Who’s Scotty Marketing Now?

Tuesday, 23 July 2024  | Graeme Cole

My former local member, Scott Morrison, is making life count and pay. While he was quietly sitting on the backbenches after his demise as Prime Minister, the Member for Cook was as busy as a celebrity chef at the kitchen table churning out his memoirs and recipes for life, culminating in Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness.

Like so many former high-profile politicians, he has sought to beef out a best seller before the next Federal election and cash in on the wave of Christian nationalism in the US before the most important Presidential election ever in November. After recently posing with convicted felon Donald J. Trump in front of gold ornate doors in Manhattan and then posting the snapshot on X (formerly Twitter),[1] it struck me once again that, while Morrison has aspired to be a Pentecostal pastor, he is also both a paradox and pragmatist.

Morrison piped in his posting: ‘It was nice to catch up again, especially given the pile on he [Trump] is currently dealing with in the US’. The meeting was prior to Trump’s 34 convictions on electoral fraud.

But Morrison knows context. In Australian terms Trump had ‘form’. Morrison knew that but it counted for nothing. He was there to sell and make the moment count. Facing four separate criminal prosecutions and 88 indictments, including inciting the January 6 riot at the Capitol Building, Morrison nevertheless made Trump his key advocate and mediator with the US market.

The Trump narrative is that he is always innocent, the charges are a witch-hunt and those who seek justice are simply out to shoot Bambi. It is a line pedalled by Republicans and MAGA extremists. It is a lie built on fear. And it is a lie that can easily be propagated by the sub-text of a tweet and the iconoclastic photo of two old mates standing shoulder to shoulder in their time of need. I could hear the elevator music in Trump Tower, ‘He aint heavy, he’s my brother’. DJT had his own little fundraiser with a God Bless the USA Bible and Morrison his manuscript. And there it was, empanelled in the abhorrence of opulence: reciprocity as strong as AUKUS.

Nick Bryant noted: ‘Forgiveness has always been an article of Christian faith. But judging from the tenor of Morrison’s remarks, he does not appear to think that Trump has done anything wrong. Later, in an interview with the ABC, the book of Morrison again appeared to mimic the book of Trump: that the former president is the victim of a Democratic witch-hunt’.[2]

How could an evangelical Pentecostal Christian be such a spiritual contortionist in such an ostentatious and public way?

Many of the Christian reviews of Morrison’s book affirm his forthrightness in relation to his faith (word/proclamation). In evangelical Bible-believing circles he gets a tick for weaving the Scriptures, God’s grace and his daily prayer life into his calling.

While critical of Morrison’s compartmentalised theology, Robyn Whitaker, Director of The Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Policy, and Associate Professor of New Testament at Pilgrim Theological College, summed it up succinctly:

Morrison’s book has real strengths. It insists upon the unconditional love of God. It encourages people of faith to examine their lives in the light of scripture. It notes that religion transcends, or should transcend, partisan political considerations. To a certain kind of Christian, this will be a helpful devotional text. But the operative theology it reveals is one that doesn’t fully grapple with God’s plans for the world beyond the individual, the nuclear family, or the Shire.[3]

By his deeds, Morrison is a considered and not an incidental preacher of selective repentance. While calling criticism of Trump’s litany of lies and criminal acts, including rape, a ‘pile on’, Morrison, like other Trump supporters, by implication denigrates the legal system and the rule of law, and turns a blind eye to the events of 6^th January 2021, the deaths that occurred on that day and later, and the unbridled trashing of democracy that Trump incited. How many US and Australian lives have been lost in protracted wars and conflicts around the world so that democratic values could dispose of tyranny?

In another twist, former Vice President and Trump bête-noir Mike Pence wrote the foreword to Morrison’s book. Pence, an evangelical Christian, certified the US election results of 2020. Trump told Pence that, if he certified the results, it would simply be a ‘career killer’. In a letter to lawmakers on January 6, Pence said what Trump wanted him to do would be ‘entirely antithetical’ to ‘our Constitution, our laws, and our history’.

At a rally in Washington, Trump instructed thousands of his most fervent supporters to march to the US Capitol and ‘fight like hell’ to stop Congress certifying the results of the election. Pence was presiding over the process in a joint sitting of Congress. But as January 6 rioters stormed the Capitol building seeking to lynch Pence, Trump sat idly by as his acolytes sought summary justice.

For many Christians, Morrison’s seemingly bizarre posturing will be another hurdle to sharing their faith. In the public sphere of pre-evangelism and social justice, and in the multi-billion-dollar sectors of Christian education, community services and aged care, we now have another section writ large in the Australian psyche and apologetics: the Morrison chapter.

My non-Christian friends will be asking me to explain Morrison’s behaviour. I don’t have to and won’t, but he’s just provided another free kick to the sceptics and the inquiring minds. From the pub to the water cooler and from family lunches to mainstream television media panels, time and space in our ephemeral world will be given to the symbolic, the contradictory and the odd. It is a new counter-Christian discourse that will draw upon the Morrison story, fed by other narratives both current and past.

Like Trump, it seems Morrison is comfortable with gross paradoxes because they are secondary to the efficacy of the sale and transaction. That’s Scotty from Marketing acting a lot like Trump.

Graeme Cole is a veteran journalist and public affairs executive. He is the 2016 winner of the Gutenberg Award for excellence in religious journalism.

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