ArticleEveryone’s talking about Scott Morrison’s struggles with anxiety as prime minister. He’s been praised, rightly, for breaking that taboo. But if we still feel awkward, it’s because he broke another: Morrison’s book makes his private faith very, very public, and we don’t know what to do with it.
Australians cringe about faith. “God bless America” might be mandatory American political speak but historian Manning Clark nailed Australians’ religious instincts as “a shy hope in the heart”.
Well, shy Morrison’s book ain’t. The theme of Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness is God’s constant presence to Morrison, who says he “often felt like an alien in the place where I believe God has called me to serve” – an alien line in the average Australian political memoir.
But the faith element isn’t surprising. Australia’s first Pentecostal prime minister now seeks an American audience. The foreword is written by former US vice president and fellow Christian Mike Pence. American spelling and explanations of Australiana, from Akubra hats to Christmas crackers, appear throughout.
Obvious high points of Morrison’s prime ministership are covered, such as the “miracle” election win of 2019 and the crafting of AUKUS, praised as his government’s best achievement.
Also included, but not dwelt on, are occasions where Morrison’s legacy, and the faith factor he gives these events, might be more mixed. Morrison says he “sought to be sensitive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit” while weighing up whether to stand for the prime ministership after the Malcolm Turnbull leadership spill. (Turnbull remembers being stabbed in the back by Morrison. You’ll have to decide what you think.)
Elsewhere, Morrison links Christian beliefs about human dignity, owing to the idea that all people are made in God’s image, with his decision to impose restrictions on younger people to protect the lives of older Australians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The latter aren’t expendable, since “as prime minister I see every Australian’s life as precious”. That’s worth applauding.
But the trouble is how selectively such belief seems applied elsewhere.
Morrison, the architect of Operation Sovereign Borders, consigned asylum seekers to wilt, indefinitely, in offshore detention. This incredibly effective regime was, and is, also incredibly dehumanising. But aren’t the lives of refugees equally precious to Morrison’s God, and mine? (Yes).
Maybe it’s unfair to single out Morrison since the Rudd government introduced the policy in 2013 and it continues to enjoy bipartisan support. The people have spoken: Australians want the refugee issue out of sight, out of mind.
But Morrison made Christian faith, characterised by compassion and justice for the poor and hungry, part of his electoral pitch. “For me, faith is personal,” he said in his 2008 maiden speech to parliament, “but the implications are social”.
However, as Sean Kelly relates in The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, the former member for Cook would bristle when reporters asked him to reconcile his Christianity with the Coalition’s refugee policy. No one envies the terrible compromises politicians must make, but Morrison’s defensive silences fed suspicions that he called on faith at his convenience.
Plans For Your Good offers more thin Christian gruel. A basic Christian belief is that we’re all flawed, yet Morrison won’t be drawn on any regrets: “I’m not going to turn this into a weeping public confessional; that is not my style.”
There is no mention of the hose episode, or the parliamentary censure that followed the revelation that Morrison had secretly sworn himself into five ministries, unless the following counts as an oblique reference: “The world I served in as a politician thought only about power; how to acquire it, how to express it, how to use it (often against others), and how to hold on to it. It was not an easy place to have the same attitude as Jesus, and, I admit, at times I came up short.”
For a book written for American audiences, it lacks a compelling come-to-Jesus moment, a splashy incident that becomes a catalyst for personal change.
The closest we see of Morrison as a fallible man raging at his God is in a heartfelt chapter on the infertility he and Jenny experienced before the “miracle” births of Abbey and Lily. Here, the mask Morrison wore as PM slips for a minute. I would’ve liked that man to linger: he felt more real.
It pains me to fulfil Morrison’s gift for prophecy: that Christians can be some of his “most vocal and judgmental critics”. I don’t relish kicking a fellow believer. Politics is already a nasty business and speaking about faith in public is a game no Christian politician can win.
But if Christianity teaches anyone anything, it’s that the seemingly futile pursuit of something good and true, like the radical love of the other, is a win even if cloaked in loss. For public faith to be something to be glad of, not feared, it needs to be marked by that love. This is a legacy worth leaving behind.
This article first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.
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