Transcript
TONY JONES: To discuss his essay in tomorrow's The Monthly magazine, we're joined from our Brisbane studio by Labor's Foreign Affairs Spokesman, Kevin Rudd.
Thanks for being there.
KEVIN RUDD: Thanks for having me on the program, Tony.
TONY JONES: How is the Labor Party dealing with its gradual conversion from secularism?
KEVIN RUDD: Well I think the wrong thing about your introduction was that somehow I'm stepping outside the Labor mainstream. Anyone familiar with Labor's history as a political party knows that for 115 years we've been this amalgam of Irish Catholics, of English Methodists or Christian socialists, and as well as enlightenment humanists. We've all come together, over the course of that 115 year history, on the common platform of social justice. So there is nothing, sort of, stepping out of a previous convention on this. I'm simply reasserting an historical norm. We've got to do that because I don't intend to concede for one minute the terrain in this debate in Australia today to the political conservatives under John Howard.
TONY JONES: What's prompted, then, this latest foray into the role of Christianity in Australian politics?
KEVIN RUDD: Well again, it's not, sort of, a latest foray. I've been talking in these terms for the last two years, since the last Federal election. The reason I started a couple of years ago and was asked to chair the Caucus Committee on Faith Politics and Values was because of the emergence of Family First. We became very concerned at the last Federal election that Family First, with strong links to various evangelical and Pentecostal churches, decided to direct all of its preferences, in effect, to Liberal and National Party candidates at the last election. We saw very many good members of Parliament from the Labor Party lose their seats as a result, including Con Shacker here in Queensland. So when I saw that, and I've seen parallel trends in the United States with the Republican Party increasingly orchestrating the evangelical and Pentecostal churches there, I concluded it was time to speak out, and I've done so with the support of my caucus colleagues are well.
TONY JONES: This time it's done through the prism of looking at the life of your personal hero, the man you described as the greatest in the 20th century, Dietrich bon Hoffer. Tell us why he is relevant today?
KEVIN RUDD: Well, bon Hoffer was an extraordinary man. Bon Hoffer was a German pastor and theologian and began work just as the Nazis took over control in Berlin with Hitler's chancellorship in 1933. Bon Hoffer concluded that the only thing he could do ethically was to oppose the regime. The day after Hitler became Chancellor he went onto radio and broadcast against the so called 'Fuehrer Principle'. A couple of weeks after Hitler proclaimed the Arian race laws bon Hoffer produced his own Christian tract on the Jewish question, directly challenging what the state was doing. When all that failed, bon Hoffer eventually organised an underground church and then acted for a while as double agent, participating in the plot against Hitler. That's why they hanged him only a couple of weeks before the end of the war. A man of extraordinary courage. The key point being, for him Christian ethics was dead, a dead letter, unless it was converted into concrete social action and social justice in the circumstances of the day. That's why I think he still speaks to Christians in politics in every age.
Complete transcript : http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1753915.htm
Video Windows Broadband : http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200610/r109430_340426.asx
Refer also Rudd seeks church role in politics : http://www.acl.org.au/national/browse.stw?article_id=11184
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