Nile's bully tactics do Christians no favours

This article was published in The Drum 2 August 2011

Last year ABC’s Gruen Transfer cast its eye over a series of religious advertising campaigns to see who was selling the spiritual message most successfully. The Jesus all about life campaign of the Bible Society received a tick for its focus on Jesus — the best thing Christians have going for them. Leo Burnett's Todd Sampson suggested that this was a clever way of getting around any associations with the church, which, he noted, was on the nose.

If Sampson is right, Christianity's efforts to improve its position in the PR stakes won't have been helped by Fred Nile's manoeuvres this week.

Rev Nile has been out and about selling his message, defending the place of Scripture in schools, by opposing the teaching of ethics classes in the same time slot. And it seems he's prepared to hold a gun to Barry O'Farrell's head to do it, threatening to use upper house votes to jettison the government's public service wages legislation if O'Farrell doesn't fall into line and remove the ethics class option.