I couldn't help but be struck by a bizarre similarity in two back-to-back events this week: the YouTube/CNN Republican forum and the swearing in of Pakistan's President Musharaf broadcast by NPR. Although worlds apart, both demonstrated what happens when religion and politics mix in a less-than-productive way—the insistence on religious tests for holding office.

In the case of President Musharaf, he took the oath of office to a country with Islam as the state religion by swearing that he is a Muslim, upholding the oneness of God, and pledging allegiance to Allah. If we had formal religious tests for office holders in the U.S., this would be akin to being inaugurated as president by proclaiming one's Christianity, stating belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, and dedicating oneself to Jesus—essentially a doctrinal test for politicians.

Americans know that the second scenario is not likely to occur. Although the new president lays his (or her) hand on the Bible and references God, these ceremonial acts are interpreted according to individual conscience and imply no specific doctrinal content. Indeed, the Constitution the president swears to protect and defend outlawed religious tests for federal officials, and, during the early 1800s, individual states slowly ended local practice of religious requirements for public office. However, this formal Constitutional principle didn't stop the forum questioners from insisting upon some sort of informal religious test for their candidates. Several people asked about the theological beliefs (not even the more generic religious beliefs) of candidates on a wide range of issues and pointedly quizzed them on their views of the Bible.

Several years ago, I taught theology at a Christian college—a task that I disliked because the class almost always devolved into a sort of checklist of right opinion to get into heaven. The Republican forum reminded me of that experience. The candidates were required, down to specifically quoting scriptures, to "check off" the right religious answers in order to secure their party's bid for the nation's highest office. It is almost as if a politician will utter the magic words - "Jesus is my Savior" or "the Bible is true in all that it affirms" - millions of people will cast their vote for that candidate. While I do not doubt the sincerity of (most of) the answers, the whole exercise struck me as politically dubious.

Americans need to understand that the relationship between religion and politics is a malleable one - there are few clear-cut rules regarding their interplay. The U.S. is neither a "Christian Nation" in the way it is popularly interpreted, nor is it ruled by a rigid separation of church and state. Neither cultural war stereotype is entirely true or entirely false. Rather, when it comes to religion and politics, we live in a perpetual state of creative tension. Throughout our history, faith and politics have created an often nuanced interplay of fine and sometimes conflicting lines—an interplay that requires discernment on the part of politicians, courts, and voters.

As a serious Christian, it matters to me that the president of the U.S. is a moral person with a mature conscience, and that he or she brings broadly shared ethical insights (along with other insights) to political issues. It does not, however, matter by what tradition that moral conscience has been formed as long as the office holder supports the Constitution. In the U.S., broadly shared political ethics generally include such things as respect for all human persons, a commitment to national and global justice, and developing national capacities of happiness, freedom, and liberty for all citizens. This is not a religious creed or a Bible verse. These are commonly held values that we have struggled for throughout our history. In our context, these values arose originally from diverse Christian traditions, but today numerous American faith traditions can assent to them. Although the founders never imagined the variety of religions in the contemporary U.S., they nevertheless opened the door for a creative political pluralism in the 21st century. We should not be electing a theologian-in-chief. We need to elect a good president.

As a Christian, I also know that getting the answers right on a doctrinal test are no guarantee of a person's moral disposition or fitness for leadership. Indeed, one's orthodoxy can bear little relationship to one's practice of faith. Experience, vision, compassion, good leadership, and an ability to govern well are the only tests upon which Christians—or other religious folks—should vote.

Of course, voters have the right to ask about candidates' religious views, and politicians have the right to talk about those views. But when such rights verge on becoming a faith test, then we begin to sacrifice the wisdom of our political system in favor of a testimony that more rightly belongs in church. And a big part of that wisdom is that our president does not make theological affirmations that exclude millions of Americans on Inauguration Day.

Diana Butler Bass (www.dianabutlerbass.com) is the author of Christianity for the Rest of Us (Harper One, 2006) and a regular blogger for God's Politics.

On Dec. 1, the world commemorates World AIDS Day, a day in which we pause and remember the 25 million lives lost to the deadly epidemic. The day also challenges us to redouble our efforts to show greater solidarity with the estimated 33 million people worldwide living with HIV. The day's slogan is "Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise". This is a direct appeal to governments, policy makers, and regional health authorities to ensure that they meet the litany of targets in the fight against HIV and AIDS - especially the promise agreed to at the 2005 G8 Summit of universal access to HIV treatment, care, support, and prevention services by 2010. The 2007 theme of "leadership" highlights the stark reality that without a revolution in political will the epidemic will continue to outpace even our best response.

