God in the Lodge: The Religious Beliefs of Australia’s Prime Ministers, and Why They Mattered

Roy Williams is the author of In God They Trust – The Religious Beliefs of Australia’s Prime Ministers 1901-2013. As an emerging writer, Williams’ book reviews appear in The Weekend Australian and he is a contributor to The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Literary Review, Dissent and Inside Sport. Before taking up a career in writing, Roy Williams was a litigator at Allens Arthur Robinson, specialising in defamation. His first book God, Actually was met with critical acclaim. On Tuesday 30 July 2013, Roy Williams addressed The Sydney Institute on the role of religion in the lives of Australia’s prime ministers. 

GOD IN THE LODGE: THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF AUSTRALIA’S PRIME MINISTERS, AND WHY THEY MATTERED

                                                                                 ROY WILLIAMS

It is a terrific honour to be asked to address The Sydney Institute. I have long admired both Gerard and Anne Henderson for their contribution to the intellectual life of Australia. Most of all I admire their preparedness to provide a forum for disparate voices – including people whose views may differ from their own.

For me the writing of this book – In God They Trust? – was a labour of love.  It traverses the two subjects that interest me the most – Christianity and politics – and the interplay between them in an Australian context.  But I pose the rhetorical question: why should the general reader be interested?

For fellow believers in the Christian religion I expect sheer curiosity may be one reason.  Many of our prime ministers are household names. All were intelligent and capable people and, as it happens, they represent a good cross section of every shade of Christian adherence and agnosticism. A few were talented amateur theologians. The four who stand out in that respect are Alfred Deakin, one of the great founding fathers; that remarkable, irascible character Billy Hughes; Sir Robert Menzies, our longest-serving leader and without question one of the most distinguished; and our current leader, Kevin Rudd.

After researching the lives of all 23 of our past leaders (I put to one side the four “stop gap” appointees who served terms measurable in weeks), my overall conclusion is that as a group they were atypical of the population as a whole. Of the 23, sixteen in my judgment were believers in God. And even most of the seven unbelievers thought long and hard about God. Bob Hawke is a prime example: his father was a Congregationalist minister and Hawke himself was a practising Christian until his early 20s.

I would classify only two of our Prime Ministers as lifelong agnostics – Edmund Barton (though some historians categorise him as a liberal Anglican) and Harold Holt. And there have been no atheists. I, for one, am far from convinced Julia Gillard is really an atheist; certainly, as a girl in Adelaide, she grew up steeped in the Baptist tradition.

But again, some people may respond: so what?  How is any of this relevant?

My starting premise is that Australia is a great country, and that our 23 Prime Ministers deserve at least some of the credit for that. Overall, Australia has been well led.

My other starting premise is that genuine religious belief is, or ought to be, a key determinant of personal behaviour – and of political behaviour. Faith without deeds is dead. I argue in the book that the religious beliefs of almost all of our leaders had important earthly consequences.  Let me begin with one case-study.

Alfred Deakin’s personal mission

Alfred Deakin’s story should give pause even to hard-core secularists. He served three separate terms as Prime Minister between 1903 and 1910 and was the most influential figure during the first decade of the infant Australian nation.

What Deakin believed became Australia – a lively patriotism, the rule of law, a strong defence, assistance for Australian industry, centralised wage fixation, and a reasonable safety net for the working classes and the elderly.  And – the big blot on his record, though even it must be understood in historical context – the White Australia Policy.

Views may reasonably differ in retrospect as to the desirability of all aspects of this policy mix, which Paul Kelly has dubbed “the Australian settlement”. But there can be no question Deakin was a good and brilliant man. He was a lawyer by training and exceptionally well-read. He was also the most religiously-minded Prime Minister in our history.

Deakin was not a conventional Christian but he believed in God as the Creator of all things and as the ultimate foundation of morality. He believed in an afterlife.  He also believed in a personal God. He once wrote: “Almost always I realise the existence of God.  Always I believe in Him with my intellect and turn to him with my heart.”  

Now here is the key point.  Throughout his career Deakin was driven by a sense of mission. He was convinced that God shared and supported his aspirations. He wrote hundreds of private prayers and frequently he beseeched God for help. For example, in 1898 he prayed that his career “might be the means of creating and fostering throughout all Australia a Christ-like citizenship”. 

That is how Deakin saw the Australian settlement. It was the fulfilment of his, and Australia’s, divine Destiny – the practical implementation of the Lord’s Prayer, the coming of the Kingdom on earth. That sounds grandiloquent, certainly. But that is what Deakin wrote in his private journal in January 1908.

