It’s relatively common to find that public commentary on religion doesn’t really understand its subject. A lot of that can be shrugged off, but when it comes from a significant agency like the Human Rights Commission, it’s time to be concerned. The Commission has released a report, Conversion Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand, which purports to offer “insights and recommendations from a human rights perspective.” If put into practice, the report’s conclusions would stretch the boundaries of the law and seriously infringe religious freedom.
Let’s start with some background. The Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 made it an offence to carry out “conversion practices”. This means “any practice, sustained effort, or treatment” directed at an individual and intended to change or suppress their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. The Act gives some examples: “encouraging” someone to believe that their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression needs changing because it is a “defect or disorder” is a conversion practice. So is a “prayer-based practice” that intends to change or suppress someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, though the mere expression of a “belief or religious principle” is not a conversion practice as long as it is not meant to change or suppress these things.
Conversion practices can be criminal offences, punishable by three years in prison if performed on an under 18 year old or five years in prison if they cause “serious harm” to an adult. There’s also a civil complaints regime; someone who believes they have been subject to a conversion practice can complain under the Human Rights Act. That complaint will be received, and mediated, by the Human Rights Commission. That means the Commission’s beliefs, findings, and recommendations could have important real-world consequences.
Conversion practices are, as the name implies, things that are actually done. But the Commission’s focus is wider than this.“Conversion practices,” it says, “are underpinned by a set of beliefs that can be broadly described as conversion ideology.” While it stops short of wanting to prohibit this “ideology”, the implications are clear. It’s not enough to tackle the practices; the beliefs themselves must be confronted. In fact, the report says this quite openly: “While this ideology is not unlawful in Aotearoa, eliminating conversion practices is almost impossible without addressing the underpinning root beliefs.” This focus on “conversion ideology” and beliefs more generally sets the tone for the report as a whole.
Nor does the Commission seem to understand the beliefs it critiques. The report has a lot to say about “religious communities” on the basis that these are “one of the most frequent settings for conversion practices”, especially “Christian religions”. The report states, for example, that, “conversion ideology can co-exist with a religious belief that humans are sinful and are in need of being ‘saved.’” The scare quotes are revealing. The belief that all of us sin and therefore need the grace freely offered by Jesus is a completely mainstream and orthodox Christian belief, one that doesn’t single out anyone on the basis of sexuality, gender identity, or anything else.
Shortly afterwards, the report gives an example of the kind of religious practice it is concerned with: “Catholic leaders recommend celibacy as the path for those with diverse sexualities. This is still, however, a form of suppression of Rainbow people and may, in some cases, constitute a conversion practice.” But celibacy isn’t just for Rainbow people or those with diverse sexualities—every Christian believer is called to live out the virtue of chastity, which among other things means being celibate if you’re unmarried. The Commission apparently misunderstands fairly elementary aspects of Christian belief and wrongly views them as singling out some people when they actually establish norms for everyone who adheres to the faith.
The Commission discusses some specific conversion practices, many of which are disgusting and indefensible—“beatings, whippings, burnings, ‘corrective’ rape”—conduct that was, is, and always should be, criminal. But it also casts the net wider than this, wide enough to include “rituals, prayer, ... and worship.” It goes on to promote advice for religious communities from those who have experienced conversion practices, and recommends that religious communities “investigate options” for applying that advice. This is evidently aimed at correcting the beliefs the Commission sees as entwined with conversion ideology. The advice includes “‘un-gendering’ your language” and therefore using gender-neutral terms in teaching and worship, because using "He" to refer to God “reinforce[s] the importance of the gender binary and male dominance”.
The advice also recommends that religious communities revise their interpretations of sacred texts, hold non-religious events, celebrate events like Pride Month, and display “visual signs of affirmation” like Pride flags. Earlier in its report, the Commission says that the prohibition on conversion practices “does not interfere with the right to hold a religious belief,” but merely limits “how that belief is put into action”. It can be difficult to draw a bright line between belief and conduct, but advice like this is getting very close to crossing that line.
The Commission doesn’t stop there either. It wants the Act to be reviewed and strengthened. First, it wants a lower threshold for criminalisation of conversion practices involving adults. Second, it wants one of the key safeguards against unfair prosecution removed. The Act says that any criminal prosecution requires the Attorney-General’s consent; the Commission says this safeguard should go. More generally, the Commission wants to be funded to deliver “conversion practices education” in schools, the social and health sectors, and in faith communities. It also wants the Government to “improve” the relationships and sexuality education offered in schools, and it wants the media to adopt a ‘no-platform’ policy for “misguided debate”.
The Commission is charged with advocating for human rights and promoting them through publicity and education. But its report leans heavily in favour of one set of rights—freedom from discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity—and pays little more than lip service to rights that uphold religious freedom. It is particularly concerning that the Commission apparently wants religious communities not merely to avoid illegal conversion practices, but to change or suppress entirely legal beliefs and other practices.
Hopefully the Commission’s actual practice as a quasi-judicial body will be less ideologically freighted than its advocacy. But if the Commission is unable to strike an appropriate balance between competing rights, perhaps it’s time to reconsider whether the same body that promotes reports like these should also be trusted to accept and mediate complaints on the very issues those reports concern.
