God in the House

Helen Clark: ``Those who invoke religion must accept that they will be judged by its precepts.''

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Overt religious beliefs seem to rest uncomfortably with the political aspirations of our parliamentarians. PHILIP MATTHEWS looks at why so many of them are uncomfortable with talking about whether they believe in God.

These have been days of tribulation for Christian politicians. Consider the signs: the disgrace of Taito Phillip Field, the disgrace of Graham Capill. The new disunity of the only Christian party to cross MMP's five per cent threshold, the centrist United Future, with one of its three MPs -- Gordon Copeland -- splitting over the anti-smacking bill.

Days of tribulation and days of confusion. The Catholic Copeland looked like he might join a new Christian outfit, the Family Party, but then he didn't. And the Family Party? That's the low-polling Destiny Party renamed. It was briefly a vehicle for the post-Labour aspirations of Field and is still a home for former United Future MP Paul Adams, who came from the Protestant fundamentalist wing of that troubled alliance.

Days of humiliation. You might expect Helen Clark to be laughing up her sleeve at every clumsy effort by the Christian right to get traction in New Zealand politics -- the Exclusive Brethren's secret alliance with National at the last election, Christian journalist Ian Wishart's campaign to demean Clark and husband Peter Davis, even Don Brash's doomed attempt to occupy the high ground when Clark spoke in the Christchurch Cathedral in 2004 (he attacked her as an "atheist", although technically she's agnostic) -- but her response is measured. "I believe that those who invoke religion must accept that they will be judged by its precepts," she says.

Belief has become the last taboo -- even sex is more widely discussed. And in politics, this seems doubly true -- Christianity is potentially a liability. This is what Tony Blair was getting at when he said recently that "You talk about it (religion) in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter".

Massey University historian Peter Lineham, a specialist in the religious aspects of our political history, believes there are about 15 Christians among Parliament's 121 MPs -- a figure which stands in some contrast to the 51% of New Zealanders who called themselves Christians in the last census. "It's cautiousness (about religion) that I'm struck by in New Zealand politics, even compared to British politics," Lineham says.

This is borne out by the reluctance of some of our most high-profile Christian politicians -- National's Bill English, Gordon Copeland of Future New Zealand and United Future's Peter Dunne -- to talk about their beliefs, the intersection of those beliefs and their politics and their views on Tony Blair's comments.

For a journalist hoping to find someone happy to talk about their experiences as a Christian politician, salvation comes from an unlikely quarter: Jim Anderton. This willingness is a reminder that Christian politics wasn't always the property of the right -- Anderton's belief system hails from an era when Christianity could be identified with social progress. In particular, the Second Vatican Council.

Anderton converted to Catholicism at the age of 17. He was a student at Seddon Memorial Technical College in Auckland when four of his class -- him included -- took religious instruction at Saint Mark's, Remuera (Anderton adds that he was living in working-class Penrose). Like all teenagers, he says, he was looking for answers to the big questions, but he was also impressed by the example of two of the Catholic kids in his group -- "they stood up to a fair bit of hammering, which I admired".

He joined the Catholic Youth Movement. He became the president of the Catholic Society at Auckland Teachers College, then worked full time for the Youth Movement, becoming its president for five years. He says he was actively engaged in the Catholic movement until about the age of 32. His involvement fell off partly because of other demands -- paying a mortgage and raising a family, running a business, getting into politics -- and partly because it seemed that the gains of the Second Vatican Council were being rolled back. "It all looked pretty hopeful, but it didn't quite happen. That wasn't the fault of Jesus Christ -- it was the fault of the way human beings handle Him."

He still goes to church occasionally, whenever he feels the need -- and says he will do so this Christmas -- but he doesn't "make a fetish" of his churchgoing.

"I've never stopped believing, not in God or in the values and ethics of Christianity. I was in a Bible study group that went through the Bible about five times, from cover to cover, with Father Ernie Simmons, who was the editor of Zealandia. He was a very fine theologian, so by the time I'd done that I'd done a course in theology, I reckon. So I'm reasonably well-equipped to match the born-again Christians who want to argue out gospel quotations."

Catholicism was long identified with Labour -- the Irish Catholic vote was a working-class one -- but that tradition wound down in the 1970s. You're now as likely to find Catholics voting for National, Massey University's Lineham says. But a greater lost tradition, he believes, is political involvement from the mainstream Protestant groups -- Anglican and Presbyterian especially -- whose numbers have declined rapidly. "That liberal Protestant tradition was politically aware, very internationalist in outlook and very concerned with social justice."

For at least a generation, he says, a liberal Presbyterianism shaped the thinking of both the Labour and National elites -- indeed, Presbyterianism is the tradition that Helen Clark was born into -- but that political culture died with John Marshall. The Student Christian Movement that Clark remembers as still being strong at Auckland University in the 1960s was gradually supplanted by secular student politics, while the culture wars of the '70s and '80s -- over abortion initially, then homosexuality -- tested traditional bonds between churches and parties.

But in Lineham's view, the final break came in the early '90s, when National duplicated Labour's free-market politics, and the leaders of 10 New Zealand churches, horrified by the plight of the poor, issued a Social Justice Statement that was "widely criticised in the media and by the government".

In the same era, separatist Christian parties began to form. Christian Heritage was first, in 1989. Lineham believes that this separatism has, ironically, put fewer Christians in positions of political influence rather than more, as Christian parties have not, with the exception of United Future, made it into Parliament. Writing after the trouncing of both Christian Heritage and Future New Zealand in 1999, political scientist Jonathan Boston advised Christians to "put their energies into more viable political options".

Or there's a less secular way of putting it. "The gospels talk about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and rendering unto God what is God's," Anderton says. "Jesus Christ didn't set up a political party. He didn't stand for Parliament. He taught.

"I'm not here as a Catholic or a Christian, I'm here as a legislator. I legislate on behalf of the people of New Zealand. So I have to be careful that I don't allow any religious view I have to be influential in the decisions I make other than the ethical set of values I have: to be honest; to tell the truth."

One such test came in 2004, when he opposed the Catholic position and voted for the Civil Union Bill, while Parliament's other Catholics -- including Copeland, Dunne, English, Gerry Brownlee, David Carter, Clayton Cosgrove and Damien O'Connor -- voted against it.

"The bishops and the priests and Christians of any sort don't have a mortgage on wisdom and knowledge and experience and judgment," Anderton says. "If I think they're wrong, I'll say so."

Ultimately, the Christianity that Anderton likes is as much an attitude -- pragmatic, independent, compassionate -- as a doctrinal system. So he has an appropriately common-sense response to Tony Blair's fears about making his faith too overt.

"You'd only be considered a nutter if you talked about Christianity in a nutty way."

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