Senator Fatima Payman’s defection over Labor Party policy on statehood for the Palestinians has generated wider discussion about the written and unwritten rules of Australian politics. One of those involves the vexed question of the role of religious faith.
Scott Morrison’s prime ministership inevitably raised it. Morrison did not hide his evangelical Christianity. His strange memoir revived the issue because it showed Morrison’s faith was not incidental to his politics. By his own account at least, faith was its organising principle.
So far as I’m aware, Morrison’s Christianity was not understood as a threat to social cohesion – weird, certainly, but not dangerous in that way. Those who talked up its dangers were often treated as engaging in hyperbole, or even hypocrisy – since Kevin Rudd’s Christianity did not receive the same level of scrutiny or criticism.