***

Deakin’s is perhaps the clearest personal example. But my overall thesis is that in virtually all cases the religious beliefs of our Prime Ministers mattered. Not always for the good, but they mattered. This evening I will touch upon the three perennial issues of practical politics – war and peace, the distribution of wealth, and human rights.

Decision-making in wartime

The decision whether or not to wage war is – or should be – the most grave that any national leader can make. In the Christian tradition there are only two valid attitudes towards war. The first is pacifism. The second is the “just war” doctrine – rigorously and conscientiously applied.

I am bound to say that the three Australian prime ministers with the keenest anti-war instincts were not driven primarily by Christianity. They were the men who had actually seen serious combat when young – S.M. Bruce (who was wounded on the Western front in WWI) and John Gorton and Gough Whitlam (both of whom served in the air force in WWII). The horrors of war no doubt have to be experienced in person to be fully understood. But the record shows that religious belief can play a part too.

I draw a distinction in the book between what I call “Old Testament” Christians and “New Testament” Christians. Both are sincere. But their preoccupations are very different. New Testament Christians tend to emphasise charity and mercy and the ever-present possibility of redemption. Old Testament Christians emphasise personal righteousness, diligence, rule-keeping, and “loyalty” – and they believe that those who do not conform to the same tenets (whether individuals or groups in society or entire countries) deserve God’s wrath.

During World War I, Australia had three Prime Ministers: Joseph Cook, Andrew Fisher, and Billy Hughes, the Little Digger himself. Two of them – Cook and Hughes – were quintessential Old Testament Christians. They had both clawed their way to the top from very humble lower-middle class, Protestant origins in Britain. Their overriding loyalty was to the British Empire. The third, Andrew Fisher, was a New Testament Christian – he had been a very fine peacetime prime minister, but he began his third and final term just a month into WWI and retired in despair just over a year later.

(Fisher remains, to this day, the only Labor Prime Minister to have been a lifelong practising Protestant. He was also the only one of Australia’s six then-living prime ministers who opposed conscription in WW1.)

In August 1914, it fell to Cook to declare war on Australia’s behalf. He did so without hesitation and justified the conflict in religious terms, as a defence of Australia against Germany’s “putrid morality, an ethic of Hell”. Near the war’s end – by which time 30 million people including 60,000 Australians had perished – Cook was still completely unrepentant and opposed to any negotiation whatever. He said in September 1918:

This is not a war for arranging and negotiating and fixing up. It is a struggle of two conflicting ideals. You cannot negotiate a thing like that. There is only one thing you can do about it – either the light must drive out the darkness or it must be submerged by the darkness.  

Cook was the perfect deputy for Billy Hughes. Hughes succeeded Fisher as Labor Prime Minister in late 1915; infamously, he then proceeded to split the Labor Party and the country at large over the issue of conscription. There were conscription plebiscites in October 1916 and December 1917. Both of them narrowly failed.   Hughes inflamed religious sectarianism to a tragic degree by painting all opponents of conscription – especially Irish Catholics – as “disloyal”.

The key point for present purposes is that Hughes justified his deplorable conduct to himself in religious terms. He wrote in November 1916: “I believe I have a mission and that God gives me strength to do it.”

Hughes and Cook represented Australia at the Versailles Conference of 1919 and they went there thirsting for revenge. Hughes especially was a punisher. In his advocacy for the pulverisation of Germany he spoke openly of exacting “an eye for an eye”. He called this “the gospel – my gospel”. At Versailles, he fought tooth and nail against a proposed Racial Equality Clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations – and prevailed.

Sandwiched between Cook and Hughes was Andrew Fisher. As I have said, he was miserable and conflicted. At the beginning of the war, he denounced it as “a crime against civilisation and against humanity”.  Fisher never supported conscription for overseas service. In mid-1916, as High Commissioner, he refused to sign a public statement of support for the “Yes” case in the first of the two conscription plebiscites. He was the only past prime minister who so refused: five others signed it.

Now let us jump forward to the 1930s. In that period Australia was led by two Prime Ministers who were the closest we have ever had to being pacifists. Both were devout Catholics. The first was Jim Scullin. He once said – imagine any leader saying this today! –“I do not pretend to be a military expert, and the Lord forbid I ever should be one.”

But Scullin was swept from office at the December 1931 election. His successor was Joseph Lyons, the leader of the newly formed United Australia Party. Throughout the 1930s, Lyons supported every attempt by the British government to negotiate peace with Nazi Germany.

