Address, G20 Interfaith Forum, University of Utah, Salt Lake City

Religion, Faith and Human flourishing

As a former politician and national leader I want to share with you what Rabbi Sacks taught me about religion and politics.

Politics is not a religion nor is it a substitute for it. History teaches us that when this occurs, bad things happen.

This continues today in many forms, where political and social claims of meaning and purpose are being made to  new generations that cannot be made good.

And while science  can increasingly tell us what, it cannot tell us why and what we should do about it. It offers, by design,  no moral guide.

By contrast, faith offers identity, meaning and direction. Faith provides the acknowledgement of our common human dignity as being fellow and equal image bearers of our creator God. This creates a universal family of humanity.

Faith can  therefore bring unity - not necessarily of view -  but of action. The latin from which religion is derived, ligare, means to bind.

As a result, faith has created and sustained moral communities of good faith for centuries. This has sanctified a social order capable of resolving the problem of trust between strangers. This has built stronger societies and nations as a result.

John Adams wrote in 1798 that the American Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to the government of any other. George Washington called religion and morality the indispensable supports of political prosperity. In the twentieth century during the sixties German legal philosopher and Catholic intellectual  Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde warned that  the liberal secular state lives on premises it cannot itself guarantee.

Faith enables us to reject the dualism of “us” v ‘them’ that externalises conflict, that faith teaches us must be resolved within each of us first. This demands an humility, to see the humanity of others, on the same terms as our own.

In ‘Not in God’s name’, Sacks says ‘you cannot love God without honouring the universal dignity of humanity as the image and likeness of the universal God’.

This defeats dehumanising our enemies with genuine empathy,  the cultivation of grievance and victimhood with grace and responsibility, and the rejection of  altruistic evil through divinely authored morality.

He argues that violence happens when you try to resolve a religious dispute by means of power .. and that you can’t impose truth by force  and that religion and power must never be confused. But this is not an argument for the sidelining of religion in our society.

This appreciation of human dignity, inspires and sustains our understanding of human liberty and our consideration of ‘the other’. It, Os Gunness argues, affords us the freedom to do what is right, rather than what we please. It pushes past tolerance for difference to loving our neighbour and even our enemy.

This charity, this hospitality, is what in turn enables sustainable pluralist societies, of which my own country, Australia, has been an example - while not a perfect one.

It is also what led faith communities to initiate and establish care provision and wellbeing institutions: our hospitals, our universities, our schools, our orphanages, income support for widows, primary health care, and now aged and disability care and emergency relief. Modern states have adopted these services and have increasingly forgotten their origins. They also fail to understand that faith is the most essential ingredient in how these organisations deliver these services.

These instruments for public wellbeing were established by people of faith because they believed that image bearers of God must live out their God given purpose to flourish.  This is what people of faith mean by human flourishing.

You won’t find that in a G20 Leaders memo on how to achieve human development and well being goals. In fact, you won’t read too much about human flourishing at all. The secular motive will speak of rights and entitlements, but fail to acknowledge the true source of such rights. Apologies to the writers of the Declaration of Independence, but they are not self evident. History, including of this nation and my own, and all over  the world and even now as we speak, tells a different story.

Such rights, when disconnected from their source, become relative and arbitrary. They are subject to politics and power. People of faith possess a more enduring and reliable vision. 

Our human rights - once called God given rights -  are universal because they are granted by a loving creator God, not a human appointed council. Nation states, or well meaning globalist institutions, did not create these rights, but they were formed to protect, defend and honour them. 

I raise these points not as a cleric, but as a former national leader who has run a Government and who has sat round the G20 top table and many others like it

My message is that people  of faith and leaders of faith communities must continue to proclaim and remind political leaders of these truths by word and action.

What you believe as the basis of human dignity is not openly shared or probably even accepted around the counsel of those tables. That is not to say there are not noble, genuine nor sympathetic humanitarian sentiments. There are, but compared to the truth, as people of faith understand it, those sentiments are not enough.They are untethered from their source and will inevitably drift.

So what are the implications for people of faith and our religious institutions?

Religion often gets a bad wrap. It is routinely dismissed and  derided as the cause of the world’s problems, where God’s name has been conveniently and blasphemously misappropriated to carry the burden for humanity’s own moral failures.

To illustrate Sacks quotes Jonathan Swift, who said that too often we have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

This is what I believe Rabbi Sacks meant when he talked about bad religion. But the answer to bad religion, Sacks argued, is not no religion, but good religion. And that is where as people and leaders of faith must focus their efforts.

We must do religion better.

The decline in public trust in our various institutions is not limited to the secular and civil sphere. Our religious institutions, particularly in more developed societies, have also suffered, and often at their own hand.

If faith communities are to effectively carry out their mission in the future, they must restore that trust and standing.

This must be done by demonstrating that faith provides answers to protect human dignity, by meeting the needs of our communities, continuing to deliver and expand humanitarian and social services and support that faith communities  have offered for centuries - now as partners with government  - and provide pathways to  peace, forgiveness and reconciliation.

There is also a need to attend to the hygiene of our religious institutions - the integrity and transparency of teaching and ministry, as well as the accountability and transparency of institutional governance, where there have been serious failings. New and higher standards must be set and met.

In these areas, Government agencies and institutions are right to task and  expect religious organisations to follow Jeremiah’s instruction to the exiles to seek the welfare of the city (Jeremiah 29:7) and the Mishnah’s counsel to pray for the welfare of the government (Avot 3:2).

But I have three other requests for the leader of our faith communities.

The first is to stay on the field and not withdraw, either voluntarily or by being coerced to vacate the public square. We should not privatise our faith. as our lane is wider than many in the state think.

Secondly, stay salty and do not allow your message of faith, love and human dignity and your acts of service to be conformed to the fashion of contemporary political and cultural settings. Otherwise, what are you really offering?

And thirdly, stay humble and don’t intimidate. We must not seek to coerce our truth by the force of the state. We must seek only those laws we would happily impose on ourselves, appreciating that we operate up stream in our communities, and by doing so impact what happens down stream in our parliaments.  The state will not make a holy nation, but those living out their faith can.

If faith communities first attend to the moral and relational enrichment of their own communities and societies, this will lead to better and more competent states. This is essential if global goals are to be achieved.  This is true in developed and developing countries alike.

Modern states, such as the US, became strong in the first place because of this very dynamic.  In the United Kingdom groups like the Clapham sect in the 18th and 19th Centuries transformed their societies, through their faithful promotion and practice of Godly manners as they called them, ultimately leading to the collapse of state sanctioned slavery, not to mention reforms in education and  prisons.

Faith is indispensable to human flourishing. It celebrates and dignifies the humanity we are all so keen to protect. It is essential to our liberty and success as pluralistic societies. We ignore and dismiss it at our collective peril.