A simple Presbyterian in politics

The Presbyterianism of a young Robert Menzies had a foundational role in shaping his liberal philosophy and anti-sectarian views. By David Furse-Roberts.

The following is an edited transcript of a speech delivered by David Furse-Roberts at the First Annual Conference of the Robert Menzies Institute on November 18.

With the theme on “Menzies: The Early Years”, this paper will focus on how the young Robert adopted his Presbyterian faith and how this nourished his philosophy of Liberalism and shaped his non-sectarian outlook. Menzies in his latter life, of course, had much to say about both Liberalism and anti-sectarianism, from the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944 to the delivery of State Aid in 1964, but the scope of this paper will be on the formation of these ideas in Menzies’ boyhood, youth, and early public life. 

A Simple Presbyterian

Beginning with his religious faith, Menzies was an old-style, broad-church Presbyterian who cherished the Scottish heritage of his church. Fond of describing himself as a ‘simple Presbyterian’, Menzies had inherited a strong tradition of Scots Presbyterianism from his father’s side. According to Menzies’ biographer, Allan Martin, James Menzies seemed to blend the strict Calvinism of Presbyterianism with the more emotional temperament fostered by Methodist teachings.   

It was into this religious environment that Robert Menzies was born with regular church-going and Bible reading forming a part of his early upbringing. In the household of the young Menzies, the main books included The Bible, the Presbyterian Hymn Book, The Ingoldsby Legends and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Menzies’ Christianity was very broad and non-sectarian but, in public, he made little secret of his pride in identifying as a Presbyterian. Of his Presbyterian Church, he once remarked:

How proud we ought to be of the history of our Church. How proud we ought to be to consider its roots in Scotland, its flourishing and growth in Australia, its vast missionary enterprises, the clarity of its thinking, its concentration upon the essence.

As a proud Scottish Australian, Menzies saw his Presbyterianism as integral to his cultural identity in much the same way that many Irish and German immigrants respectively viewed their Catholicism and Lutheranism. Dating back to the sixteenth century Scottish Calvinist, John Knox, Presbyterianism had been deeply woven into the Scottish cultural fabric with the state Church of Scotland.

Presbyterianism arrived in Australia through British colonisation, and together with Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism and Methodism, it was one of the four great faith traditions of early modern Australia. As such, it contributed richly to the religious and civic life of the nation through its churches, charities, educational institutions and influential networks of professionals and public figures. Bringing a Reformed variety of Protestantism to Australia, it did much to contribute to the evolving national psyche. The Melbourne Argus credited Presbyterianism for impressing the ideals of ordered liberty, citizenship, personal responsibility and service to the community. In his later years as Prime Minister, Menzies affirmed these principles as the great drivers of democracy and national progress.

As well as embodying the social values of Presbyterianism, Menzies assented to much of its theology contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. These included core Christian beliefs in the sovereignty of God, the authority of the Bible and Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, but unlike many of his fellow churchman, Menzies was not a staunch Calvinist who adhered strictly to every letter of these doctrinal standards. His own form of Presbyterianism was simple, practical and doctrinally minimalist. For his part, he was happy to go straight to the Bible to draw his Christian beliefs and leave the finer points of doctrine to the theologians. As a Presbyterian layperson in public life, he saw his chief vocation as not so much to expound doctrine as to give practical effect to broad Christian principles.  

In addition to Presbyterianism, Menzies was shaped profoundly by Methodism through both his father’s lay leadership in the Jeparit Methodist Church and his education at Melbourne’s Wesley College. Revering the Methodist founder John Wesley as one of the immortals of the eighteenth-century, he credited Wesley for breathing life into the English Church. Forging a close friendship with the Melbourne Methodist leader, Irving Clarence Benson, Menzies imbibed Methodist beliefs in personal free will, practical works of service and optimism in human progress under God. Like the twentieth-century Australian liberal philosopher, Frederick Eggleston, Menzies blended these Methodist impulses with Liberal ideals. Both Eggleston and Menzies affirmed that sacrificing one’s self for the common good was essential to the survival of liberalism and democracy.

Liberalism

Accordingly, Menzies espoused a Liberalism infused with Christian ideals. At least in its understanding of the divine origins of human dignity and freedom, it was not philosophically dissimilar to either the British Whig liberalism of Burke and Gladstone, the US Republican tradition of Lincoln or, more contemporaneously, the Christian democracy of twentieth-century Europe.

In common with these overseas traditions, the Liberalism of Menzies affirmed the values of individual freedom and dignity, private property rights, free enterprise, class harmony, cooperation between employer and employee as well as the freedoms of speech, religion and association. As both Larry Siedentop and Tom Holland acknowledge, Christianity played a foundational role in shaping the liberal precepts of human dignity and equality which helped to define modern societies in the West.

Like democratic traditions in both Europe and the United States, Menzies’ own philosophy of liberalism was based on a conception of democracy that viewed all individuals as possessing equal dignity in the sight of God. Speaking in October 1942 on the “Nature of Democracy”, Menzies pronounced:

Democracy is more than a machine, it is a spirit. It is based upon the Christian conception that there is in every human soul a spark of the divine; that, with all their inequalities of mind and body, the souls of men stand equal in the sight of God.

For Menzies, this foundation to liberal democracy was basic and broad enough to appeal to Protestants, Catholics, Jews and other Australians of faith, particularly when counterposed with the common enemy of “godless communism”.

The Christian ideals of the Australian Liberalism that Menzies revived in the 1940s were evident in its applause for humane social reforms, affirmation of a selfless individualism, pursuit of a “good neighbour” foreign policy, commitment to a civilised capitalism, and appeal to the “natural law”. Much of this character to the Liberalism of Menzies could be traced back to the Federation Liberalism of Alfred Deakin.  

