Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Religion and Politics in Australia*
Sunday 27 March 2005

The growing influence of conservative
religion on Australian politics.

Terry Lane: Now there was an interesting moment, you might recall, in the Federal election campaign last year, when the Prime Minister launched Mr Don Randall’s campaign for the Perth seat of Canning. The launch was being held, probably significantly, in the Christian Life Centre, and Mr Randall welcomed the Prime Minister as, as he said, ‘a Christian leader’, and said that Mr Latham, on the other hand, ‘as an atheist, or agnostic, or whatever he calls himself these days’, would be less welcome in this particular venue. Mr Howard responded by saying that ‘although I come from a Christian tradition myself, I respect fully the secular nature of our society’. Now on the face of it, it looks like a mild rebuke for the enthusiastically Christian Mr Randall. But Marion Maddox reckons that there is more to this exchange than meets the ear. Dr Marion Maddox teaches at Victoria University in Wellington, in New Zealand, and she went there from positions in Adelaide, where she specialised in the subject of religion and politics. Marion Maddox has written a book called ‘God Under Howard: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics’, and when I spoke to her from Wellington, I asked her what it is that she thinks was going on in Mr Howard’s rejoinder to Mr Randall.

Marion Maddox: Well if it had been just that one incident, then we probably would be able to say nothing very much was going on, and as you put it, it was a rebuke. But what was kind of striking about it in the context of the election campaign was that it was at a time when particularly the conservative side of politics seemed to be getting religion in a big way, and going to some efforts to kind of play up its religious side. You know we had in the months leading up to the election campaign, Peter Costello’s famous appearance at Hillsong church; we had the increasing emphasis on family values that seemed to mean somehow a particular religiously-endorsed kind of family; we had the debates about the transfer of federal funding to mainly independent, low-fee Christian schools, most of which are identified with a particularly conservative kind of Christianity. So there was a lot of kind of religious talk going on around that time, and that’s why I think an incident like that Canning campaign launch, we’ve got to kind of look at it and see whether there might be a bit more to it. And what it immediately kind of strikingly reminds me of, is a pattern of conversation that American religious right leaders are very good at, and that they actually talk about as a strategy. You know, this is how you do it. So it’s not like we’re kind of making up the idea that there’s a strategy; at least in America, people who excel at political rhetoric know and say that they’re doing a strategy, which is where you kind of cultivate somebody more conservative than yourself, or encourage them to put a more conservative or more extreme sounding view than you’re prepared to articulate yourself. But then you distance yourself from it, and say, ‘Oh well, I wouldn’t want to go as far as that’. And the effect of it is that you manage to convey two messages at once. So people who want to, hear that the Prime Minister, in the Canning example - if we read it in the context of that well-known American strategy - people who want to hear that the Prime Minister is a good Christian, God-fearing man, can take the message from what Don Randall said, but other people who might be in a secular society such as Australia made uneasy by that kind of association, can say, ‘Oh well no, Howard immediately distanced himself and said “No, I respect the secular nature of Australia”.’ But meanwhile, the people at whom you might say that the religious message is being targeted, they can discount that and say, ‘Oh well, of course he would have to say that wouldn’t he, because of all those left-leaning, liberal trendy elites who force him into it’. So it’s sort of a way of saying two things at once to different audiences, without hopefully scaring off either of them.

Terry Lane: But if Mr Randall’s comment came as unexpected, that is the criticism of Mr Latham for being ‘an atheist or agnostic or whatever he calls himself these days’, you’d have to say either Mr Howard has the rhetoric well-rehearsed and ready to deliver on demand, or he’s very quick-thinking and cunning.

