Why faith matters

Robert Menzies was not shy in promulgating the importance of Christianity to a democratic, peaceful and free Australia. By John Anderson.

The following is the Afterword to God & Menzies: The Faith that Shaped a Prime Minister and his Nation by David Furse-Roberts.

It is one thing to be Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister, but it is quite another to be arguably Australia’s most important and ‘nation-shaping’ Prime Minister. In truth it is hard to deny either, and so the interest in his life and career needs no justification.

Menzies’ life has now been exhaustively documented in several biographies, as has his political career and lasting legacy in Australian history. Happily, earlier caricatures of Menzies as merely a seller of pig iron to Japan, mere Cold War warrior, or a backwards-looking Anglophile are now superseded by more subtle and even-handed analyses of his mind and legacy. Long may this much-needed exercise in historical recovery continue.

In this respect, David Furse-Roberts’ God & Menzies is a welcome addition to the growing interest in the founder of the Liberal Party. Furse-Roberts shows at the very least that, even if Menzies was no Christian enthusiast in the evangelical mould, his world-view and vision for Australia’s future cannot be adequately explained without uncovering his deeply held conviction that Christianity is absolutely essential for democracy and a healthy civilisation. Even if Menzies, like many of his generation, was shy about speaking at length about what his Christian beliefs meant to him personally, he was not shy in discussing their importance to a democratic, free, and peaceful Australia.

If Menzies had never mentioned the role of Christian belief in the image of God in all people, as a foundation for democratic equality, or ornamented his speeches throughout his career with Bible verses and allusions, or repeatedly stressed that a full education ideally includes religious instruction, he would not have been very different from other prime ministers. In other words, Australians would not have judged him harshly for it. He spoke of these things because he believed in them.

To understand any Australian prime minister’s effect on the country, indeed, any great historical figure, it is necessary to get inside the mind to find the principles animating the policies. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Menzies’ religiosity was his aversion to sectarianism – unusual during a period in Australia’s history in which Catholic-Protestant rivalries still raged. Certainly the extension of Commonwealth funding to denominational schools, starting incipiently in the 1950s and becoming robust from 1964 onwards, was one of the greatest contributions Menzies made to Australian society. But importantly for Furse-Roberts’ study, resuming funding for Catholic schools after two generations of its absence was a startling demonstration of Menzies’ Christian ecumenical spirit.

Furse-Roberts has written the most detailed account to date of Menzies’ religiosity, his relationship to communities of faith, and the way his religious convictions informed his activities as a legislator. Certainly this book will never be surpassed for its detail and scope.

Menzies famously remarked, “Human nature is at its greatest when it combines dependence upon God with independence of man.” Likewise, analyses of Menzies are at their best when they acknowledge, not only the intellectual and strategic brilliance of the man, but also his sense that everything hinges, in the end, on a nation’s response to the God whose existence is presupposed, even demanded, by the principles of freedom, equality, and democracy, principles which characterised the very civilisation he spent his life trying to serve and defend.

Hon John Anderson AO is former deputy prime minister. He will be launching God & Menzies: The Faith that Shaped a Prime Minister and his Nation by David Furse-Roberts online on 15 September. Click here to register and here to buy the book.