Father Bob Maguire’s remarkable life was defined by a moral coherence our politicians lack

Father Bob Maguire, who died yesterday at the age of 88, invited us to consider the many worlds his long and remarkable life bridged. News of his 1934 birth in Thornbury, Melbourne would have most likely taken weeks, if not months, to arrive by letter to relatives in his parents’ native Scotland. Within hours, news of his death was available to millions via their phones.

The way he was introduced to the majority of his (non-congregation) audience, through Sunday Night Safran, belongs to another time, and not just because its audience — in the centre of Triple J’s target market when the show debuted in 2005 — are now likely nearing 40. The show was, as Helen Razer noted in Crikey upon its finish in 2015, a “meandering and old-timey” one which wrestled with big ideas, and occasionally interviewed people who did “bad things” to do so.

“And, rather than supposing, as we routinely are led to suppose by other broadcast media, that these ‘bad things’, like white supremacist activism or military desertion or murder, were an exceptional threat, we began to understand them in a more usual context,” she wrote.

Indeed, 2015 seems a suggestive time for such an endeavour to end — within a year or two, a major broadcaster interviewing a white supremacist was no longer a provocative, uncomfortable and necessary reckoning with extreme thinking, but a sort of business plan, an exhausting regular nudging of the Overton Window bit by bit until it framed something deeply sinister.

Then of course there is Bob himself. A man of considerable personal faith. An army reservist. Born into desperate poverty, he survived the abuse of his alcoholic father — Maguire’s “long-suffering” mother was a “model of Christian piety”, he would later write — and the deaths of both his parents and a sibling by the time he was 15.

He worked his way up from these beginnings to be ordained in 1960, and dedicate his life to social causes, for which he received an Order of Australia in 1989. There are currents in both major parties that at one time could have claimed to be the natural home for people with Bob’s values — faith as both a centre of community and coherent design for how to live a good and useful life, a belief in service to one’s country and community, with modesty, self-reliance and resilience.

This is not to sanctify anyone, or express any yearning for some golden era that never existed, but merely to observe that the organic bases of political parties, where someone like Bob may have fit, are now hollowed out and replaced by… well, just look at the explicit impact committed Christianity has actually had on politics in the past 15 or so years.

On the one hand, it gave us trade unions with (until very recently) inexplicably strong views on stem cell research. On the other, it gave us the energetic and baffling culture warring of Tony Abbott, who urged UK Tory ministers to ignore the biblical imperative to “love thy neighbour” when it came to refugees and told his daughters their virginity was “the greatest gift that you can give someone”.

Bob himself once wrote in Crikey about his concerns about the Australian Christian Lobby, Hillsong Church and the “prosperity gospel”:

They’re preaching for those at the top end of town, it’s not about the little guy. I’m all about social activism, and last night [then ACL head] Jim Wallace did talk about overseas aid, about Make Poverty History, but it’s not really your traditional Jesus of Nazareth going about his humble business giving the voiceless a voice.

… Jesus of Nazareth was all about self sacrifice, and it’s not about self sacrifice anymore.

That was in 2007, the year our first prosperity gospel prime minister, Scott Morrison, entered Parliament.

It is striking how few high-profile conservatives have expressed any feelings at all at the passing of this emblem of Christian virtues, who dedicated his life to helping the vulnerable. It is also notable, as Rachel Withers noted yesterday, the nerve of sitting Labor politicians expressing their awe at his life’s work, when a rounding error in the money they’ve dedicated to building war readiness could raise unemployment benefits above the poverty level and make some of that work far less urgent.

The needless cruelty of this policy and its predecessors, which everyone agrees makes absolutely no economic sense, can only be the result of some twisted morality so deeply imbibed by the political class that they can’t seem to explain it to anyone else anymore.

Contrast this with the quote attributed to Bob by his longtime collaborator Safran — quietly breathtaking in how it takes something we apparently find very difficult, and renders it the most natural thing in the world:

He attracted all manner of outcasts, not all pleasant, but he was open-hearted to those people too. I asked him how did this and he said, ‘You don’t have to like people to love them’.