Former Australian Prime Minister, MP for Cook Scott Morrison. Photo / YouTube
OPINION:
Former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave us a fascinating new insight into his worldview on Sunday as he spoke at a church in Western Australia.
Morrison addressed worshippers at the Victory Life Centre, a Pentecostal church in Perth run by former tennis champion Margaret Court. The MP for Cook told reporters he was there in a private capacity at Court's invitation. More on that later.
In his half-hour sermon, Morrison largely focused on the issue of mental health, and more specifically the often overwhelming anxiety many Australians face. He argued that faith, and a belief in God's plan, were the answer.
The intriguing part came as Morrison expanded the scope of his point, bringing up the anxiety one might feel over the threats the world currently faces – the war in Europe, climate change and so forth – as opposed to more everyday, small-scale worries.
"Whether it is on these existential issues like the world's stability, or climate, or any of these things, don't be anxious about it," said Morrison.
"God's kingdom will come. It is in his hands. We trust in him.
"We don't trust in governments. We don't trust the United Nations, thank goodness. We don't trust in all of these things, fine as they might be, and as important a role as they play.
"Believe me, I've worked in it, and they are important.
"But as someone who's been in it, if you are putting your faith in those things like I put my faith in the Lord, you are making a mistake. They're earthly. They are fallible. I'm so glad we have a bigger hope."
Let's acknowledge, firstly, that governments are indeed fallible. They are staffed by human beings who make mistakes and occasionally succumb to immorality, which is why the severe scrutiny they cop is so essential.
(The same is true of powerful institutions like, say, organised religion.)
The bit that left me momentarily dumbstruck was Morrison's assertion that we shouldn't "trust in governments". This is from a man who spent three-and-a-half years at the head of a government, five years as a minister before that, a further six years in Parliament, and who just spent an entire election campaign asking voters to place their trust in his government.
The reality is, that we do need to trust in government to an extent. Though personally, I would rephrase that: we need to expect things from our government. We cannot be complacent about the important issues of our time, as though the divine will fix them for us.
Until God decides to eradicate all injury and illness with a click of his celestial fingers, for example, we are going to need a fully functioning public health system. That most basic and essential of services can only be provided by the government.
Until He chooses to end cyclones, fires and floods, we are going to need the capacity to respond swiftly and competently to natural disasters.
I am sure a great many victims of the bushfires and floods that ravaged the country during Morrison's tenure prayed to their gods asking for help. But they also expected help from their state and federal governments. For many, it was not forthcoming.
It is unclear to me how the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than six million people, fits into God's plan, but Australians expected their government to swiftly procure vaccines. It did not.
Is God going to set the tax rates, provide unemployment benefits, or conjure ideas to deal with rising inflation? Is he going to end poverty, and violence against women? No. For that, we must look to the government.
And that is just in Australia. Elsewhere, millions of infant children die each year, and there is no sign of divine intervention stopping it. Are we to sit back, relax and wait for God's plan to take effect? Or shall we try to fix the problem ourselves? Because that is the sort of thing the admittedly flawed United Nations, so often maligned by Morrison, seeks to do.
I am not having a go at Morrison for believing in God; whether he trusts in the divine to safeguard his soul is entirely his business.
Rather, I am unsettled by his attitude towards the thing that was his literal job for the better part of a decade.
It has become quite apparent, through thousands of years of human suffering, that any god who may exist is not much of an interventionist. That means we cannot rely on Him/Her/It/Them to fix things for us; we must do it ourselves. And our leaders, who are elected to do just that, must do so with a sense of urgency.
How much urgency can one muster if one believes in the sort of fatalism, albeit optimistic fatalism, that Mr Morrison was preaching in Perth on Sunday?
I'm reminded of my years in the United States, a much more pious country than Australia, where each mass shooting at an elementary school is met with sincere "thoughts and prayers". To be followed by total inaction.
Now to the other issue.
I listened to Court's brief sermon from Sunday, which she delivered a few minutes before Morrison spoke. It contained worthy sentiments: love, sacrifice, the value of helping others and so forth.
When a famous person is defined in the public eye by their controversial stance on one issue, it can be easy to forget that is not the totality of their views. Presumably, most of Court's preachings are unobjectionable.
That said, we cannot ignore her attitude towards homosexuality, which remains a festering moral blind spot. Court's literal interpretation of certain passages of the scripture has led her to spout some truly repulsive rhetoric.
"I believe implicitly in what the Bible tells me. I do not cherry pick to be popular," she explained in her 2016 autobiography.
Such is her right. Court is free to rant about the "abominable sexual practices" of gay people; she can continue to accuse them of violating the "nature of what is right and what is wrong". In other words, she may condemn them for the heinous crime of being the way God created them.
But why would someone of Morrison's stature elevate such a person? By chumming it up with Court on that stage, the former prime minister was implicitly accepting her views as legitimate, if not endorsing them.
Morrison spent much of the recent election campaign defending a virulently anti-trans candidate, Katherine Deves, from criticism. Now he is happily hanging out with someone notorious for believing gay people should not enjoy the same rights as other humans. His tolerance of intolerance is fast becoming a pattern.
Once, when gay men and women lived in constant fear of being ostracised or worse, Court would have been in the majority. Now she is the outlier. Modern society – including, to its credit, much of the Christian faith – has evolved beyond the morality of centuries past.
The point is, there are many other churches Morrison could visit, led by preachers who reject bigotry in any form. Perhaps he should spend next Sunday morning at one of them.
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