In 1935, and again in 1937, Lyons utilised his ties with the Vatican to obtain audiences with Mussolini. In September 1938, during the crisis over Germany’s re-occupation of the Sudetenland, Lyons drew upon his close friendship with the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Lyons urged Chamberlain to use Mussolini as a go-between with Hitler – and Chamberlain did.

At the time, the last-gasp preservation of peace at the Munich Conference was greeted almost everywhere with joy. But Lyons was gathering enemies, especially on the right of politics. Some were beating the drums of war. In January 1939, Keith Murdoch wrote in exasperation to a like-minded friend:

I don’t know what we can get out of Lyons, but his wife is an ardent pacifist, even a belligerent pacifist; when he speaks she speaks; when he gives a Christian message she gives one. … Her message always, if we love our neighbours enough there will be no war.  It is very pitiful.   

The wisdom in retrospect of appeasement – and Britain’s sudden abandonment of appeasement in September 1939 – is a massive and controversial subject.  But, in my opinion, the “message” of Joe and Enid Lyons, far from being pitiful, was sensible and judicious.

Joe Lyons has been accused of naivety on this score even by his admirers, but it seems to me that at all times he behaved as a Christian. He vetoed conscription for overseas military service because “he had such a strong belief in the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of individual conscience”.  At every turn, he urged consultation, concessions and compromise, rather than the “brave” path of war. He was a peacemaker. History, I would argue, proved him right.

The one time that Lyons went fully public with his faith was around the time of the Munich Conference. On September 3, 1938 he called for a “Day of Prayer for Divine Intervention and Guidance”:

At times national viewpoints become so irreconcilable that it would seem that no human agency could devise a solution and our hope of achieving a lasting peace must emanate from the intervention of a Higher Power.   

There is a lot more I could say on this topic in relation to other prime ministers – especially Robert Menzies and John Curtin (our leaders during WWII) and John Howard (as regards the invasion of Iraq in 2003). But let me turn to a happier subject.

The distribution of wealth

Australia has a deserved reputation for egalitarianism. I would argue that Christianity has played a positive role in the shaping of that ethos. Disparities of wealth and income – while significant – have never been as pronounced in Australia as in, say, Britain or the United States. Our social safety net is strong.

Of course, many factors have been at play, not all of them religious. But it is significant that the majority of our Labor prime ministers were:

• Protestant Christian socialists or from that tradition – Andrew Fisher, the pre-Federation Joseph Cook, the pre-WW1 Billy Hughes, Kevin Rudd; or
• practising Catholics who had imbibed social justice teachings as part of their faith – James Scullin, Ben Chifley, Paul Keating, Rudd (he was raised as a Catholic as a child).

These two traditions were central in the formation and ongoing electoral success of the ALP.

It was Ben Chifley who coined the phrase which is still the ALP’s catchcry: “the light on the hill”.  He drew it, of course, from the Sermon on the Mount. For Chifley, Christianity was not wholly or even mainly a private matter. He once explained to a friend that he wanted as many people as possible to “have a little of Heaven on earth”.  In a letter in 1950, he was even more explicit: “All those who seek to spread the Gospel of Christ are, I feel, duty bound to follow his own rule of life to help the lowly to better things, which was shown I think in the New Testament.”

There was a third group of Labor leaders, made up of people whom I term “fellow-travellers” with Christianity. They were raised in the faith as children and/or maintained a keen interest in religion – Chris Watson, John Curtin, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Julia Gillard. All five have fascinating religious stories.

Let me now turn to the conservative side of politics. The ameliorating influence of Christianity has also been apparent there. Almost all of Australia’s non-Labor prime ministers were practising, or at least cultural Christians and the only two lifelong agnostics – Edmund Barton and Harold Holt – had a benevolent side. With the strange exception of Cook, and the partial exception of S.M. Bruce, none were uncritical worshippers of the market.

Barton and Alfred Deakin were progressive protectionists who relied on Labor support. Deakin believed that every member of Australian society was “entitled to be considered, not as a cog-wheel in a machine, but as a living human being, endowed with an immortal soul”. The Free Trader George Reid (the son of a Presbyterian minister) believed something similar. He was a fulsome anti-socialist, but he led quite an enlightened government in NSW before Federation. Likewise Billy Hughes.  Even after his defection from the ALP in 1916, Hughes never forgot his humble origins.

