FEDERAL Labor has a problem in church that's just like the problem it has in our other temples of culture.
It's making pals with the priests, not the parishioners. It's cuddling up to the cultural elite again, and not the mbuttes they fail to represent.
And Kevin Rudd, Labor's foreign affairs spokesman next leader, doesn't get it.
In an essay this week, Rudd urges Christians to get involved in politics -- the politics of the Left, that is.
A Christian himself, he complains: "My concern is that in recent years we've only been hearing one set of Christian views on politics -- and that has been an overwhelmingly conservative one."
May God not strike him dead for sinning against the ninth commandment. Yet such is the ignorance of the media on matters Christian that not one commentator said, "Verily, Kev, thou bearest false witness."
The fact is that despite the hysteria over the rise of Pentecostal churches and the election of one senator from the Christian-conservative Family First party, the church elites are as still as furiously of the Left as are the elites of all our cultural insbreastutions. And just as out of touch.
Rudd claims he's still waiting to hear a properly "Christian view on the impact of the Americanisation of our industrial relations system", "a Christian view of global climate change" and "a Christian view of asylum seekers".
Heavens, is he deaf? Or has Rudd in fact not been inside a church in years?
In fact, bishops and senior priests of every one of the big traditional Christian denominations are still harrying bored congregations with sermons on just these topics that Red Rudd himself could have written.
Examples? How many do you want?
Take Anglican Bishop Philip Huggins, a former adviser to then Victorian Labor treasurer Rob Jolly, who last year held an ecumenical church service to protest the "radical and distressing industrial relations proposals of the Howard Government".
Or consider the farewell address the Rev Dean Drayton gave in July as president of the Uniting Church, urging Christians to get into that sandals and sackcloth stuff through "the wise use of energy (and) the protection of the environment".
Drayton went on, in a way that should have had Rudd crying hallelujah!: "Anti-person laws have traded away basic rights before the law. The Government has abrogated our international obligations to asylum seekers. It has turned its face from David Hicks."
The man who took over as the church's president, the Rev Gregor Henderson, used his very first address to likewise lecture the faithful on Hicks, "asylum seekers", workplace relations, the war in Iraq, human rights and the "restrictions of the anti-person laws".
No wonder Bronwyn Pike had no trouble switching from being the Uniting Church's director of justice and social responsibility to serving as a minister in the Bracks Labor Government.
Of course, we're no longer surprised that the leaders of the Anglicans are just as verbose on global warming and the mythical "stolen generations" (yet near mute on end), but it's sad to find the supposedly conservative Catholics little better.
Although Cardinal George Pell may have tried to get priests to talk more about God than the devil, John Howard, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference still issues press releases with such Rudd-tickling headlines as "Bishop calls for justice for David Hicks" and "Catholic Bishop welcomes Government's withdrawal of offshore processing Bill".
A S if that's not enough, these Big Three establishment churches have, with like-minded others, formed the Australian Council of Churches, which does yet more Leftist lobbying.
Check its recent press releases. The ACC denounced the Howard Government's crackdown on people smugglers, criticised its workplace laws, and even issued a joint press release with the neo-pagans of the Australian Conservation Foundation to tell us to "to tackle dangerous climate change".
These are bishops who seem more worried by the heat on earth than by the heat in hell.
No, the church elites are as Leftist as ever. Even Rudd sort of admits that when he protests: "(W)henever an Australian Christian leader speaks out on industrial relations, Iraq or Guantanamo Bay, they are publicly attacked by Howard, Peter Costello, Alexander Downer, Kevin Andrews and the rest of the crew."
What sinners, those Liberals! Fancy, when a bishop now preaches Left politics, the wicked Howard Government now answers back.
But it's not just Liberal politicians who are fed up with this political barracking from the altar.
In 1991, the authoritative National Church Life Survey asked churchgoers what would get them to join some other congregation. Would it be the lure of joining one that preached more the word of God, or one that rather preached on social action?
God was preferred to politics by a margin of three to one, but the mainstream churches wouldn't take heed. No wonder that every one of them have since seen their pews emptying.
So what in this tale of Left-spruiking preachers (and ticked-off parishioners) could possibly have caused Rudd -- and others in Labor -- to think the churches were shunning Labor?
The scary thing for him is that many more conservative Christians have decided to move their worshipful rear ends to the pews of new churches that have more to say on God than climate change, and rather like the idea of people being held responsible for their sins and their own salvation.
I'm referring especially to Pentecostal churches such as the giant Hillsong mega-worship complex, which are blossoming in our outer suburbs.
These are ones that praise hard work as much as they do charity, with the buttemblies of God declaring: "We believe that God wants to heal and transform us so that we can live healthy and prosperous lives in order to help others more effectively."
You can see how the folk of such churches might feel about socialism, say, and you might guess how fed up they were with the politics preached at them at the Anglican or Uniting Churches many long quit.
So, no wonder the Pentecostal churches have grown so fast, with the buttemblies of God alone tripling its followers from 1977 to 1997, and now getting Steve Fielding elected to the Senate.
These, and independent churches like them, have now formed the Australian Christian Churches, which represents up to 200,000 worshippers, who tend to be younger than other Christians and much more likely to turn up to church on Sundays.
And such people can lobby hard if they're stirred. So can sympathetic groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby, led by former SAS commander Brigadier (retired) Jim Wallace, whose big rally in Parliament House in 2004 helped to frighten Labor off backing gay marriage. The ACL isn't very keen on late-term end, either.
These are the people who have Rudd worried. And -- so typical of Labor's new aristocracy -- he's reacted in exactly the wrong way.
Howard the Hypocritical Religious Pretenderferdie When John Howard declared that the former HEAD priest of the Catholic church was his hero, he demonstrated that his party.. You can't get more cuddly with the Vatican HIERARCHY, than sucking up to...
Instead of listening to the disgruntled mbuttes, he's ordered the elites to herd the mob back into a tidy flock.
Instead of trying to woo the conservative parishioners, he's urging their Left-wing priests to preach even louder, as if yet more of the same strident sermons will fix what's ailing the churches and Labor itself.
Think it will work? Kevin, you haven't got a prayer.
