I like Joe Hockey and without getting into politics, I think one day he will make a great prime minister for this country.

I was very interested in his address to the Sydney Institute this week, (November 9) “In Defence of God”. 

There was both good and bad about it at once.

To his credit, Mr Hockey was arguing, “What we as a society must not do is allow our secularity to be a reason for ignoring those who are truly inspirational just because they are people of faith”. 

In fact, he argued for a place for people of faith as well as for genuine freedom of religion and belief. I get the feeling he was speaking against the grumpy old atheists like Hitchens et al who want to completely marginalise believers in society. In fact, he went further in claiming that “A secular society imbued with the values that faith engenders will be stronger not weaker”.

But there were some things that troubled me as well. 

Firstly, Mr Hockey was defending “faith.” He even says, “In this speech I use the term God as an analogy for faith in all its forms”. Faith was a common feature of the various religions. This meant that in arguing for tolerance he chose the form of tolerance which depends upon the thing being tolerated being basically the same, not tolerance which copes with difference. 

In fact, the assumption of his address was that faith, no matter what religion you are, is fundamentally that thing, that leads to the values of compassion and concern and tolerance, and that extremists in any faith really don’t count. 

In other words, tolerance only existed because we happened anyway to agree seemed to be the underlying subtext of his remarks. This, of course, is not really religious freedom.

Secondly, as far as I could see, there was only one reference to Jesus Christ in the entire piece, although Mr Hockey identifies with the Christian faith: “In the past that inspiration has often come from the works of the saints, the mystics, the prophets and in the case of my faith, from the teaching and example of Jesus Christ”. 

The concept of religion and God which runs through the paper therefore was shallow, weak and in danger of becoming the lowest common ethical denominator.

Surprisingly for one who at one level rightly claimed a real tentative knowledge of God, Mr Hockey also makes very clear religion can be used, he says, “in ways that no loving and forgiving God can possibly have envisaged or decreed”. In other words, he understands what God must be like even though he doesn’t want to make clear how he knows that.

Thirdly, one of the important points that Mr Hockey makes, following along the work of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God (which I read recently and is very much a sophisticated version of the points Joe Hockey makes in this paper), was that literal interpretation of Scripture makes faith less believable and leads to all kinds of other troubles. Joe Hockey’s examples were the famous Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925 about the literal statement of creation and the place where (the fictional) President Jeb Bartlett of West Wing critiques a Christian opponent of homosexual behaviour by drawing attention to the other prescriptions in Leviticus which the person didn’t want to keep. Hockey regards this literalism as alienating.

The problem with this is that the language of ‘no literalism’ says and proves nothing. As a matter of fact, I do not believe that the Genesis creation story does compel me to hold anything like a literal account of a brief recent-time special series of miraculous divine events. Nor do I believe that restrictions in Leviticus about slavery, not wearing two different kinds of cloth or consuming pig meat apply to me today. But the reason is not simply that I have moved away from literalism. It is much more theologically sophisticated than that, as I am sure Sydneyanglican.net blog readers are well aware. It is a pity that Joe Hockey’s words give the impression that religion is okay as long as you didn’t take it too seriously, just water it down. That’s not the answer to the problems of religion.

However, not all is for criticism. When all was said and done, there is a lesson for us Christians in what Mr Hockey said. It was impressive that he wanted to say that matters of faith do have a place and, more importantly for us, showed that the great critique on Christian faith will not be questions of truth but questions of morality. 

And that it is incumbent upon us to show that true Christian faith genuinely enhances human wellbeing and life and can even contribute importantly to a freer, more compassionate and more loving society. I know this is not going to be proof of anything, but it seems to me that those are the terms today in which a lot of our apologetic needs to move. Even if Joe Hockey’s defence of God was inadequate, he does raise questions that are inescapable.