Scott Morrison's polarising of Australian society

Why, if Judaism and Christianity were "made up" religions, designed to comfort believers, would devastatingly negative events that threatened the basis of faith, be central to their understanding of the nature of God? Why should bitter experience weigh so much? It weighs so much because it plumbs the depth of the human experience and gives us a vision of the human that we would rather ignore.

The theology of the Judeo/Christian tradition was born out of darkness and despair and in no way can it be seen to be positive propaganda. The Holocaust occupies a similar position for modern Judaism. In other words, the essence of what it means to be human is that we find ourselves thrown into the world to earn our bread in difficulty and to face our death; we share the experience of the legendary Adam and Eve when they were expelled from the garden of Eden. Any attempt to ignore this will result in a baseless optimism of our own making.

It is essential that those in public life have a deep understanding of the human dilemma and compassion for it as we find in the Christian tradition. Ideology will often interfere with this sense. The Paschal drama destroys our optimism because it teaches us about human corruption, what "good" people are capable of. It was the religious people and those in government that murdered Jesus, the one true man.

While the rationalists place much emphasis on the power of the will, we know that that is often not enough and that most of us have to fight our own private demons. We all bear the heaviness of being. It is no accident that meetings with others often begin with the question; How are you? We know that even the most privileged life is fraught with difficulty. The billionaire has mental health problems that debilitate him, the suburban princess makes foolish choices in men, key members of families die. The experience of the tragic aspect of life defuses our shallow optimism and introduces a seriousness through which the world can be seen as it is.

This seriousness will not be seduced by attempts to always be positive and uplifting, a temptation for many professions, especially clergy and politicians. There is a temptation not to experience the depths of "good" Friday. But unless one does, one does not experience the darkness of the absence of God. This skipping over the darkness produces a positive frame of mind that does not serve us well, especially when tragedy hits our own lives, as it is sure to do. In the spiritual life one must go through the darkness, not around it, because only the experience of darkness will humanise us and cleanse us of all personal projects designed to make us happy. Indeed, the temptation of "religion" is that it can be used as a comforting blanket to insulate us from the cruel realities of life, even to the extent of ameliorating the tragedy of death. Such use blocks real human maturity.

The Liberal ideology of Morrison et al is triumphalist to the core because it applauds the successful but denigrates those who suffer and hence do not establish themselves economically. Obviously we would all rather be successful. But that success has mostly not been a consequence of a choice we have made. Many of us have inherited a favourable situation, if not economically but in terms of having a loving and supporting family. Take the same person and place him with alcoholic parents, or whatever, and you will probably produce someone with low skills, poor education and a troubled soul who will be unemployed for much of his or her life. The emphasis on choice disregards the real situation people face and is used as a weapon to denigrate the poor, adding insult to injury.

The origin of egalitarianism is to be found in Christian Scriptures. No other society thought that each person was made in the image of God. Valuing one person over another on the grounds of economic contribution eats away at the foundations of our society, its laws and institutions. I know that it may seem like overreach to say this, but such a move provides the foundation for fascism, the rule of the strongman.

The great inversion we see in the Beatitudes is not a sentimental statement but a vision of a social order of higher delight. To name it class warfare is to miss the point because it points to a commonwealth more of the heart than the failed vision of the communist or capitalist state. It points to a society in which every person is seen as a creation in the image of God and to belong to that society whether they are able to contribute or not.

The only way our political culture will regain respect is for this inversion to be inwardly digested. Only then will our political actors begin to look like real flesh and blood men and women whose strength is shown in weakness. Only then will we see a truly human society emerge that includes not only the strong and successful but those whose lives have been broken in suffering.