Shouts from the desert

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this site that I do not approve of politics motivated by religion. Religiously motivated politics is rampant in recent years. There are of course the fringe parties supporting religion in politics - most notably the Christian Democratic Party (which seems to me neither Christian nor democratic) and Family First - but the more disturbing inroads are the ones religion is making into the mainstream of politics in the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party. Yesterday Gerard Henderson had a column in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he defended the mixing of religion and politics.

I have often said that religious belief is an entirely inappropriate justification for invoking the coercive power of the State - there are many conflicting religions, and it is absolutely wrong to force a person to adopt the rules of your religious convictions when that person does not share those convictions. Not only is "god said so" an unsound premise on which to base an argument as to public policy, but the fact that people hold conflicting religious beliefs with equal fervour and equal certainty of their correctness makes it impossible to objectively choose between one set of beliefs and another. To force the religious morality of one believer onto nonbelievers or believers in incompatible faiths is to engage in serious repression of those people. The law is the tool of people, not of any god, and is imposed on all people. It must equally serve and protect all without regard to religious beliefs - you cannot justify a rule on the grounds that it is dictated by a god to or against a person who does not believe in that god.

On the flip side, when a person uses Christianity as the religion of choice to justify imposing religious morality on others by force, that person engages in hypocrisy of the highest order and heresy against their own religion. In doing so, they breach the following New Testament religious rules:

• The rule against judging others (Matthew 7:1-2);
• The rule against exacting vengeance (Matthew 5:39);
• The rule against inflicting punishment for violations of religious rules (John 8:17);

A politician or political candidate who uses their Christian beliefs to attract votes also breaches the rule against using their religious beliefs for the improper purpose of self-promotion (Matthew 6:5-6) and when they attend Church for self-promotion breach the rule against using that place for personal gain (John 2:13-17).

This is not to say that holding beliefs about religious rules is wrong, or even stating them is wrong. It is when a person claiming to be Christian uses their religion as a tool for furthering their political ambition that they offend against the religion, and it is when they attempt to force them onto others that it is wrong.

When a member of Parliament, who has a role in shaping the coercive power of the State, speaks out to promote the rules of religion, there is an inference that many will make that the person will seek to encode those religious rules into law. As a legislator, the member of Parliament is often expected to be talking about law and government policy. Such a politician must on each occasion, at a minimum, make it clear that they are not advocating that the religious rules be encoded into the law or used to shape government policy. It is doubtful that a Christian politician should speak about their beliefs - including their beliefs in religious rules - at all. To do so runs an extraordinary risk that they be perceived as seeking to encode the rules into law, and of offending against the self-promotion rule.