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30 May 2005
Christianity and Politics: An Address by Kevin Rudd
Address delivered by the Hon Kevin Rudd (ALP), Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs on May 29, 2005 at the Sunday Night Live Service, Wesley Mission, Sydney.
Kevin Rudd
It is good to be back here at the Wesley Mission. I said to Gordon as we first came in tonight that I first darkened these doors of the old building as a 17 year old questing. I sat up the back of the middle Lyceum Theatre that you saw on the screen before and listened to the Rev Alan Walker preach. It is good to be back some years later.
I have been asked tonight to talk about Christianity and politics. This is a hazardous business, an exceptionally hazardous business. So hazardous that saner men than myself would not hazard it.
Politics at its worst can be little more than the pursuit of self interest. Christianity at its best can be the pursuit of the common good of all human kind. In the view of some, never the twain shall meet. In fact, there are whole philology’s constructed around the view that these are two difference spheres — the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Earth.
Of course there is the added complication that in politics anyone who happens to be Christian, when they speak of these matters, runs the great risk of being accused of hypocrisy. In many cases the charges may be well deserved for we all fall short of the ideals by which we stand, and on this I am no exception.
But this great tradition of the gospel speaks to both our personal lives and our public lives. The great debate about Christianity and the state is as ancient as the church itself, because when Jesus of Nazareth said “to render unto Caesar those which are Caesar’s, and to God those things which are God’s”, the great debate began. When three centuries after that Caesar, in the person of Constantine, decided to take the Gospel unto himself, the debate took on a new dimension. This is a debate which has raged in the following centuries since.
In speaking of this tonight I’m intensely mindful of how these debates have raged through history, for good and for ill, and how these debates are seen today, for good and for ill.
None of the above I believe is an appropriate pretext for silence given some of the great challenges of our age. Challenges both for the community of faith, and challenges also for the way in which the community of faith expresses its view to the secular space and place which is our national political life.
So I stand here tonight before you mindful of those who have stood on this site over the last 100 years. Great men and great women, some of whose names have been mentioned here tonight. Mindful also of the tradition of Methodism which is so much a part of this place. You may not know it, and I certainly didn’t until I had just finished reading the Hattersly biography of Wesley, that it was 300 years ago today that Samuel Wesley, father of John and Charles, made a spectacular foray in to the sphere of British politics. Samuel Wesley, in Lincolnshire, in a by-election in May 1705 against all local council, as a member of the local clergy elected to throw his full weight in a campaign against the Whig Party candidates for that seat because of his deep concerns about the loyalty of the Whigs to the established church. Sam backed the wrong horse. The Whigs won. Sam, his wife Susanna, and infant children including John aged 2, came close to being driven out of town. Samuel Wesley wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the following terms that an unruly mob had gathered outside of the vicarage to, quote, “squeeze my guts out”, something I hasten to add, Gordon, the Labor party has never threatened to do to you.
John Wesley himself, who, together with Whitfield, were the fathers of the English revival, had a much less institutional and a deeply theological view of Christian social responsibility. It was in 1764, Wesley wrote, and I quote, “after providing for one’s own household things and needs for life and godliness, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, relieve the sick, the prisoner, the stranger, with all thou hast”. It was in this tradition that Wesley, in 1746, established the People’s Dispensary at the Foundry in London, to “give physick to the sick”, that is, to provide for those who could not afford the doctors or medicines of the time. It was in this tradition that George Whitfield built a school at Kingswood to educate the son’s of coalminers.
Wesley and Whitfield prayed together at Oxford as members of Oxford’s Holy Club, so practical social action was an automatic consequence of Christian wakening. Of course, this is the tradition of Wesleyan Christianity, and has been alive in this mission for more than a century and is alive and well with us today. W.G. Taylor, whom Gordon mentioned was Superintendent of the Mission in 1890, convened a conference of unionists with the object of reducing working hours to reasonable limits stating “the remedy of social misery was agitation for laws which would make sweating impossible”. George Martin, a President of the Methodist Conference argued in 1894 that “if the church neglected the great social issues of the day it was no better than the priest and the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan”. In 1897 a miner’s strike broke out in Locknow, west of Sydney. Routhledge, of the Central Methodist Mission, attacked the low levels of wages in a variety of trades and as retiring president of the 1903 Methodist Conference declared himself to be a Christian Socialist. P.J.Steven, a colleague of Routhledge, who took over as president of the CMM in 1913, at the time of the miners strike, was quoted in the Daily Telegraph as a being a forceful advocate of trade unionism.
