‘Nobody quite understood’: What role did religion play in Scott Morrison’s ‘bulldozer’ moves?

Scott Morrison’s departure from politics this week brings to a close an extraordinary, yet little understood, era in Australian public life: it is the period when the relatively small Christian denomination of Pentecostalism moved from the fringes of Australian life to the very centre of power, coinciding with the parallel rise of Morrison, the Pentecostal politician, and Brian Houston, the Pentecostal pastor.

Over a period of 20 years both ascended to the peak of their respective professions. Morrison became Australia’s prime minister in 2018, making him the first and only pentecostal Christian ever to become a world leader. At the same time Brian Houston’s Hillsong church had expanded exponentially in Australia and internationally, making Houston one of the world’s most influential Christians – and ultimately gaining his access to the White House and a meeting with Donald Trump.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison and former Hillsong Church pastor Brian Houston: both rose to the top of their professions.Credit: Getty, NYT

It was a far cry from the early 2000s. Back then there was only one pentecostal Christian in any parliament anywhere in Australia. That was Andrew Evans, an Adelaide pastor who became a member of South Australia’s legislative council in 2002.

At the time Morrison was director of the NSW Liberal Party and an emerging political player. On Morrison’s watch, Louise Markus, gained Liberal preselection and became the first Hillsong follower to be elected to federal parliament. Morrison followed in 2007 after his own highly contentious preselection. Both Markus and Morrison would use their first parliamentary speeches to pay tribute to Pastor Brian Houston who by then had become the most powerful figure in Australian Pentecostalism and almost single-handedly responsible for a surge in church attendance.

Houston’s glitzy prosperity message appealed mightily to the aspirational suburban middle class – which just happened to be a core demographic for political parties and savvy campaigners like Morrison.

In common with evangelical leaders from the United States, Houston was an advocate for christianising society through political influence. His message to Morrison, as told by Morrison himself, was that he should use what God had put into his hand – a barely concealed reference to using power to implement Pentecostal Christian aims.

Morrison blurred the lines between the personal and the political by inviting the media into the Horizon Church in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire.Credit: AAP

What did that mean in terms of Morrison’s governing?

Throughout Morrison’s time in office the question of the influence of religion on his politics has been largely off the table: not a question to be asked in polite company. Morrison himself has always rejected the idea, even though it was Morrison who blurred the lines by inviting the media inside his local Pentecostal church to capture him, flanked by wife, Jenny, in an ecstatic moment with hand-raised to receive the Holy Spirit. This week Morrison repeatedly referenced and gave his thanks to God in his valedictory speech to parliament. Australia’s political media has largely abided by the convention that religion is personal, that it has nothing to do with politics and that it is not to be pried into.

Yet Morrison – as the evidence now shows – has been anything but a conventional politician and, despite his protestations, there is a growing trail of breadcrumbs to demonstrate that he may have made policy decisions that reflected his personal religious commitment.

The clearest example is the ill-fated attempt to introduce a Religious Discrimination Bill in the dying days of his government. Morrison had made a public commitment while sharing a Hillsong stage with Brian Houston in 2019 that he would deliver on such legislation. Morrison’s insistence to push ahead with an all-night sitting fractured the government, with five dissenters crossing the floor. Liberal senator, Andrew Bragg, would later remark that the government was “massively out of line with the public” in pursuing the bill with just weeks remaining before the 2022 election.

The push for an all-night sitting of parliament to pass the bill “gives you an idea of the way the show was being run”, he later told the ABC.

Newly elected prime minister Scott Morrison on stage before a Hillsong congregation in 2019, where he pledged to pursue religious discrimination laws.

Morrison made a brief push for Australia to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in line with hardline Apocalyptic Christian doctrine (and supported by the Trump administration). He pledged a multimillion dollar grant to a Pentecostal run rehab centre in Perth, which was later closed down after claims emerged of harsh religion-based treatments such as casting out demons. He backed the preselection of a Pentecostal pastor with no political experience to represent the party in the 2022 elections. In 2019, he arranged to take the visiting US secretary of state and fellow Pentecotal Christian, Mike Pompeo, to his local Pentecostal church in the Shire. (Morrison is taking on an advisory role alongside Pompeo in a US-based venture capital company advising on AUKUS investments.)

