January 2007

Politics and the Inheritance of Reason

Alastair Furnival

With the ascension of Kevin Rudd to the Labor leadership, much is once again being made of “the Christian vote” as a decisive influence in Australian elections.  Some have been sufficiently sceptical to suggest that this is little more than clever political positioning.

At the same time, we are witnessing a coordinated and concerted effort to discredit and suppress the impact of Christian teachings within our parliaments.  This has been more than mildly successful in the past year, with a majority of Federal parliamentarians rejecting restrictions both on human embryo cloning, and on access to chemical abortion.

The obvious conclusion from these events is that our Senators and Federal Members are far from afraid of a voter backlash based on Christian beliefs.

Naturally, one wonders whether there is any coherent explanation to such apparently disparate assertions, that Christianity is simultaneously a critical electoral asset and a parliamentary irrelevance.

Perhaps Melbourne writer Pamela Bone, in a recent article  (Let’s have faith in society: and keep God out of it, The Australian, 9 January) unwittingly provides the most compelling response, when she writes: “Everything good in religion can be had without religion.”

While the statement is offered as a defence of nihilism, it is telling about how politics filters faith – and more specifically Christian teachings.

Those parliamentarians willing to explicitly link a policy position to a question of doctrine, are generally regarded by colleagues as a curiosity.  For the mainstream, Christian faith and its testament are generally subsumed in the language of ‘values’, ‘family’ and ‘community standards’. 

Beyond this code - as last year’s votes on life issues show - a subtle line is drawn between the broad Christian message of charity and protection of ‘life’, and what is regarded as a more dogmatic position of traditional Christianity.

This is not simply a matter of clever politics.  Simmering below the surface of the political translation of Christianity are two common judgements: that parliaments are not organs of the faith in a pluralist society; but that all our institutions and their history are founded in that faith.

There is a broad acceptance, both in society and in the political class that the moral views inherent in every legislative decision require some reference point, and that reason is not sui generis.

Rodney Stark, in his 2005 book The Victory of Reason, argues that reason, and particularly science, are products of Christianity: that an orthodox faith - in contrast to the other Abrahamic orthoprax faiths (concerned with laws rather ideas), and the Eastern belief systems without a godhead at all – was able to permit theology without automatic heresy, and therefore foster a spirit of inquiry which led to the development of scientific method.

The import of this is that Christianity is widely recognised not only as our dominant faith, but as our social and moral inheritance.  Both the secularisation project of the Enlightenment, and the moral relativism of post-modernism have been forced to recreate and defend the goods which we receive from Christianity – a little like using reverse engineering to dodge technology software copyright.

Even if Richard Dawkins – who believes meaning is best found in a metaphor of the body as a vehicle fuelled and driven by self-propagating DNA – believes science should supersede religion, he would do well to recognise that the society which permits such views without violence does so because of its Christian foundation.  I’m sure the Arabic translation of The God Delusion burns beautifully.

The late Pope John Paul II, in his 1998 Encyclical Letter, Fides et Ratio, reinforced this position with the elegant observation that: “… Christian philosophy is objective, in the sense that it concerns content.  Revelation clearly proposes certain truths which might never have been discovered by reason unaided, although they are not of themselves inaccessible to reason.”

Which is the obverse of Pamela Bone’s contention.  Certainly, one can accept and implement the ‘good’ beliefs of Christianity without believing, but one should not be so arrogant as to presume that these goods were simply the product of abstract philosophical imagining.

The corollary to this, which is understood (if rarely stated) at both the social and political level, is that Christianity is a force of conservatism.

The difference between following Christian beliefs and an atheist pursuit of good, is that the former requires discipline and forbearance, while the latter is simply a preference offered to the democracy.

The mainstream parliamentary position described above, recognises this tension, and seeks an accommodation between Christian tradition and contemporary social liberalism.

This is consistent with some contemporary theology, which diverges from the Catholic and other orthodox positions to accept the erroneous assertion that doctrine must bend to desire.

It’s not just those of us who seek traditional Christian truth who can find this compromise galling.

The former Conservative MP, Matthew Parris, writing in The Spectator on 18 November last (Why is it so hard for Christian ‘moderates’ to defend their views with passion?), noted in relation to homosexuality, and an evangelical Christian’s advice to “hate the sinner, not the sin”, that: “For someone to tell me that what I may feel or do is sick, disordered and morally rotten – but they still love me, pity me and mourn my sinfulness – is no less odious to me for being offered with a smile and a handshake.”

Quite so.  Not that hatred should take any part in the true Christian message in any case, but it illustrates the difficulty in extracting the values from the faith.

But perhaps this is simply a necessary feature of modern spin politics.  One might compare the ‘theology’ to which Parris objects to the US Democrats’ position of “supporting the military, but not the war.”

Regardless of the conflict between the two poles of traditional Christianity and fideist nihilism, one cannot help but feel that Christianity is not available as a swinging vote.

It may be that there is a cohort of voters for whom Christian faith is a primary voting guide, but they – like the politicians – will filter their judgement in terms of policy decisions and apparent values.

It seems less likely, as Pamela Bone suggests, that there are progressives who will genuinely shift their ultimate preference away from Labor because Kevin Rudd is a Christian.  This is slightly risible – do they expect to find an atheist renaissance in the Liberal Party?

Where we are at, much like the balance between the Federal Coalition and State Labor, is coming to seem like a natural and persistent equilibrium: the ‘core’ values of Christianity, characterise the core of Government policy.  They underpin our inherited notion of good, regardless of how much faith is discussed.

I would not for a moment question Kevin Rudd’s faith, which appears entirely genuine.  But we should also recognise that it removes a political problem for Labor, who many Australians, whether churchgoers or not, were perhaps beginning to perceive as ungrounded.

Alastair Furnival is Chairman of political consulting firm, Australian Public Affairs, and Executive Editor of the political journal, the conservative.

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