Politics, Power, and Pentecostals
Over at Christianity Today, Morgan Lee wrote a good piece on the recent Australian federal election which was lost by the Liberal-National coalition headed by Pentecostal Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Morgan and shared my own thoughts about Morrison and the intersection of faith and politics in Australia.
The podcast, The Rest is History, has a great trilogy of episodes about Australian Prime Ministers. On the show, Tom Holland noted that Aussie prime ministers all tend to be formed in some way by Christianity, many are rock solidly for it (Morrison, Rudd, Abbott), but even those who turned away from it (Hawke, Gillard, Curtin) were still very much shaped by its social vision.
Scott Morrison always made much of his faith as something that drove him, for that reason, he also received a lot of scrutiny and criticism when it came to certain policies (like the treatment of refugees), his relationship with Hillsong Church (which was notoriously overblown), and whether he was doing a religious performance for show (I believe it wasn’t). In extreme cases, some progressive commentators fanned fears that Australia was now living in a soft theocracy precisely because it had a Pentecostal prime minister! In addition, there were many weird conspiracy theories on twitter that Hillsong was secretly controlling the Australian government through Morrison.
To his credit, Morrison did manage to stop the revolving door of prime ministers that took place between 2007-17, he led the nation through the COVID pandemic, took a hard line against Chinese cyber-attacks and economic sanctions against Australia, bolstered Australia’s military alliance with India, Japan, and America, and kept unemployment to record low levels.
Yet Morrison’s tenure as prime minister was not a golden age for evangelicals. Morrison’s government failed to pass an anti-religious discrimination bill due to it being watered down by rebel members of his own party. Also, many evangelicals criticized him for failing to take more action on climate change and moving Australia to a carbon-neutral economy.
According to Tim Costello:
Morrison’s personal unpopularity was not because he was a very public Christian, but more due to the perception that his policies did not adequately reflect the Christian faith.
At the previous election in 2019, the ALP lost the unlosable election by playing hard against religion, mocking and maligning Morrison for his faith. That did not sit well with voters. So, while Aussie voters might not necessarily gravitate towards a religious candidate, they do not like it when politicians punch down on others because of their religion.
The new ALP prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was born to a devout Catholic mother, and while he is no longer practicing, he seems warmly disposed towards people of faith. He has people of a variety of faiths and none in his new cabinet and caucus. Time will tell if Albanese will, as he promised, pass an anti-religious discrimination bill, many hope he does!
Religion does not loom large in Australian politics. Evangelicals are not a powerful voting block as in the USA. Australians are luke-warm about religion, but they don’t like people attacking religion, especially in suburbs with large ethnic populations. But I was glad to see that Pentecostalism, once an outsider religion, is now a mainstream faith in Australia, the second-largest Christian denomination in the country after Catholics. It is no wonder that we have now had our first Pentecostal prime minister.