These views were by no means the universal views of those who shaped the work of this Mission over this last century or more, but they were, nonetheless, strong views, and consistent with the tradition that many who are Christian in politics come from, and I am one of them.
Where does that leave us in response to the great questions of our age today? One model on offer in terms of the Church in its relationship to the state today is one in which the church really becomes a cheer-squad for the state, whichever political party happens to constitute the state at that particular time. In my view that is not appropriate, it has never been appropriate. At its worse this model has the church subsumed by the state as has happened in Germany in the 1930s requiring extraordinary acts of moral courage by Christians such as Bonhoffer to register as an authentic Christian voice only to pay for that with his life.
The second model on offer, often driven by an understandable anxiety about the excesses of the first is for the church simply to remain silent on the great questions of the day. However, silence equals consent, and this I believe is also not an appropriate approach given the tradition of the Gospel.
The third approach is for the church to engage in an informed critique of government policy. Armed with the great and continuing trues of the Christian tradition, and informed also by a practical understanding and knowledge of the policy terrain of the debates of our time. This is the model which I believe to be appropriate.
Some will undoubtedly say: “what are the great and continuing trues which don’t lie beyond dispute?” This has given rise to much discussion and debate. But my view is this: the Gospel records Jesus saying you must be born again if you are to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet, the Gospels record the same Jesus as saying that to enter the kingdom of heaven we will be asked not how pious we have been but whether we have fed the hungry and whether we have clothed the naked.
So Christianity is not only about self but also about society. What are the moral concerns of our contemporary circumstances which we in politics must address? Family breakdown is a moral concern, the impact of family breakdown on children is a moral concern. Violence, virtual or physical is a moral concern. Equally, a family’s ability to put bread on the table is a moral concern. Just as a family’s ability to fight for a just wage is a moral concern. So too is a family’s ability to afford decent health care, and a decent education for its children, a moral concern. As is our treatment of those who cannot readily defend for themselves, including those who come to seek refuge from other lands as well as the one and a half billion others in the wider human family who wake this day in abject poverty. Remember always Wesley’s great injunction, the world is my parish. And then there is the custodianship of the planet itself. These are all in my argument legitimate moral concerns. Not morality written narrowly, but morality broadly consistent with the traditions of the Gospels, although there are some who are more comfortable in the marketplace of our national politics who prefer to see morality reached narrowly.
So if Christianity and the church do have a role in our national social and therefore political life, and the moral terrain of its engagement is broad rather than narrow, what voice should Christians and the church bring to bear? Sometimes I believe we complicate this unnecessarily. Jesus gave us the great commandment as our guide, to love God, and to love our neighbour as ourself. In other words, to put others first and ourselves last, something that does not come naturally to those of us in politics. This I think is the revolutionary message of Christian politics. Does this provide us with the neat mathematical formula for the purposes of informing every aspect of the public policy debate? Of course not. But the principal at stake here is that Christians and the church seek to promote ethical standards but based on this core Christian teaching: maintain a healthy distance from the state and provide a cogent critique where necessary when governments simply stray too far.
The church, in my argument, has a fundamental and continuing role in all of this. It is fashionable in this century to criticise the church. What I say is this: the church is and remains an overwhelming force for good in the world, and in that spirit, the church, and God through the church, should not become the property of any one political party.
This morning in Brisbane at our local Anglican church we sang three hymns by Wesley. Remember Wesley always claimed he died an Anglican. A premonition perhaps of my coming here tonight, but I doubt it. The last hymn we sang was And Can it Be, the battle hymn of Methodism. I think it has become the battle hymn of Christianity. My favourite verse in my favourite hymn runs like this: “When I defused a quickening ray I woke the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed thee…”
For 100 years on this site this Gospel has been preached here and as we go forth from here this night let us take this message of the Good News to the hungry and the naked in this city, and the nation, and the world beyond.
The Hon Kevin Rudd (ALP), Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs
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