The Great Depression was a watershed. Labor floundered and for 38 of the next 50 years – until the transformative Hawke-Keating era – Australia was led by a second series of (fiscally) moderate non-Labor prime ministers.  All but Harold Holt were deeply influenced by Christianity. Joseph Lyons (who of course began his career in the ALP) had a sensitive social conscience derived from Catholicism. Robert Menzies, for all his anti-socialist rhetoric, was at heart a puritan: he nursed an old-fashioned barrister’s distaste for “money-grubbers” and the big end of town. Policy-wise he was a moderate Keynesian. So, after he left office, was S.M. Bruce. And so, also, were John Gorton, Billy McMahon and Malcolm Fraser. I argue in the book that the worldview of each of them had religious roots: Gorton was an unconventional liberal Anglican, McMahon a convert from Catholicism to liberal Anglicanism, and Bruce and Fraser came from families steeped in noblesse oblige Protestantism.

It might be said that John Howard was the outlier in this regard. In religious temperament Howard was more like Cook and Hughes. Even so, at least in government, Howard was less fiscally extreme – or “pure” – than some of his Liberal Party colleagues. He once professed to having a “social justice streak” inherited from his childhood Methodism – and I believe him. 

Human rights

Let me now address a subject very much in today’s news: human rights. The prominent British Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has justly argued that humanity’s “supreme challenge … is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image”. For Christians, the challenge is to really live by Paul’s message that we are “all one in Jesus Christ”.

Since Federation two human rights questions have loomed large in Australia and I will say just a little about each.

Sectarianism and State aid to religious schools

It is hard to overstate the all-pervasiveness of the Catholic-Protestant divide in Australia right up until the 1970s.

Consider our very first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton. He was an urbane man, a nominal Anglican, and he disliked the warring of the sectarians. Possibly to pique them, he had an audience at the Vatican in July 1902 with Pope Leo XIII. For this heinous sin he was denounced back in Australia by tens of thousands of zealous Protestants. There was a huge protest meeting at Sydney Town Hall. No fewer than 30,000 people signed a petition condemning the visit and a Protestant MP presented it to Barton in the House of Representatives.

So that was the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century and, thanks to Billy Hughes, it was made even worse during WWI.

The long and tortuous process of easing sectarian division was achieved in Australia through the efforts of a number of prime ministers. Scullin and Lyons began the process simply by contesting the 1931 election and later worshipping at the same church, St Christopher’s in Manuka (in Canberra). Lyons brought many middle class Catholics over to the conservative side of politics. But neither Scullin nor Lyons – nor Chifley – intervened in the vicious debate over state aid to religious schools. They were fearful of inflaming sectarianism.

The momentous issue of state aid was ultimately resolved by two Protestant Prime Ministers – Robert Menzies and Gough Whitlam. They responded to years of political pressure imposed by the DLP.

Consider Menzies first. He believed passionately that “education can [not] be pagan without being destructive”. In the lead-up to the November 1963 election he promised to give federal money to both government and independent schools for the building of science blocks. He was accused of electoral expediency, because Labor was still hopelessly split on state aid. Yet I venture to say that in 1963 only Menzies could have taken this key first step. He had immense authority within the Coalition and the country at large and was unimpeachably Protestant. He also had a most respectable record as regards sectarianism.

Growing up, Menzies had witnessed a good deal of religious intolerance – some within his own family. In his memoir The Measure of the Years, he recalled that “from my earliest days it nauseated me”. In his “Freedom of Worship” radio address in 1942, he denounced sectarianism in plain terms as “the denial of Christianity, not its proof”.

On the Labor side, the key figure was Gough Whitlam.  He had been brought up in an extremely pious – but extremely tolerant – Baptist household.  Whitlam’s knowledge of Christianity was second only to Deakin’s. During years of internal debate within the ALP, he battled against both bigoted Protestants and irreligious secularists. He secured party support for his policies at the 1969 Federal conference, and then appointed as his Shadow Minister for Education a genuinely serious Protestant Christian, a man steeped in the Moral Re-Armament Movement – Kim Beazley Senior. Beazley regarded his role in ending sectarianism in education policy as his principal achievement in politics.

I must add that noble secondary roles as regards state aid were played by John Gorton and Malcolm Fraser. And, in modern times, John Howard merits praise for his so-called New Schools policy. The point of that initiative was to make it easier for new low-fee independent schools to be started up in geographical areas already serviced by a state school and a Catholic parish school.   Since 1998 there has been a rapid increase throughout Australia in the number of such schools (most of them Protestant). To their credit, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard continued Howard’s policies.

