Reflections of a Recovering Prime Minister
July/August 2024Interview with former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison.
On the wall of his office in Australia’s Parliament House, Scott Morrison hung a framed newspaper dated May 1, 2019, proclaiming: “ScoMo’s Miracle!”
It was a headline that appeared the morning after Morrison’s poll- and pundit-defying election to Australia’s top political job. The evening before, Morrison had stood before a cheering crowd at a hotel in Sydney and accepted his unexpected win with the words, “I have always believed in miracles!”
In the months and years that followed, though, divine intervention sometimes seemed in short supply. The COVID pandemic, various international crises, devastating wildfires and floods—even a mice plague that threatened Australian farming—turned Morrison’s tenure as the nation’s thirtieth prime minister into an approval-ratings roller coaster ride. At one point, with his administration’s tough COVID policies protecting Australians from the high mortality rates experienced by almost every other nation, Morrison’s approval ratings were the highest of any Western leader. At other times, though, his approval ratings scraped the bottom end of the scale.
Yet there has been one constant throughout Morrison’s almost 16 years in federal politics: his Christian faith.
As Australia’s first Pentecostal Prime Minister, Morrison displayed his religious devotion openly and, at times, exuberantly. And this within a largely secular culture, where public displays of piety are often treated with suspicion, if not disdain.
Bettina Krause, editor of Liberty magazine, recently talked with Mr. Morrison about how he has sought, through the years, to combine two very different identities: man of faith and hard-charging political partisan.
Bettina Krause: It seems to me, reading some of the many articles that have been written about you—especially when those articles touch on your religious beliefs—that there’s a deep sense of unease with any expression of faith within the context of Australia’s public life. Can you help our North American readers understand why this would be so?
Scott Morrison: Yes, that’s an important observation. Australia is culturally quite different from the United States. It’s more like New Zealand or Canada, I suspect, but also the United Kingdom. Here in Australia there’s a view that faith should be a private matter. It’s not something that should ever be raised publicly, particularly when one is in public life.
Now, I had a different view. My view was never, “Oh, vote for me because I’m a Christian.” My view was that I am a Christian and I should be transparent about that. I never sought to proselytize from the speaker’s box in the Parliament or in any of my other roles. But neither was I shy about it.
I received enormous support from many Christians around the country and well beyond our shores—I think they got what I was trying to do. But there is a strong element within Australia, and not just in politics but in the media as well, that is very hostile to this idea, extremely hostile to it.
Krause: You went on the record, numerous times, saying that the Bible is not a public policy book, yet your policy positions were sometimes painted as being influenced by your faith. Was there an element of truth to that? Because your faith is going to inform your moral sensibility and you’re going to bring that sensibility to the issues you face in office, right? Or can you keep those two things compartmentalized?
Morrison: Well, I don’t think there’s so much of a conflict. I mean, Western societies, representative democracies, are founded on Judeo-Christian values—issues of human rights, justice, personal responsibility, individual liberty. And those are also values that inform who I am as a Christian. There is a foundational set of values that I would say are entirely necessary to our society. But beyond that, everyone has to work out what they believe is the best way, in a policy sense, to achieve those things. And I certainly know many Christians—and other people of faith—who wouldn’t share all of my political or policy views.
I never sought to ascribe an evangelical, let alone a Christian, bent to my policy positions. I never thought to explain them in that way or seek to justify them that way, either. Australia is a secular country, as is the United States and most Western democracies, and for very good reasons.
But I said in my maiden speech to Parliament: “We have no national religion, but that doesn’t mean secularism is our religion either.”
I do feel that, over time, secularism has almost been elevated to the religion of the state. And I think that’s wrong. I think that’s in direct conflict to what, in Australia’s case, was intended at federation. Or, in the United States, what was intended by those who wrote the Constitution.
Krause: Some perceived you as “too Christian,” yet, ironically, some of your most vitriolic critics were other Christians, right?
Morrison: I remember I got off a plane one day and ran into a former member of Parliament—one from the generation before me—who was at odds with a particular policy position I’d taken. I was minister for immigration at the time. And so he proceeded to lecture me on the position, but then started to lecture me on my faith. And I said, “Well, mate, you have every right to question me on my policies, but you don’t have a right to question my faith. Only God can decide that.”
I often found other Christians who weren’t involved in politics asking, “Oh, is this person a Christian? Is that person a Christian?” I’d reply, “Well, it’s not for me to say. That’s between them and God. And if I tell you they are a Christian, are you going to have a different view of them and their policies? No, judge them on their policies and judge them on their character and judge them on what they’re doing.”