Deakin himself held to a non-utilitarian form of liberalism that affirmed the primacy of the common good, the moral duties of the individual citizen within society, and the place for ameliorative social reform. In this vein, Deakin had supported factory legislation and minimum wages to ensure that “all should have what was their due”.

Such social reform measures had deep Christian roots, both in the Evangelical social activism of figures such as William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury, and in Catholic social teaching. Menzies, likewise, had identified with these social reform impulses of liberalism, welcoming the abolition of slavery and child labour, and industrial relations reform, as some of the great achievements of liberal democracy.   

With individualism characteristically representing one of the defining traits of liberalism, Menzies’ own particular emphasis on a selfless individualism gave his Liberal creed a decidedly Christian inflexion. By “selfless individualism”, Menzies meant that whilst the state fulfilled an important ameliorative role, it fell primarily to the compassionate spirit and self-sacrifice of individuals to help the needy and further the common good. For Menzies, the ethic of selfless individualism could be summed up in the biblical concept of being “my brother’s keeper”, whereby individuals took responsibility for the welfare of their neighbours. Hailing it as the ‘noblest embodiment of the Christian philosophy’, this ethic was so foundational to Menzies that he once observed that the “oldest expression of democracy” was inherent in the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  

Anti-sectarianism

Holding to a common ecumenical Christianity that transcended sectarian divisions, Menzies sought to heal the Catholic-Protestant rift that had long blighted Australian society. Born into a decade where deep divisions festered between predominantly Irish working-class Catholics and middle-class Protestants, Menzies was all too familiar with sectarian rancour in the community. In the shadow of the Great War, Menzies witnessed the acrimonious conflict over conscription between the Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, and Daniel Mannix, the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne. Years later, Menzies reflected on this reality of his early life:

My youth was lived in a period of Australian social history when there was much religious intolerance. Sectarianism was not engaged in solely by one side; but from my earliest days it nauseated me.  

Raised as a Protestant, Menzies nevertheless felt an instinctive revulsion of sectarianism from an early age. First, he saw the spectacle of different Christians at bitter loggerheads as flagrantly at odds with the message of Christ for fellow believers to love one another. He went so far as to deplore sectarian strife as “the denial of Christianity and not its proof”.  

To be sure, Menzies recognised the tremendous diversity of the universal Christian church and recognised that there would always be differences amongst Christians over theology, church government, worship, liturgy and the sacraments. He regarded sectarianism, however, as having much less to do with conscientious disagreements between Protestants and Catholics than with a mutually hostile, cultural tribalism that he regarded as unchristian, illiberal and corrosive to the social fabric.  

Menzies’ distaste of sectarianism also sprang from his exposure to a broad, “common Christianity” in his early life: first, from the new community of Jeparit where denominational boundaries amongst Protestants were relatively fluid; and, second, from his student years with the pan-Protestant Student Christian Union at Melbourne University. Through the SCU, the primary focus was with the basics of Christianity on which all denominations could agree, such as the nature and person of Jesus Christ, and not so much on doctrinal specifics.  

The more ecumenical outlook of the SCU contrasted with the sectarian, anti-Catholicism of his family background. Appearing on the same platform as Archbishop Mannix to open a Catholic school in his electorate shortly after his election to the Victorian parliament in 1928, Menzies was excoriated by his family. As his political career progressed in the 1930s, he continued to confront religious intolerance, when as Attorney-General of Victoria, he resisted attempts by some Protestants to ban a large Catholic procession through the streets of Melbourne. As prime minister in 1939, he addressed a peace rally in Melbourne and stressed the shared faith of all present by drawing attention to his presence as a Presbyterian on a Catholic platform.   

As well as his broad Christianity, Menzies also saw sectarian attitudes as out of place in a liberal, pluralist democracy such as Australia. As an elected representative of the people, he believed that it behoved him to represent people of all faiths or, indeed none, with no sectarian prejudice impairing that objective.  

This was yet another point where his broad religious outlook intersected with his liberal principles. His acceptance of, and ease, with a diversity of Christian traditions accorded with his liberal instinct of religious toleration in civil society and each was anathema to the sectarianism of his youth. As David Kemp noted, Menzies’ resolve to turn his back on old sectarian divisions, together with those of race and class, was part of his liberal mission to forge a new political culture based on mutual respect and understanding between citizens of all backgrounds.

Menzies’ fusion of Christian and liberal principles, which fostered this toleration of diversity within the communion of Christians, had historical roots in the early liberalism of colonial Australia. Menzies stood very much in the tradition of Richard Bourke, the reformist Whig governor of NSW who put all religious denominations on an equal footing through the Church Act of 1836. Like the Anglican Bourke, Menzies was loyal to his own church yet favoured an inclusive and common Christianity as the basis for a free and moral society.

The ‘simple Presbyterian’ who would become Australia‘s longest serving prime minister stood essentially in a long Liberal tradition of religious toleration dating back to John Locke and first English Whigs. Mediated through the Enlightenment, it was inspired by a Christianity that affirmed the inherent dignity, freedom and equality of all people.

This is an edited transcript of a speech delivered by David Furse-Roberts at the First Annual Conference of the Robert Menzies Institute. David is the author of God & Menzies: The Faith that Shaped a Prime Minister and his Nation, Jeparit Press, 2021. Click here to buy the book.

The Robert Menzies Institute, a prime ministerial library and museum commemorating the life and legacy of Australia's longest serving prime minister, is a joint venture between the MRC and the University of Melbourne. Visit the RMI site here