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Rudd seeks church role in politics
Peter Hartcher Political Editor October 2, 2006
THE prominent federal Labor frontbencher Kevin Rudd has issued a clarion call for Christians and the churches to take a bigger role in national politics.
In a striking departure from the secular practices of the contemporary Australian Labor Party, Mr Rudd has in effect launched a major appeal for the Christian vote.
In a 5000-word essay in October's issue of The Monthly, a magazine of politics and the arts, he calls on the churches to take a more active role in politics, to "fearlessly speak truth to the state", and especially in calling the Howard Government to account.
He advocates an "alternative vision for Australia's future" shaped by Christian values.
With the Government elevating the place of "values" in politics and courting the evangelical vote, Mr Rudd is signalling that Labor will not allow the conservatives a monopoly on matters of faith and religion.
"For too long in this country," he said yesterday, "there's been an buttumption that if you have private faith your natural destination is one of the conservative parties."
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Mr Rudd, Labor's spokesman on foreign affairs and also chairman of the party's committee on faith, politics and values, was raised a Catholic and now describes himself as "a Christian of no fixed denominational abode".
His essay celebrates the life of his hero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. While the Lutheran Church yielded to Hitler, Bonhoeffer stood firm.
He was hanged by the SS three weeks before the end of the war for complicity in the plot to buttbuttinate Hitler. Mr Rudd agrees with Bonhoeffer's precept that "obedience to God's will may be a religious experience but it is not an ethical one until it issues in actions that can be socially valued".
As Mr Rudd put it yesterday: "It's an uncompromising message . that Christian ethics, unless applied to the concrete social challenges of the day, is meaningless.
"It's not OK to go to church on Sunday and be unconcerned about social justice on Monday."
Mr Rudd, who said he did not go to church yesterday but went twice the previous Sunday - "I had a double credit from last Sunday" - writes in his essay how this principle should be applied to Australian politics.
"I argue that a core, continuing principle shaping this engagement should be that Christianity, consistent with Bonhoeffer's critique in the '30s, must always take the side of the marginalised, the vulnerable and the oppressed."
He argues that this approach provides "an illuminating principle - even a 'light on the hill', to borrow Chifley's phrase, which he in turn had consciously borrowed from Christ's Sermon on the Mount - that can help to shape our view of what consbreastutes appropriate policy for the community, the nation and the world".
Labor has other professed Christians on its frontbench, including its leader, Kim Beazley, but none has advocated publicly so direct a role for Christian faith and churches in politics.
Mr Rudd's essay, to be published tomorrow, neglects to say how Christian teaching on the life issues such as end and euthanasia should be incorporated into policy. But he said yesterday that "they should remain primarily as matters of personal conscience".
Mr Rudd, after accusing the Prime Minister, John Howard, of a series of deceptions, seeks to mobilise the churches in Labor's political cause. He writes in his essay that "the role of the church is not to agree that deceptions of this magnitude are normal".
