A Letter to Kevin

Dear Kevin,

It was a surreal experience to watch you in tears on television today. It reminded of a day in '91, when another Labor PM cried at press conference having being ousted by his party.

You came to my attention a few months before you toppled 'Bomber' Beazley when you wrote about Faith in Politics. You lauded Dietrich Bonhoeffer for resisting totalitarian power and offered a vision of Australia that matched his integrity:

'The time has well and truly come for a vision for Australia not limited by the narrowest of definitions of our national self-interest. Instead, we need to be guided by a new principle that encompasses not only what Australia can do for itself, but also what Australia can do for the world.'

Little did we know that you would soon be in a position to make Australia the light on a hill you dreamed it should be. I was in Parliament House the day you became the Opposition Leader, and started you meteoric rise to power. Your high numbers in the polls was matched by the higher moral authority you took in the campaign, annihilating The Coalition.

Your election on my 23rd birthday seemed to offer Australia a fresh start, as we emerged from several long years under the Howard Government. Kevin07 very quickly turned into Kevin 24/7, as your punishing workload delivered: an apology to the stolen generation; ratifying Kyoto; workplace reform; a briefly more humane response to refugees; leading the nation through the GFC; attempted tax and health reform; an 'education revolution'; withdrawing troops from Iraq; social inclusion; an increased regard in the community of nations...all in two and a half years.

But it all started to unravel when your rhetoric - well actually when your rhetoric became incomprehensible and bore no resemblance to the visionary oratory of 2007. Your government backed down on core election promises like climate change and refugees and that new federalism you once promised. You had seemed so unassailable, but with a rabid new leader on the other side of the treasury benches the polls turned against you. And so did your party. Out-flanked by the factions you had banished on your accession to the top-job, your were whacked by your deputy and a fellow Nambour boy; a wasted PM.

It happened very suddenly didn't it? I'm sure you feel it was sudden. How is it that the outrage over 1975 hasn't prevented the backroom party hacks from removing the elected PM?

So it is that I sit here tonight with a familiar melancholy feeling looking over a letter a received when I was seven. I hope you too enjoy spending more time with your family.

Sincerely,

Matt

Only in America?

Obama's choice of church under scrutiny. Did any one raise an eye brow when K Rudd started attending St John's Reid?

Politics of Faith II: A Vision for Australia

In a previous post, we turned back to Kevin Rudd's 2006 article on Bonhoeffer and the rule of the church in politics. In brief, Rudd understands this to be:

'The function of the church in all these areas of social, economic and security policy is to speak directly to the state: to give power to the powerless, voice to those who have none, and to point to the great silences in our national discourse...'

Rudd continues by giving voice to what Australian politics might look like if Bonhoeffer's principles were followed:

'A Christian perspective on contemporary policy debates 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. If the churches are barred from participating in the great debates about the values that ultimately underpin our
society, our economy and our polity, then we have reached a very strange place indeed.

Some have argued that Bonhoeffer provides a guide for Christian action “in extremis”, but not for the workaday problems of “normal” political life. Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, argues, though, that this fails to comprehend Bonhoeffer’s broader teaching on the importance of truth in politics. In fact, it accepts the “assumption that truth and politics, particularly in democratic regimes in which compromise is the primary end of the political process, do not mix”.'

Rudd has the former Howard Government clearly in his sights. In describing the churches voice on issues such as Australian values, climate change, industrial relations and global poverty, Rudd not only describes Bonhoeffer as the archetypal Christian Socialist, he uses Bonhoeffer's thesis of speaking truth to government to strongly criticize the then administration:

'Mr Howard’s politics are in the main about concealing the substantive truth of his policy program because when fully exposed to the light of public debate, their essential truth is revealed: a redistribution of power from the weak to the strong.'