As the ABC’s Nemesis documentary series has shown, even those who worked most closely with Morrison were left blindsided by the revelations which emerged in the months after the Coalition lost office in 2022 that Scott Morrison had sworn himself into five ministries. Two cabinet ministers, Greg Hunt (Health) and Keith Pitt (Industry Science Energy Resources) knew of Morrison’s move, though it was not made public at the time. The rest found out later. The former Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews, whose ministry Morrison had secretly taken on, told the ABC Morrison had “trashed” what the Liberal Party stood for.

Brian Houston’s prosperity message appealed to the same demographic savvy campaigners like Morrison chased.Credit: Hillsong Church/Facebook

While Morrison’s colleagues remain perplexed – and the political media left bewildered – it’s worth recalling the findings of an official inquiry into the saga which concluded in essence that Morrison’s actions undermined trust and public confidence in government.

The inquiry, conducted by the former High Court justice Virginia Bell was unable to come up with any rational explanation for Morrison’s norm shattering actions. But what it leaves is the most troubling of scenarios: Australia had a prime minister who secretly attacked the core values of our system of government. Should we simply shrug our shoulders to that?

Ultimately, it may take the insights of a religious insider – rather than a secular expert – to explain Morrison’s actions.

Reverend Tim Costello, the leading Melbourne-based Baptist minister, has a firm view that Morrison’s secret power grab can only be explained through the prism of religious belief – and specifically by Morrison’s view of himself as a leader anointed by God, in line with the Pentecostal Christian leadership model.

Tim Costello says the Pentacostal style of leadership can cast some light on Scott Morrison’s prime ministership.

“The Pentecostal model is that God has blessed me and my decisions,” he explains. “The theology of it is that God anoints the leader, that that leader casts the vision and in a governance sense the people have to be loyal to that vision.”

The idea of the God-anointed leader has been fundamental in the governance of many Pentecostal churches in Australia, with Hillsong being the most prominent. Under its rules all power resided in the senior pastor, Brian Houston, who was virtually beyond question.

As Costello explains it, the model differs from the Baptist model where decisions are taken by church congregations. This made for a slower and more difficult decision-making process. “You don’t grow as fast, but you have checks and balances,” he says.

By contrast the Pentecostal model of the anointed leader, to whom others are loyal, worked well – unless and until the leader had “misjudgments or character defects”.

Tim Costello’s argument applies equally to Scott Morrison (the self-acknowledged “bulldozer”) and Brian Houston who both suddenly fell from great heights within weeks of each other in 2022.

In March of that year the all-powerful Global Pastor was pushed out of the church he created and ran as his own fiefdom after a series of misjudgments, most notably spending 40 minutes alone in a hotel room with a female Hillsong supporter. Houston put his moral lapse down to a cocktail of alcohol and antianxiety medication, though the full story has never emerged of what, if anything, occurred that night.

Weeks later, in May, Morrison too was gone, after a comprehensive election defeat.

Both had been central to elevating the influence of Pentecostalism. In federal parliament Morrison promoted his fellow believer, Stuart Robert, to his inner circle of advisers.

Both Morrison and Houston faced similar accusations, too, of being paternalistic in their dealings with women and favouring the influence of men in their own image.

So what of the argument that it crosses an ethical line to link Morrison’s governing with his religion? Is there a lesson to learn from the general reluctance to ask the question?

“I understand the reluctance because I do believe that the freedom of religion demands respect, even if the secular world doesn’t understand it or thinks it’s nutty,” says Costello, who has spent a life straddling the secular and religious worlds. “But I do think on the five ministries, despite telephone books of copy reporting on that, nobody quite understood this leadership model and that the so-called favour of God is on this leader. The authority that comes with that and the expectation of real loyalty to actually align yourself with the leader’s vision as the whole church does. This is very much Brian Houston and Hillsong.

“That explanation is, I think it doesn’t explain all of Scott Morrison, but I do think it explains quite a bit of the five ministries.”

Morrison’s office was contacted for comment but did not respond.

Cut loose from the prime ministership Morrison has become less and less restrained about displaying his Pentecostal beliefs. At a sermon delivered to Margaret Court’s pentecostal church in Perth the former prime minister asserted the primacy of God over government.

Next in the pipeline is a book, Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness. To be published in May it promises a prime ministerial reflection unlike any other.

It marks the fuller coming out of a man who inhabits the world of miracles and wonders - and who could perhaps never be understood using conventional means of secular inquiry.

David Hardaker is a senior story producer on Channel Nine’s Under Investigation with Liz Hayes and the author of Mine is the Kingdom: the rise and fall of Brian Houston and the Hillsong Church (Allen and Unwin, $34.99).

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