PM’s plea from the heart a timely reminder

Scott Morrison, right, with Steven Lowy at the United Israel Appeal dinner at Royal Randwick Racecourse in Sydney on Thursday. Picture: Adam Taylor/PMO

Scott Morrison has answered Kevin Rudd’s challenge and told us exactly what the most important consequence of his religious faith are for his politics: it is the belief that every human being is possessed of an innate human dignity that transcends all other considerations.

In a powerful address to the United Israel Appeal, Morrison certainly went beyond his own religious affiliations to speak to the heart of everything that he holds most dear in the human condition. And that is to recognise that in each human being there is a dignity and worth that cannot be compromised or reduced by politics or circumstance or ideology or identity.

Morrison sounded a clarion call against identity politics, decrying “the growing tendency to commodify human beings through identity politics”.

In a statement of profound ­religious humanism, he rightly declared: “You are more than the things that others try to identify you by in this age of identity politics. You are more than your gender, your race, your ethnicity, your religion, your language group, your age.”

These human attributes are important to any person but they are not, the Prime Minister argued, “the essence of humanity”.

Humanity is universal in two critical respects. We all, all of us without exception, share in the uniquely valuable quality of our human natures. And humanity attaches first to an individual, not to a group.

Morrison lauds community. It is the essence of human solidarity. But community begins with the individual. And one of the individual’s greatest and most defining characteristics is the capacity, and the ineluctable necessity, of moral choice.

Human beings are innately free. And that freedom brings ­responsibilities.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison at St Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney.

Morrison’s vision is thus both liberal — in the stress on the ­individual — and conservative, in the stress on the overwhelming importance of community arising from the association of human individuals, and on human responsibility.

His vision is not collectivist but it accommodates both community and an overwhelming sense of solidarity with fellow human beings, especially those down on their luck.

Morrison paid justified tribute to perhaps the finest moral thinker of our age, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, whose last book, Morality, has deeply affected the PM.

Sacks offers a modern guide to the perplexed from all religious backgrounds on the greatest issues of human meaning and social purpose.

Morrison did not quote the great classic Christian assertion of universalism, the Apostle Paul’s declaration: “There is ­neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison (R) and his wife Jenny Morrison attend a special prayer service to commemorate the death of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at St Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney.

To have quoted Paul would have been to impart a denominational affiliation to what is truly a universal principle, shared, as Morrison suggested, by the Jewish and Christian traditions, and by many other traditions as well.

No doubt someone somewhere will find a bizarre way to distort Morrison’s comments so they can fit the preposterous narrative that he is a Christian fundamentalist imposing a false religiosity on society.

The criticisms of Morrison’s recent address to the Australian Christian Churches reached such heights of absurdity as to be beyond a Monty Python parody.

Consider the outrage at the shocking revelation that Morrison sometimes prayed for people. Surely in the long annals of government abuses of power, a Prime Minister offering a private prayer for a constituent must rank at least with Stalin’s show trials in infamy, must be a clue to Savonarola-like conspiracy and wickedness.

In truth, this supple and heartfelt speech by the Prime Minister is transcendently focused on the dignity of each human being — a vision we can surely all embrace, believer and non-believer alike.