Rudd concludes that the pragmatic goal of the Howard policies was to:

'...retain his incumbency at all costs, distracting the body politic from the reality of his faltering program for government. The substance of that program now makes for a less robust political message as he moves into his second decade in oμce: rising interest rates, declining housing affordability, slowing productivity growth, an Americanised industrial-relations system, a regressive consumption tax,
the skyrocketing costs of university education and the steady undermining of universal health insurance. Add to these the escalating failure of the Iraq war and the deteriorating security in our immediate region, complicated by our distraction in Iraq – all compounded by a failure to tell the public the truth on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi prisoner abuse and the $300-million wheat-for-weapons scandal.'

One may wonder how often the Rudd Government has distracting the body politic from the reality of his faltering program for government. Rudd's vision is for an Australia that is a 'light on a hill' (attributed to Chifley), which is to be a global leader on climate change, the Millennium Goals, and international law:

'The time has well and truly come for a vision for Australia not limited by the narrowest of definitions of our national self-interest. Instead, we need to be guided by a new principle that encompasses not only what Australia can do for itself, but also what Australia can do for the world.'

And Rudd concludes that the church must not climb into bed with the conservative political establishment. Instead, it must take up the challenge of Bonhoeffer, robustly speaking the truth to the state.

The role of the church is not to agree that deceptions of this magnitude [War on Iraq, AWA, Children Overboard, etc.] are normal. If Christians conclude that such deceptions are the stock-in-trade of the Kingdom of the State in Luther’s Two Kingdoms doctrine (and hence of no relevance to the Kingdom of the Gospel), then we will end up with a polity entirely estranged from truth. When the prime minister states that migrants should have a better grasp of the English language, while at the same time removing major funding from the program that enables them to learn English, this represents a significant prostitution of the truth. Therefore, if the church is concerned about the truth – not the politics – of social inclusion, then in Bonhoeffer’s tradition of fearlessly speaking the truth to the state, it should say so.

Politics of Faith

In an article that helped bring the current Australian Prime Minister to national attention in late 2006, Kevin Rudd has this to say about Deitrich Bonhoeffer, politics and Christianity:

"Bonhoeffer’s seminal work, his Ethics, was not collated and published until after his execution. Its final essay is entitled ‘What Is Meant by “Telling the Truth”’, and it represents a call to the German Church to assume a prophetic role in speaking out in defence of the defenceless in the face of a hostile state. For Bonhoeffer, 'Obedience to God’s will may be a religious experience but it is not an ethical one until it issues in actions that can be socially valued.' He railed at a Church for whom Christianity was “a metaphysical abstraction to be spoken of only at the edges of life”, and in which clergy blackmailed their people with hellish consequences for those whose sins the clergy were adept at sniffing out, all the while ignoring the real evil beyond their cathedrals and churches. 'The Church stands,' he argued, “not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.'

In his Letters from Prison, he wrote, reflecting in part on the deportation of the Jews, that 'We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.' Bonhoeffer’s political theology is therefore one of a dissenting church that speaks truth to the state, and does so by giving voice to the voiceless. Its domain is the village, not the interior life of the chapel. Its core principle is to stand in defence of the defenceless or, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, of those who are 'below'." - Faith in Politics, The Monthly, October 2006.

Rudd argues that Bonhoeffer went about this mission of 'speaking truth to the state' by causing dissent, primarily through the Confessing Church and the issues it protested. The goal was to “jam the spoke of the state … to protect the state from itself” (The Church and the Jewish Question). Rudd argues that Bonhoeffer:

"...was a man of action who wrote prophetically in 1937 that “when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” For Bonhoeffer, whatever the personal cost, there was no moral alternative other than to fight the Nazi state with whatever weapons were at his disposal,"

and concludes that:

"Bonhoeffer’s was a muscular Christianity. He became the Thomas More of European Protestantism because he understood the cost of discipleship, and lived it. Both Bonhoeffer and More were truly men for all seasons."

November 24 will be one year since Rudd's election victory over John Howard. So how Kevin 07 shaped up after twelve months in office? Has he taken up the cause of the defenceless? And as leader of the state, has he taken being told truth well? Is he the type of leader who allows the church to fulfill it's vocation to 'stand at the center of the village'? Or is he another crass politician who panders to religion when it is convinent and then shuts it away in a corner?