Marion Maddox: Oh, well, I mean we’ve got plenty of examples subsequently of him doing a similar kind of thing within his own conversation. I’m thinking there of something that happened after my book came out, so I don’t talk about it in the book, but in his valedictory speech to parliament on the 9th December, 2004 - you know they make those valedictory speeches, they say ‘I wish all the Comcar drivers a Happy Christmas, and thank you to all the Parliament House catering staff’, and all that kind of thing, and they wish each other a Happy Christmas and a good break. And in amongst his remarks to that effect, John Howard said, ‘And it’s very important that we remember that Christmas is not just any celebration, but it commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the most significant person in human history’, he said. So people that come from another religious tradition might think that that’s quite a strong statement. And then he went on, and he said, ‘I think I try myself to live up to Christian principles and I think that it’s very important for people who do embrace that religious tradition, to say so. We don’t wear it as much on our sleeves as perhaps people in other countries do, but nevertheless our society is based on Judaeo-Christian values.’ So he went on at quite some length about identifying himself with Christianity, and Christianity with the basis of Australian society. But at the same time, tossing in plenty of references: ‘I respect the secular nature of our society’, just like what he said in the Randall exchange. And I think there have been plenty of examples recently, particularly on the conservative side of politics, this kind of talking up the Christian content of ideas like values and tradition and so on, while at the same time being careful not to be too explicit in ways that might put off the secular significant majority of the Australian population.

Terry Lane: The critical question Marion is, do you think that he believes it, or is he cynically playing to a particular bloc?

Marion Maddox: Well, who can see into the soul of the Prime Minister, or into anybody’s soul for that matter? But we can look at what he’s told us himself over the years about his religious position. He was interviewed, as all the leaders of parties were, by Geraldine Doogue on Compass, both for the last election and back in 1998, but John Howard was the only person who was still a leader, who had been leader in 1998, so he’s the only one who we got to hear the religious views of twice. And in both of those interviews, he described himself as not too passionately committed I suppose. In the 2004 interview he told Geraldine Doogue, ‘I go to church a bit more often than Christmas and Easter, but not every Sunday’. In the 1998 interview, he said that he respected people who identified with the emotional evangelical aspects of Christianity, the traditions that make a lot out of talking about your own salvation narrative, when you were saved, that kind of thing. He said he respected those, but that was not his inclination. So you get from what he said about his own religious practice over the years, you get the feeling that perhaps like many Australians, he has a sort of - well, I don’t want to put words into somebody’s mouth about their faith - but perhaps a fairly general or amorphous kind of religious commitment that expresses itself in occasional religious practice, ‘going to church a bit more often than Christmas and Easter’ but not necessarily in a very regular way. But the fact that it’s become so much more politically prominent over the last few years, I think that does reflect a changed perception about the political role of faith. I just can’t imagine in previous Christmases that either John Howard or any other leader really, would have made statements as strong as those that he made in last year’s valedictory speeches. I think it has to be indicative that in the lead-up to the last election, a new item popped up on the Prime Minister’s biography on his web page, you know on the web pages they have, career highlights and things, and John Howard’s biography just before the last election sprouted a new entry which was that he’d been a Sunday School teacher. I’m sure when I printed off the biography previously, that hadn’t been there. Why did the Australian public suddenly need to know that some time in the dim, distant past the Prime Minister had been a Sunday School teacher? I just think there was a sort of not necessarily a shift in the faith of individuals, but a shift in the way that it was presented to the public.

Can I give you another example? The Women’s Weekly ran that interview with leaders’ wives, and both Mrs Howard and Mrs Anderson made a lot about their religious faith. Now I certainly wouldn’t want for a minute to say that that was in any way insincere, but I just think that it’s something that … we’ve had very religiously sincere leaders and their families in the past, but that hasn’t been something that people have chosen to play up in their political persona, or in interviews with a media outlet. So I just think all those things kind of build up a picture that the individual little instances don’t necessarily demonstrate on their own.

Terry Lane: I’m talking to Dr Marion Maddox about her book, ‘God Under Howard: the rise of the religious right in Australian politics’. And talking about the Prime Minister’s religious past, you say that he didn’t learn his Christianity from John Wesley (because after all there are frequent references to his Methodist upbringing) so much as from The Saturday Evening Post. And you got that from his brother.

Marion Maddox: I did, yes.

Terry Lane: So it must be authentic.

