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Former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison reveals how he stays true to his faith as hostility to Christianity grows
Mr Scott Morrison has said he wouldn’t have been able to lead Australia through the Covid-19 pandemic without his faith in God.
The former Prime Minister of Australia was in office from 2018-2022. The country was nicknamed ‘Fortress Australia’ because of its tight border controls, which led to low Covid infection rates.
Mr Morrison told Premier’s Babel Undone podcast that he relied on God for peace, wisdom and guidance.
“My faith said… ‘wherever I end up… he’s going to be with me, he’s going to have prepared me and enabled me in those circumstances,'” he recounted.
“Now, I still had to make all the decisions, I still had to… run the government, I still had to make sure we were getting all the right information and be very careful about the decisions we were making. That was up to me.
“But faith just gave me a peace and a calm and I felt like a confidence that…I hadn’t been thrust into something for which he wouldn’t have prepared me.”
Mr Morrison, who was Australia’s 30th prime minister and identifies as an evangelical Christian, has always been vocal about his Christian faith but had to find a balance of how much it crossed over into how he led the country.
He said talking about his relationship with Jesus wasn’t always taken well as the predominantly Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox country grew intolerant to evangelicalism.
“In the period of time, almost four years, I was Prime Minister, and for that matter, the nine years I was in the cabinet, I noticed that over that period of time, there was a increasing hostility and lack of tolerance towards Christian faith in our society, and that’s true in most Western countries.
“I always tried to be quite careful about it. What I mean by that is, as the head of a government, your head of government, for all people, Australians… regardless of what their faith was.
“And sometimes I think Christians thought that I was supposed to be just their Prime Minister, as a Christian. No, I was elected, not as the head of the Christian party; I was elected as the head of the Liberal Party in Australia, and I was a Christian in politics, and there’s a difference.
“It helped drive my faith, and my values, all of these sorts of things. But I never saw myself as sort of a Christian cause advocate politician.”
Mr Morrison talks more about faith in his political memoir Plans for Your Good.
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