Faith   Politics - Evangelical Alliance

By Doug Hynd
Doug Hynd responds to comments by Peter Stokes in Salt Shakers E-News on the way Kevin Rudd will engage in policy, raising some interesting questions about differences in their respective understandings of the way Christians should engage in policymaking in a secular society such as Australia.

Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister and Christian – after Christendom

The comments by Peter Stokes in Salt Shakers E-News on the way Kevin Rudd will engage in policy raises some interesting questions about differences in their respective understandings of the way Christians should engage in policymaking in a secular society such as Australia.

Let me focus on one difference that I think is really critical that underlies Peter Stokes comments and that is a strong trace of the Christendom mindset evidenced particularly in the quotations he chooses from the Old Testament.

What on earth is the Christendom mindset?

Les Murray Australia’s greatest contemporary poet and Christian who has thought a lot about Christian witness in Australia, characterises the Christendom mindset in his call for Christians to accept that

Christianity is no longer On Top in Australia, …. The experience is probably a salutary one for us. … We’re no longer to indulge our bad habits of boring people, bullying them and backing up respectability; we’re no longer in a position to call on the law to do for us what we should be doing by inspiration and example;[1]

In his approach to engagement as a Christian in the public sphere, Kevin Rudd accepts that we are operating in a post-Christendom context. In his much discussed magazine article last year Kevin Rudd noted there are signs of Christianity,

seeing itself and being seen by others as a counterculture operating within what some have called a post-christian world. … Christianity at last within Western societies, may be returning to the minority position it occupied in the earliest centuries of its existence[2].

In taking this approach Kevin Rudd is not walking away from his Christian convictions. While a Christian perspective on any given contemporary policy issue may not prevail, it

must nonetheless, be argued. And once heard it must be weighed, together with other arguments from different philosophical traditions in a fully contestable secular polity. A Christian perspective, informed by a social gospel or Christian socialist tradition, should not be rejected contemptuously by secular politicians as if these views are an unwelcome intrusion into the political sphere.[3]

Rudd further noted that

Australia's founding fathers rightly chose to separate church and state in this country… by not constitutionally establishing any religion or denomination. Given the history of the European wars of religion, they were absolutely right to create a secular pluralist polity where all views are to be distilled and determined through democratic electoral processes.

Christians are as entitled as anybody else to advance their views, so long as their views are tempered by reason, to the secular forum that is Parliament.[4]

Christians should therefore

always hold a state somewhat at arm's length, but in their engagement with the state, they should take a consistent ethical position, which is always based on a cause of social justice or the interests of the marginalized.[5]

In an interview broadcast on the ABC Religion Report in late 2006 Kevin Rudd made clear that he is committed to an approach to Christian witness that accepts the principle that Christians should not have a privileged position in Australian society.

…I strongly defend our parliament and our polity as being both secular and pluralist, but within that secular pluralist polity, you can't deny Christians having their voice, just as you can't deny anyone else having their voice …,[6]

Christians who want to understand Kevin Rudd’s approach and are puzzled why he operates with a different language and set of assumptions to the ones that they take for granted should ponder these comments made long before it seemed likely, or even possible that he might become Prime Minister at the next election.

Doug Hynd