Marion Maddox: Well, anyone who’s got a family I’m sure knows that people have different memories of the same events. And unfortunately John Howard himself declined to be interviewed, so I was left relying on the views of those who were ready to be interviewed. But yes, the picture that I got was, as you say, we hear quite a bit about the Howard family’s Methodist background, and they were regulars at the church, which across the road from their house in Earlwood, but the Methodist church of that era, in the 1950s, didn’t reflect very much of the political tenor, we might say, of the grown-up John Howard’s positions. For example, the Methodist church in the 1950s, when I went back through its newspapers and talked to people who’d been involved at the time and so on, it actively campaigned for an open door to refugees, it campaigned for recognising Aboriginal peoples as the original owners of Australia, which I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I wonder why then if John Howard is so influenced by Methodism, why did he absolutely refuse all attempts to have the word ‘owners’ put into the preamble to the Constitution that he proposed?’ It advocated no-fault divorce in contradiction to the positions of many in the coalition parties who’ve argued that we should to back to making divorce harder. The Methodist church in the 1950s was arguing for no-fault divorce. So on many fronts, social and economic, the Methodist church in the 1950s was far from being a source for the politics of the grown-up John Howard, seemed to stand diametrically opposite to the positions that are now often attributed to it retrospectively. So I thought, ‘Well, this is a bit funny’. And then when I was talking to Bob Howard, John Howard’s brother, he said ‘Well yes, we went to church, but we didn’t engage with the political kind of themes that were coming through in the Methodist church at the time’. In fact the parents, in his memory, were quite critical of people like Alan Walker and other leading figures of Methodist social justice campaigns, you might say. And what the family read was not the Methodist church newspaper, but The Saturday Evening Post. So the kind of defining literature was all those log-cabin-to-the-White-House kind of stories that The Saturday Evening Post specialised in, a smorgasbord of American consumerism, you might say, being delivered to the family mailbox every fortnight. And they waited eagerly for the next instalment, and that was the more influential kind of world view in the family.

Terry Lane: This is one of the striking differences between the relationship between Bush and his electorate and Howard and his electorate. Bush can proceed on the assumption that, what is it now, something like 40% of Americans call themselves born-again Bible-believing Christians. So it’s a huge voting bloc that the Republican Party has been able to command in presidential elections, and that’s pretty simple and straightforward. But in Australia, there are two more or less equally balanced churches. There is what we might call the mainstream or the old churches, and the new churches that are preaching the prosperity gospel - If God loves you, you’ll be rich - The Hillsong Message. But the old churches are a real problem, it seems to me, for anybody who wants to make a cynical appeal to religion in Australia, because as you say, the research shows that while regular churchgoers might vote conservative, their views are not conservative; they have quite sort of softly radical views on issues like welfare, Aboriginal welfare, reconciliation, land rights, treatment of refugees, attitudes to war, so that you could imagine that there are a lot of people in the churches in Australia who vote for Howard, but feel uncomfortable about what he does.

Marion Maddox: Yes, and one of the themes that I pick up in the book is that over the terms of Howard government, Howard and his senior ministers have gone to a lot of effort on the one hand, to do this kind of religious allusion in their conversation that picks up conservative Christian themes, but on the other hand, to devote just as much energy telling the mainline churches, the older denominations, to shut up and keep out of politics and stop meddling in what doesn’t concern them; stick to spiritual matters. We’re never quite told what those are, but apparently something that’s not political.

Terry Lane: Not just ‘not understand’ them, but particularly in the rhetoric of Mr Downer, there are constant references to the ignorance of church leaders: ‘You are ignorant, you don’t understand, you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know the facts’, as though somehow they are - what might we say - disenfranchised because they don’t know enough. I mean that’s a funny approach to democracy itself.

Marion Maddox: It is a curious approach, isn’t it. Actually I once put that view to Harry Herbert, a prominent social justice spokesperson in the Uniting church, and he said, ‘Well, come off it, politicians aren’t always on top of – they might be on top of their specific portfolio area, but they have to cover so many areas that they can’t know all the detail of every policy that they propose either.’ Both church leaders and political leaders rely on advice, they rely on information from a range of sources, and if we’re going to start telling people that they can’t be involved in public debate because they’re not specialists on every single topic that comes up, then as you say, the consequences for democracy might be a bit constraining.

Terry Lane: We’re going to run out of time soon, and we have to get on to what is really the sinister theme in your book, one part of which is the role played by right-wing think-tanks in Australia to try to purge the mainstream churches of their sentimental radicalism, and the other is the intrusion of the American evangelicals into the Australian political scene by a program of recruiting influential people. Now tell us about The Family and what it does.

