‘I couldn’t function without it’: Scott Morrison opens up on faith

Scott Morrison’s Christian faith is so central to his life that he declares: ‘I couldn’t function without it. My faith informs my life.’

Scott Morrison in church. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison’s Christian faith is so central to his life that he declares: “I couldn’t function without it. My faith informs my life.”

The Prime Minister remembers the precise day in 1981 that he formally and irrevocably gave his life to God. He was at a Boys’ Brigade camp in Nunawading, in suburban Melbourne.

“I was 12. I massively felt it that day,” Morrison recalls. “It is a ­confession of repentance. I felt that movement, to get to my feet. I spent the rest of the day sitting with the chaplain.”

The young Morrison’s commitment to God followed a similar act of commitment by his older brother two years earlier, at a Billy Graham rally at Sydney’s Randwick Racecourse, in 1979.

The whole Morrison family ­attended that Billy Graham rally. By the strangest of coincidences Morrison’s future wife, Jenny, was also at the Graham event. (By an even stranger coincidence, so was I.)

Morrison’s insights into his ­religious development come in an interview in which he speaks more freely than ever about his Pentecostal Christian faith and how it has shaped his life.

This interview forms part of my new book, Christians, an excerpt of which appears in The Weekend Australian colour magazine. In the book, Morrison is open and expansive about the role of faith in his life. But he ­reveals that he resents those rare occasions when people criticise his policies as being somehow anti-Christian.

He recalls: “One former politician on a plane gave me a gobfull about my faith and my decisions. I said to him, you can judge my policies as a Liberal, and you can judge their efficacy. You can’t judge my relationship with God.”

Morrison recounts that the human consequences of individual decisions under his tough ­border control policies have sometimes had him in tears at home as he discusses their full ­implications with his wife. “Do I search my soul and spirit when I make a tough decision? Yes. The Bible is not a policy book. I do believe I did the right thing, it’s not that God made me do it,” he says.

But overwhelmingly, people are positive to Morrison about his religious convictions. He gets a constant stream of unsolicited mail about it: “The letters I get are amazing and it’s a lovely thing. People send me all kinds of things. That’s been a tremendous encouragement for me. It’s not something I politicise.”

Former governor-general Sir Peter Cosgrove, also in the magazine extract from Christians, talks for the first time about Christian prayer in battle, recalling the Vietnam War in which he was involved in a great deal of conflict.

He recalls giving thanks that he and his men survived a battle, but also reflects on how he felt at the sight of enemy dead: “There was sadness at the sight of dead people. They are human beings, they have families too.”

Former Labor leader Bill Hayden, for most of his life a staunch atheist and once the recipient of the Humanist of the Year award, tells in stark detail of the process which brought him to full Christian belief late in life, in 2018. “I couldn’t bear the emptiness,” Hayden says. “In my mind there was an emptiness without belief.”

One element of Hayden’s prayer life may furnish some consolation to an old enemy, who had a lot to do with Hayden losing the Labor leadership to Bob Hawke in 1983: “He might be surprised but I say prayers for Graham Richardson because he’s in ill health and I pray for his speedy recovery.”

Christians, the urgent case for Jesus in our world. Allen and Unwin. $32.95
Read an extract in The Weekend Australian Magazine