Krause: I have to ask you something I became more and more curious about as I read your book. It’s very clear that you have absolutely no illusions about the nature of politics. You call it “driven by ambition,” and you talk about how the “game” of politics often becomes an end in itself.
Morrison: True.
Krause: All these things you describe are basically the opposite of Christian virtues. If you were to advise a young person, a Christian young person, who wanted to go into politics, what would you tell them? Can they maintain their Christian integrity and still be an effective politician?
Morrison: Well, it’s not easy, and it’s not getting any easier. And this goes back to the first question you asked me. In the United States there’s still a strong element of cultural Christianity and the practice of Christianity. But in Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, for instance, it’s clearly now less than half of the population that makes even a nominal profession of affiliation with the Christian faith.
For 1,500 years Christianity has been the dominant influence in Western culture. That is now changing, and we’re becoming a minority. Rod Dreher talks about that in his book The Benedict Option, and this has become a fairly consistent theme in a lot of the literature around these issues: we’re not in Jerusalem anymore, we’re in Babylon now. And we need to live with that reality.
So that’s why there are two things I’d say to any young person contemplating a life in politics. First, get on your knees and pray.
When I was a [Liberal] party director and I was recruiting candidates, I had the tactic of trying to talk them out of it. Perhaps they were simply excited about all that goes along with politics, or they were just ambitious. I’d say to them, “Well, let me walk you through a few things. Let me tell you about how many marriages fail, about the pressures on mental health, about how long you’re away from home and family, about how many disappointed ambitions there are in politics.”
Politics doesn’t end well for most. You rarely get to choose the time of your exit, but that’s just the nature of it. And so you have to go into this with your eyes wide open. You need to feel quite convicted in your own heart and your own spirit that this is where you’re being led.
And second, I’d say to them, “Just because you think God’s calling you to a life in politics, don’t think that means everything is going to just fall into place for you.”
I’ve always admired William Wilberforce. You read his biographies, and this is a guy who was enormously capable. But he was called to a life on the backbench, tirelessly advocating and campaigning. He found himself constantly as a go-between between both sides of politics and the Parliament at the time. Why? To pursue his one big goal: the abolition of slavery. He made that choice. He was extremely good at politics, but he spent most of his time being attacked by others.
You have your eyes wide open. Just because God’s calling you into politics, it will still be potentially quite difficult. It may not be the path you thought it would be.
Krause: Following on from that, it’s fair to say that your own path as prime minister was, at times, a difficult and bumpy one. And in your book you mention times, moments of crisis, that you really sought strength and clarity through your faith.
Morrison: I have always been absolutely befuddled by how my colleagues who didn’t have a faith survived. We had a Bible study group that used to meet in my office, from the time our party was in the opposition all the way through to the time I was prime minister. And then again, after I lost the election [in 2022], we kept meeting in my office. We were a great support and encouragement to each other. And for those who don’t have that, I really don’t know how they survive that environment. Because it’s a very isolating environment. It’s a brutal and competitive environment. You’re away from your family and your support structures. And you’re pretty vulnerable.
There were so many moments I relied on my faith. I found during many of the crises we faced, I just seemed to be able to slow things down in my head. It was a bit like seeing the ball come toward you a little more slowly than it did. And with the fast pace of information moving around, I’m just very thankful that God enabled me, I believe, to process that information well and make the best possible decisions I could.
And I would pray for that. I would pray that God would prepare the ground upon which I would walk tomorrow. I would pray that prayer a lot, not knowing what tomorrow would bring. All I needed to know was that He would go before me.
Now, if you say this type of thing within a non-Christian environment, people think, Oh, you’re just praying that you’ll be successful every day. No, I was praying that I would have God’s presence each day, that I would have His encouragement. And regardless of whatever happened, I would still have His presence, His encouragement, and His peace.
Krause: You write in your book about the connections you made with fellow world leaders who shared your experience of both being a person of faith and carrying the burden of high office. How important were those friendships to you?
Morrison: They were extraordinarily important. I spent a reasonable amount of time with James Marape, who’s still the prime minister there in Papua New Guinea, and this was a very special relationship. And then I had what I call my “favorite Mikes”—Pence and Pompeo [then U.S. vice president and secretary of state]. I met Mike Pence at an APEC [Asia Pacific Economic Council] Summit at a time that, frankly, no one there had any good reason to give me the time of day, and we’ve remained connected ever since. These sort of diplomatic functions can be tedious affairs. But there we were, seated together after a wonderful meeting earlier in the day, and we just sort of connected.