Marion Maddox: The Family is one of the names of an organisation that has existed since the 1930s, but it has had various different titles. One is The Family, one is The Fellowship, one is International Christian Leadership, one is the International Council for Christian Leadership, and right at the beginning when it was just American, it was called the National Council for Christian Leadership. And I just for convenience went with The Family as the most recent name that it goes by. It was founded in the 1930s by a Norwegian actually, immigrant to America called Abraham Vereide, and he started it because he was worried that Seattle, where he lived at the time, was at risk of Communist takeover, and the solution was prayer groups meeting with the most powerful men, it was in those days, to hold up the nation in prayer, and so he started what became the Prayer Breakfast Movement in America, meetings of politicians, business leaders, industrialists, meeting outside of a church context to pray together, read the Bible, and discuss their lives in the context of what they’ve read. I’ve just been reading Abraham Vereide’s biography and it’s full of testimonies about the effectiveness of this, like the time when a labour union leader came to one of the breakfasts and immediately was moved to confess to all the industrialists present how much he’d been a thorn in their side, and that he was going to go away and not disrupt production any more. So Abraham Vereide, although he talked about it in politically neutral terms, plainly saw his movement as having a political goal.

Terry Lane: And an international political goal, a global political goal.

Marion Maddox: Definitely. In fact, reading his biography, it’s a diary of his travels. He spends apparently most of his life trotting the world to spread the message of National Prayer Breakfasts, and it became a part of the American political calendar in 1953, when Eisenhower sort of gave presidential endorsement to what is still an annual Presidential, as it’s called, Prayer Breakfast in America, but it’s financed significantly and organised by The Family, as their archives and tax records show. And it has been copied in many countries, including Australia, which has a National Prayer Breakfast each October or November, and in a number of African countries and New Zealand has the Wellington Prayer Breakfast also in October. So it’s been very successful in having an international spread, and it seems to be regularly associated with these groups of powerful people who meet at other times through the year for prayer and discussion. And we might all say ‘Well, what a very admirable thing, and why should anybody worry about that?’ But the worrying aspect of it, as a number of American journalists who’ve investigated The Family have demonstrated, is that The Family itself as an organisation, has aspirations which are quite undemocratic. So Geoffrey Charlotte, an American journalist who lived in a house run by The Family, a training house, for some time, he quoted leaders of the organisation saying things like, ‘Everything you need to know about leadership you can see in the cross: it’s vertical, not horizontal. We elect our leaders but Jesus elects his, and what it means to be a leader elected by Jesus is that you can do anything you like and nobody can judge you, because you’ve got divine endorsement’. So in other words, the sorts of checks and balances on leaders that we normally assume to be an essential part of the democratic process, The Family sees as an obstacle to divine rule, and if the law comes from God, rather than from humans, then why wouldn’t you want to just impose it in quite a direct way. And The Family, in its discussions of its own goals does have quite a specific commitment to putting what it regards as Christian values, which of course are not what many Christians would regard as Christian values, into place through the law, regardless really of whether it’s endorsed by the majority of the people.

Terry Lane: Christian values, including stoning to death blasphemers, adulterers and homosexuals. And unruly children.

Marion Maddox: And rape victims who’ve been raped in the city. If you didn’t cry out, never mind if you had a sock in your mouth, you deserve what you had coming to you. That’s the views of Christian Reconstructionism, which is a kind of extreme Christian sect, most Christians would say, but that has been disproportionately influential in relation to its size in spreading the idea that perhaps not the extreme penalties that you’ve just cited, but perhaps a milder form of Dominionism, as it’s often called - Christians, taking dominion over this world - is the way to hasten Jesus’ return. Jesus won’t come back until Christians have taken over and made the world ready by imposing so-called Christian laws.

Terry Lane: Yes, it’s both funny and scary. Marion, thank you very much for your time. I’ve been talking to Dr Marion Maddox about her book, ‘God Under Howard: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics’, and it’s published by Allen & Unwin.

net.au/rn/talks/natint/stories/s1331259.htm .. shit! sorry, closed it without checking and trying to find it, again ..

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/natint/stories/s1331259.htm