In the news you might have missed over the Thanksgiving weekend, Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd decisively defeated Prime Minister John Howard in an important Australian election. Howard has long been one of the strongest supporters of President Bush's policies. Rudd, on the other hand, has already made it clear that he has different priorities. In his first news conference, he committed to making climate change a priority, promising to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Rudd also announced he will withdraw Australia's troops from Iraq.
But deeper than specific issues are the principles that guide Kevin Rudd's politics. On my most recent trip to Australia, I had dinner and a long conversation with Rudd, in which I learned he is a committed Catholic Christian in a secular country and a longtime friend of Sojourners. We discussed at some length how to apply Catholic social teaching to public policy. We had a subsequent conversation in Washington, D.C., on faith and politics; and in the fall of 2006, he wrote an essay, titled "Faith in Politics," for an Australian magazine, The Monthly. He began by saying,
[Dietrich] Bonhoeffer is, without doubt, the man I admire most in the history of the twentieth century. ...This essay seeks both to honour Bonhoeffer and to examine what his life, example and writings might have to say to us, 60 years after his death, on the proper relationship between Christianity and politics in the modern world.
Rudd pointed to the core principle that,
Bonhoeffer's political theology is therefore one of a dissenting church that speaks truth to the state, and does so by giving voice to the voiceless. Its domain is the village, not the interior life of the chapel. Its core principle is to stand in defence of the defenceless or, in Bonhoeffer's terms, of those who are "below". ... Christianity, consistent with Bonhoeffer's critique in the '30s, must always take the side of the marginalised, the vulnerable and the oppressed.
It is unusual for a prime minister to cite Bonhoeffer as his model, but it is that principle that Rudd will bring to his new position as prime minister. Along with British prime minister Gordon Brown, he is a new kind of political leader who seeks to practice moral politics.
Jim Wallis is the Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners and blogs at www.godspolitics.com.
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