Private faith v public faith

Updated November 09, 2012 09:29:25

What does private or personal faith actually mean for citizens in general, and public figures in particular, wonders Damon Young.

When a public figure suggests that their religion is private or personal, this seems like the end of the matter. None of our business, in other words.

Kevin Rudd, for example, said in 1994 that he had a "long standing personal policy simply not to publicly discuss questions of personal religious faith." Tony Abbott, speaking on radio to Steve Price, argued that politicians ought to be judged on "political competence," and not religious beliefs. Faith or faithlessness, he said, was "a personal matter".

But what does private or personal faith actually mean for citizens in general, and public figures in particular?

To be clear, faith is by no means wholly religious: it involves many human-all-too-human instincts and motives. The Catholic Church, with its history of abuse and cover-ups, is the premier example of this. But what makes faith unique, at least in the Abrahamic traditions, is its combination of ethics and belief. The faithful believe in supernatural beings, without evidence, and this belief is considered a virtue. This, in turn, provides the foundation for many of religion's customs, ideals and values.

What's private is best comprehended alongside the public. If public is the domain of strangers and their associations, the private is one of family, friends, perhaps close colleagues. Public is the world of policy, media, common spaces and times, and how they're managed. Private suggests retreat or invisibility: what's private is not usually available for strangers.

The mind is, in many ways, the ultimate 'space' of privacy. It isn't actually a space at all, but the metaphor will do: the psyche is the exemplary invisible world, which cannot be forced to reveal itself. It is policed, at least in most Western countries, with caution.

Private faith is, in this light, withdrawn religious belief; faith that is secluded or invisible. The ideal of tolerance was developed alongside this idea. Thinkers like John Locke, in the seventeenth century, argued that politics and religion ought to work independently. This was partly to do with the separation of church and state. As voluntary associations, churches had no legal authority over the faithful. Governments, meanwhile, could regulate civil matters, but had no business in telling anyone what to believe. (Although, for Locke, atheism and the Roman Catholic Church, as antithetical to trust and secular rule, couldn't be tolerated.) But this was also a matter of public politics versus private faith. Governments' domain was this world, not the next - they had no mandate for salvation. And salvation, in turn, was often between oneself and one's god - a relationship invisible to others.

This contract usually relies on a certain level of education, prosperity, and other social and psychological achievements: rights, rule of law, secularism, conscience, and so on. But in practice it can be quite straightforward: we don't have to agree with, or even understand, what you believe - we simply have to tolerate it. We cannot ask the bailiff to arrest you for worshipping false gods. This works for families as well as nations: Uncle Richard might believe in 'Juju up the Mountain', but this is his private faith, and we are not deputised to arrest him on his strange hiking pilgrimages.

Importantly, private faith is no magic shield against queries, criticism and even mockery. It is not above questioning. You cannot be forced, in public life, to disclose, discuss or discard your religious beliefs. But neither can you force others to stop analysing or satirising these beliefs - provided this is done without libel or vilification.






Topics: religion-and-beliefs, government-and-politics, abbott-tony, rudd-kevin

First posted November 09, 2012 08:44:43