Paul Kelly: God at heart of new strategy

AFTER a decade of John Howard, who has been attacked for bringing religion into politics, the Labor Party has elected in Kevin Rudd a leader who declares this to be his duty.
These are not good days for secularists who aspire to remove the bogy of religion and religious superstition from politics. They are fighting a losing cause. Despite the decline of the hierarchical churches, Australia has two political leaders who are declared Christians and believe in the influence of religious ethics in politics.

Contrary to claims, Australia is not following the US path, where the decentralised, populist, market-based evangelical impulse embedded in America's soil and psyche has led to the rise of the Christian Right, much exploited by George W. Bush. It is an irony, however, that after 10 years of Howard's appeal to conservative, traditional and Christian values amid howls of outrage from his secularist opponents, that Labor has elected as his opponent a declared Christian conservative with a religiously inspired social philosophy based on the gospel.

This would surprise only those who miss the big global trends or who are seriously out of touch. God's comeback is one of the dominant world stories of the past decade. Rarely reported in Australia, it is usually presented as an Islamic manifestation or a pathetic sign of US dysfunction.

The Pew Forum's Timothy Samuel Shah and Harvard University's Monica Duffy Toft conclude: "The belief that outbreaks of politicised religion are temporary detours on the road to secularisation was plausible in 1976, 1986 and even 1996. Today the argument is untenable. As a framework for explaining and predicting the course of global politics, secularism is increasingly unsound."

This constitutes one of the radical messages of the age. During the past 40 years the main religions - Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam and Hinduism - have grown faster than the world's population. From covering 50 per cent of total population at the start of the 20th century they will cover close to 70 per cent by 2025. The trend is apparent in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

It is driven not only by demography. As Samuel Huntington says: "A global phenomenon demands a global explanation. The most obvious cause of the global religious resurgence is precisely what was supposed to cause the death of religion: the process of social, economic and cultural modernisation that swept across the world in the second half of the 20th century." It is apparent from Russia to India, from Nigeria to the US.

Australia is only on the periphery of such trends and has its own story. The decline of the Australian churches is documented with Anglican bishop Tom Frame recently saying: "Christians no longer enjoy political, social or moral ascendancy. Many clergy feel besieged or ignored. Whereas previously the church's position meant a great deal in national affairs and Christian thinkers were accorded a prime place in the public square, Christians can no longer presume they will even be heard, let alone heeded, in an increasingly indifferent and hostile society."

Yet there are contrary trends apparent in politics. There is a growing revolt against the secularisation of public life. Howard's prime ministership captures this trend in its explicit quest to restore values and ethics and mobilise the Christian vote.

Howard recognises the public's mood for a reassertion of standards. Although this does not necessarily involve religion, the revival of tradition, unsurprisingly, usually does contain religious elements.

Rudd's arrival, however, highlights another trend: that political leaders seek to define themselves by religion and Christian action. Rudd presents himself as a leader to restore the ethical balance in Australia. He embraces a dynamic and assertive view of the Christian role in politics that goes beyond anything Howard propounds. As far as I am aware, it goes beyond any Christian vision advanced by any other federal political leader of a main party for many decades. Bob Menzies, during the Christian age of the 1950s, did not talk like Rudd.

In his recent article in The Monthly magazine, Rudd declared his personal hero to be German theologian, pastor and peace activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who defied Adolf Hitler and was executed. Rudd quotes Bonhoeffer in 1937 prophetically saying that "when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die".

Rudd upholds Bonhoeffer's rejection of the two kingdoms doctrine: that the concern of the gospel is the inner person, as opposed to the realm of state affairs.

Bonhoeffer railed at a church for which Christianity was "a metaphysical abstraction, to be spoken of only at the edges of life". For Bonhoeffer, the church must stand "in the middle of the village".

So Labor has a leader who champions Bonhoeffer's muscular Christianity and finds him in the tradition of Thomas More, who defied the king and paid with his life. Why did Rudd write this article? Not because he had spare time on a rainy day. It was part of Rudd's campaign to establish his philosophical credentials for the Labor leadership.

For Rudd, what counts is how the individual Christian should relate to the state. His answer is unequivocal. They should relate by Bonhoeffer's principle of action, and that means taking the "side of the marginalised, the vulnerable and the oppressed". Rudd says the church's role "in all these areas of social, economic and security policy is to speak directly to the state". He wants the church to fill the moral and political vacuums.

There is no compromise. In case you missed the point, Rudd gets specific: "We should repudiate the proposition that such policy debates are somehow simply 'the practical matters of the state' which should be left to 'practical' politicians rather than to 'impractical' pastors, preachers and theologians."

It would be hard to imagine a more comprehensive rejection of aggressive secularists seeking to keep religion and church out of politics. For Rudd, religion has an important and constructive role to play. The state, in turn, has an obligation to listen, if not to endorse.

Rudd lectures politicians on how to deal with the church. He puts secularists on notice: Christian views should be heard and respected. They should not be "rejected contemptuously by secular politicians as if these views are an unwelcome intrusion into the political sphere". That would diminish our civic life.

Rudd knows that Howard operates on the reality that religion is involved in politics.

His response is not to deny this but to embrace it. In political terms, Rudd's target is Howard. In religious terms, Rudd's targets are those Christian leaders and Christians who allow their faith to be turned into the handmaiden of the conservative political establishment.

By arguing for a Christianity based in social action, Rudd hopes to rebuild links between the Labor Party and the churches.

Frankly, it is long overdue, given the mass Christian defection to the Coalition. For Rudd, this seems to be a political strategy and an expression of his Christianity.

The symbolism of Howard and Rudd as rivals is hard to avoid. The message is that while the church and its membership is in decline, the role of religious values in politics is undergoing a revival.

This is driven by deep currents unlikely to dissipate any time soon.

This is adapted from the Acton Lecture: Religion and Politics - Contemporary Tensions, delivered at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney on Monday.