Godless politics has gone too far for democracy

A dismissive attitude towards Christianity flows into a phony dichotomy between Caesar and God

ONE of the ABC's better initiatives has been the interactive panel discussion program Q&A which, unlike the heavily moderated and controlled Insight on SBS, allows the discussion to move into interesting and unexpected shoals and eddies.

One such moment happened recently after a fair bit of discussion about the Opposition Leader and the usual ribaldry about his (or was it the panel's?) preoccupation with sex.

One young man asked whether people with strong religious beliefs should be allowed to participate in politics.

Now that one even knocked the sensibilities of the rather wobbly old Whitlamite warrior Mungo MacCallum, forcing a nice little speech about freedom of religion from the bearded one.

I wondered if our young friend really understood what he was saying: that anyone with any kind of religious formation should be deliberately excluded from democracy.

Of course he had Christians in mind, and he didn't bother to ask himself why Christians, rather than Buddhists, Muslims or Jews, were less entitled to participate in democratic government. Cue the Horst Wessel Song?

At least he had the excuse of ignorance and youth. In the same week I had a conversation with a well-known head of a national institution who is supposedly on the opposite end of the ignorance scale, who declared he "hated all religion" and thought it had always been destructive, before flouncing off.

This dismissive attitude is often used as a way to avoid complex argument about issues of conscience.

Another way is to set up a phony dichotomy about God and Caesar.

A variation on that is to suppress religious belief and initiations in the name of freedom, as the human rightists are always trying to do.

It always amuses me how little the opponents of religion understand the complex philosophical foundations of Western democracy and the debt they owe to religious philosophy in our understanding of the human being.

Nor will they even concede that men and women of religious bent took on most of the great human rights battles of the past, such as the abolition of slavery and even the foundation of modern labour movements.

Today, nowhere is this denial more evident than in the battle over human life, human rights and freedom of conscience.

In Australia public policy is formed by a complex mixture of ideas and values.

The traditional values that are foundations of our democracy surely need as much consideration as any other less traditional and less widely held views.

Furthermore the church is deeply embedded in the health, welfare and education systems.

So it is right that religious views should be and are part of the mix of ideas.

The Sydney-based Ambrose Centre was set up to facilitate the philosophical and ethical perspective religion can bring to public debate.

For that reason it is pan-religious, because all great religions share certain common values and teachings.

This month it is sponsoring an American academic from Notre Dame University in Indiana, Gerard Bradley, who will be speaking in Canberra and Sydney on the lessons we can learn from a Catholic perspective arising from the present debate over health reform in the US.

With our vastly different and certainly more egalitarian medical system, we see ourselves as a bit beyond the almost fanatical individualism of the opponents of American health reform.

However, the American Catholic bishops have intervened quite significantly in that debate, as they have in the case of abortion and gay marriage.

We can learn, if not about health reform per se, something about the place of a Christian ethos in issues of conscience, which has ramifications quite beyond the debate about health reform.

According to Bradley, almost everyone agrees that the interventions of the American bishops have been, and will be, crucial to the outcome of President Barack Obama's health bill.

They spoke "consistently, and in a consistently principled way; they refrained from taking sides on technical or political issues [that] were beyond their competence as teachers of faith and morals".

But what of complaints that we are seeing a growing tendency towards episcopal interference in secular matters, such as health, based on derogation of proper church-state separation?

They are exposed as opportunistic rhetoric.

"These complaints focused mostly on the bishops' resistance to abortion funding; no one objected to the bishops' equally persistent declarations in the same teaching documents in favour of a universal right to health care as somehow crossing the line between what is Caesar's and what is God's," Bradley says.

"These opponents are not really civil libertarians, for they opposed adequate conscience protection for healthcare personnel opposed to abortion."

This rings a bell.

In Australia there have been almost identical accusations against the churches over issues such as abortion, embryo research and gay marriage.

Health care enmeshed within the bureaucracy of state and territory governments has already been a battlefront, too.

In Canberra, Calvary Hospital was directly threatened by the highly ideological ACT government, which sought to starve the hospital of funds to force its sale. The intervention of Archbishop of Sydney George Pell was characterised as meddling by one outsider; but, more seriously, the ACT's Stanhope government used the spurious argument that it couldn't fund what it didn't own.

If this argument had prevailed, the Catholic hospital system of Australia could have been threatened with similar action.

Likewise in Victoria, where ultra-liberal abortion laws have severely curtailed the right to conscientious objection. The provision that doctors must refer for abortion would have put Catholic hospitals in that state in an obvious dilemma.

So what of the separation of church and state in health care or indeed any other part of the church's extensive education welfare apparatus?

Just as a person cannot divide themselves into different parts, secular or religious, to suit the demands of the state, neither can the church.

In Australia the church acts as a benevolent agent for the people of the state in health and education.

But once the state interferes in the conduct and running of an institution by, for example, telling a hospital or school who it should employ, or to ignore its ethical foundation, then that is a threat to freedom of religion.

Gerard Bradley will speak on Religious Liberty in the Public Square: How the Church Should Engage Public Policy -- Lessons from the American Healthcare Debate at Notre Dame University in Sydney on Tuesday and at St Thomas More's Church in Canberra on Wednesday.