Race

Finally, I want to say something about the most vexed political issues of all:  those centred on race. In assessing our leaders against Christian criteria I was looking at a minimum for an absence of bigotry on racial grounds – and, ideally, a proactive commitment to eradicating racism and xenophobia from Australian society.

In this respect most of our leaders had a blind spot – even progressive icons such as Deakin, Fisher and Chifley. Some were much worse than others, but nobody emerged with honour until Harold Holt. The White Australia Policy was enforced by every prime minister from Barton to Menzies, and few took more than a passing interest in Aboriginal affairs.

The first political party to advocate the dismantling of the White Australia Policy was the DLP and it was Harold Holt’s Coalition government of 1966-67 that took the first tentative steps.  But Holt’s successor, John Gorton, had a xenophobic streak and his successor, Billy McMahon, shamelessly raised the spectre of Asian immigration during the 1972 election campaign.

On the Labor side, even Gough Whitlam made his notorious comment in Cabinet in 1975 about “f_____g Vietnamese Balts”. Gerard Henderson has recently pointed out that it was not until Bill Hayden became leader of the ALP in mid-1977 that Labor came fully on board with Malcolm Fraser on the matter of so-called boat people.  Bob Hawke, in 1977, was an early adopter of the term “illegal immigrants” to describe refugees arriving by boat, and, as Prime Minister, he resorted to another misleading and pejorative label, “queue jumpers”. John Howard had, in my opinion, a highly problematic record on these matters, and in respect of Indigenous matters too. Kevin Rudd has recently resorted to the so-called PNG Solution.

Somewhat disturbingly, from a Christian perspective, two of the three prime ministers with the best records on racial issues – Harold Holt and Malcolm Fraser – were unbelievers. That leaves Paul Keating. In most respects, Keating’s record on matters of race was excellent.

Which leads me to a consideration of Keating’s overall record as a Christian prime minister.  I argue in the book that – taking into account his 8-year stint as Bob Hawke’s treasurer, as well as his five years as Prime Minister – Keating was the most influential politician in Australian peacetime history. He was the person principally responsible for overturning Deakin’s Australian settlement and creating the modern Australian nation we live in today.

One thing I attempt to do in the book is dispel the popular notion that Keating was and is a mere “tribal” Catholic. There is a surprising amount of material on the record. Over the years, Keating has explicitly linked the basic tenets of Catholicism – as he understood them – with his political philosophy.

If I may hazard a generalisation, that philosophy has two main strands. It combines economic liberalism with social conservatism. But there are two vital riders.

First, Keating’s economic liberalism has always been tempered by a strong belief in State-sponsored charity for the helpless and deserving. At the beginning of his career this was very much his emphasis – he had imbibed Thomist teachings about distributive justice.

In 1997, Keating spoke at the launch of Anne Henderson’s fine book about the religious order founded by St Mary MacKillop, the Sisters of St Joseph. Keating was educated by the Josephites as a boy and he sought to explain why he admired the nuns so much. He extolled their “fidelity to the poor, and [their] belief in God’s interest in them, Christ’s interest in them, and their intrinsic importance as his children”.

On economic policy, Keating was a Labor innovator. By the late 1970s, his focus was on economic growth as “the engine of everything”, including social justice. In this respect – perhaps unknowingly – he became a convert to a more broadly Protestant view of political economy.

The second of my riders about Keating is even more important. While in most things he has always been a social conservative, his views became increasingly progressive on issues of race.  I am thinking not merely of the Redfern speech of 1992 and the Native Title Act, but, more generally, the vital link between, on the one hand, Keating’s record as an economic reformer, and, on the other hand, his liberal views on issues of race.

Keating always insisted that in order to create and maintain economic growth Australia could not remain “a little European enclave in the Pacific”.  Rather, it had to “trade its way into the south-east Asian community” – to, if you like, make disciples of all nations. This became the central theme of his political career. It never made him popular – and he felt the visceral backlash at the 1996 election – but he was right. Populist rhetoric aside, his vision is now conventional wisdom on both sides of politics.

Speaking in 2009, Keating recalled that by the early 1990s he “had in my mind that by thought and cooperation, we could make the East Asian hemisphere a better, safer and more cooperative place altogether.  And by we, I mean Australia.”

China, of course, is now a superpower.  And I will finish by posing a rhetorical question: I wonder what Keating makes of the fact that Christianity is growing faster in China than in any other country of the world?