And the same was true with Mike Pompeo. Mike came out to Sydney with his wife, Susan, and we had dinner together at the [prime minister’s] residence in Sydney. Susan came to church with us the next day, and Mike was a bit upset that he couldn’t come too—he had to work that Sunday morning with my foreign minister. But those sort of relationships in politics go deep quick. You recognize each other, and you get that you’re on a similar path.
Krause: There’s one issue that was particularly difficult during your time in office, one that stemmed, in part, from Australia’s 2017 recognition of same-sex marriage. And that’s the question of religious freedom in relation to LGBTQ rights. In America we’re having similar debates: how we can protect religious freedom when people have traditional views of human sexuality, while at the same time making sure that LGBTQ folk are protected from discrimination. Is there a way forward for Australia on this?
Morrison: Well, these protections were previously never really necessary, because Christianity was the dominant culture in Australia. But that has really shifted, and there are many things that have contributed to that. When you become a minority culture—well, you need a bit of a reality check. You have to change your expectations around what laws should be in place. We’re a representative democracy. We’re not a Christian theocracy. And in a representative democracy, the majority rules.
But then, at the same time, majorities don’t get to rule with tyranny in a democracy. The majority doesn’t get to impose how people should think or believe.
I was incredibly devastated that we were not able to pass these religious freedom protections, because I was simply seeking to make that balance. We already had anti-discrimination laws that applied to gender, sexuality, race, and things of this nature, but not as applied to religion. And I was seeking to apply the same protections to religion as well. We were unsuccessful in that. And I don’t believe [the current government] will be successful in changing these laws now.
Krause: In your final speech before leaving Parliament earlier this year, you spoke about the fact that society is becoming increasingly disconnected from its religious values and heritage. Can you speak more to that?
Morrison: I chose to speak on this because I also spoke about it in my maiden speech to Parliament. So it sort of rounded off my almost 16 years in Parliament, as I saw this issue continue to morph over that period.
There’s no doubt that Western society’s values and principles have their origins in the Christian and Jewish faiths. No historian would argue to the contrary on that. But over time, I think in the West in particular, we feel as though we’ve outgrown it a bit. And so now we’ll pick and choose a bit more. But once you start doing that, frankly, the intellectual rationale for what you’re talking about starts to crumble. And this idea of having one’s own truth, well, where does that end? If there’s no objective standard around truth, if there’s no objective standard around the key principles of morality and life and the dignity of humans, if they’re not anchored or deeply rooted into anything of substance, well, they just blow away. And that really concerns me, and not just as a Christian. It concerns me as an Australian. It concerns me as a citizen of a Western representative democracy, seeing something that has been our greatest strength being diluted before our very eyes.
President Biden is right when he talks about the contest between autocracies. And I would put it more in this way: it’s a contest between autocracy and freedom. The contest between autocracy and freedom is real. Freedom is about liberty, and I think, from a Christian point of view, it’s about love and care for one another.
Autocracy is about power. And in that fight between love and power, you’ve got to know what you believe. I know the result of those who believe in power. I know what they’re prepared to do. I came up against them, particularly in the form of the Chinese Communist Party. And they’re not kidding. They’re very serious. And in our Western democracies I think we need to understand where our strength resides in order to resist this.
So I worry about that disconnect. When you start chipping away and picking and choosing—or, as it says in Romans 1:25, exchanging the truth of God for a lie—well, I fear we’ve sort of cut that rope and we’re just drifting. Where are we drifting? Who knows?
This is the world we’re living in. Is it really that different from the world that Jesus and His disciples were living in? Is it really that different from the world that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were living in, or the world that Esther was living in? No, probably not.
So what did they do and how did they approach it?
One of the things I always found fascinating about people like Daniel and Joseph is they didn’t try to take over the government. They didn’t try to stack the Parliament. They didn’t engage in some sort of Christian political contest. They were faithful. They did their jobs well. They were respectful of authority. They cared for others. They held to their relationship with God. And they didn’t compromise their identity in who they were in God. They stood firm. And where the regime fell afoul of those things, well, they stood their ground. And they knew they’d either end up in the fire or whatever the case may be. And I think that’s a similar call to us.
So my message is: God does have a plan for us. We need to know who the Author of that plan is, and we need to hold on to it.