to feel good by espousing liberal causes, while getting to feel even better by having free rein over their workers’ opinions.’

Folau, however, is not a straightforward martyr. It was never settled conclusively in court, but he appears to have finessed his way around an implied contractual agreement not to post anti-gay comments. As an old rugby teammate of Knox’s, Andrew Purchas, explains, Folau’s words do hurt young players who have felt compelled to repress their sexuality for decades. Not all conservative Christians supported Folau, either. The most recognisable face of Australian Pentecostalism – after Scott Morrison, perhaps – the Hillsong preacher Brian Houston chided the footballer for his insensitivity and, let us say, elementary theology on sexuality.

But the Folau affair did have a lasting political impact. A week before the 2019 federal election, then Opposition leader Bill Shorten urged Morrison to tell Australians if he believed gay people went to hell. A deft Morrison was prepared for such a demand and said, ‘God’s love is for everyone’ before insisting he was running for prime minister and not pope.

After the election, the case turbocharged the government’s determination to introduce religious-freedom legislation. Most mainstream religions probably require no extra protections. Even some conservative Christians worry about the public perception of a special deal for faith.

As Malcolm Knox’s book demonstrates, Israel Folau’s tweets leapt off the screen and into the bloodstream of Australian politics.