Dec. 1 represents a day for remembering the 2.1 million people that lost their lives this year due to this preventable and treatable disease. While we are starting to win victories in increasing access to treatment we are still losing the war to prevent new infections. Reports still show an alarming concentration of infections in the southern third of Africa, with nations such as Swaziland and Botswana reporting as many as one in four adults infected with HIV. Even closer to home, statistics released last week in Washington, D.C., reveal a state of emergency in which one in 20 residents is HIV positive - with 80 percent of cases among black men, women, and adolescents. The report shatters the common myth that AIDS is predominantly a gay disease, as 37.4 percent of newly reported cases were due to heterosexual contact. Behind these sobering statistics are real lives, real families, and real people made in the image of God.

We can give thanks to the degree to which Christians, including evangelicals, have now embraced AIDS as an urgent and legitimate cause. This weekend Pastor Rick Warren is convening thousands of faith leaders from across the country and world for his annual Summit on AIDS and the Church. I applaud his leadership in shining a spotlight on the indispensable role of the church in the fight against AIDS. However, past conferences have often shied away from the political nature of this epidemic and failed to deliver a clear call for political action to address the systemic injustices that so often fuel it. We can celebrate major advances in global treatment due in large part to increased funding through the President's Emergency AIDS Plan and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Still, only 20 percent of people in need in the developing world currently have access. Thanks in large part to activism through the 2008 Stop AIDS campaign, all three leading Democratic Presidential candidates have agreed to a bold campaign promise to increase President Bush's pledge of $30 billion for AIDS prevention and treatment over the next five years to a figure more commensurate with the global need of $50 billion. Now we must pressure the Republican candidates to follow suit.

AIDS tests our faith as well as our humanity. Applying Matthew 25 to the contemporary age of AIDS, I believe God will also ask us "when I was living with HIV, did you love me, care for me, and use your prophetic voice to help stop the epidemic?"

The gospel music artist Donald Lawrence came out with a song last year titled "I Speak Life." As Christians we must speak life by loving and supporting people around us living with the virus. We can speak life by using our voices to challenge Congress and the Bush administration to make good on their promises to achieve universal access to treatment by the year 2010. We can speak life by breaking down the walls of stigma in our churches and communities, raising awareness, and encouraging testing. We can speak life by addressing the underlying injustices and issues that so often fuel the crisis of AIDS, including intravenous drug use, poverty, sexual violence, promiscuity, and infidelity.

An old African American Spiritual says it best:

Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work's in vain.
But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.
There is balm in Gilead to heal the wounded soul.
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.

Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners.

The eighth and final entry in a series of posts by Bob Massey, a Los Angeles screenwriter who traveled to India with a team from Ecclesia Hollywood. + Click here to read previous posts

Our final stop is Mussoorie, an hour's harrowing taxi ride up into the Himalayan foothills from Dehradun. And it's dazzling. The town spreads across the hilltops, often seeming to float above the clouds. A short walk over the hillcrest reveals a 180-degree view of snowcapped Himalayas. Beyond them lies Tibet.

Mussoorie is the opposite of Mumbai: serene, beautiful, quiet. Though we all loved our time in the cities this comes as a relief. There's a well-regarded Hindi-language school here, so the town hosts a lot of expats. (It also hosts a lot of monkeys, who tend to swoop down and steal the expats' food off the café table.) Some of them (the expats) attend the tiny church run by our friends, a couple we'll call Fred and Ethel.

Fred grew up in one of the villages that lie in the shadows of those aforementioned Himalayas. No power, running water, or driveable roads, if I remember correctly. His family's faith, while technically Hindu, might be more accurately described as animist. They worshipped household gods. They kept homemade idols.

As a teenager Fred was recruited by some missionaries to assist at a school and it was there that he came to believe in Jesus. (They thought he was already a believer. Oh, that wacky cross-cultural communication thing….) Though he'd never finished the equivalent of high school, Fred went on to get three master's degrees. Along the way he met and married Ethel, also the recipient of advanced degrees. And they felt called to Mussoorie.

If you believe in Jesus and the stuff he said, then the earthly pursuit of justice emerges from Jesus himself. It's Jesus who demands justice and it's Jesus who fulfills it, ultimately. That's a little thing they call the gospel, and what Fred and Ethel do is train guys to walk out to those inaccessible villages in the mountains and tell people about this gospel thing in their own language and cultural context. It's a job that Western folks couldn't do correctly, nor even folks from the cities in India. The villages are too isolated and their language too idiosyncratic for non-natives.

The young guys they train come from those villages and they walk for days to get back to them. Much like Paul, Timothy, and Barnabas. It's pretty grueling work. But these dudes are just filled with energy and joy, and if you ask them to dance (as we did on our final day), they throw down, Garhwali-style.

And at Fred and Ethel's church the songs are mostly in Hindi. It's a real homegrown service but the non-natives in the room are mostly trying to learn Hindi anyway, so it works out.

We had the privilege of driving out to a couple of nearby villages with Fred, Ethel, their three kids, and a few of the guys they train. Imagine unpaved one-lane roads without rails, winding above sheer drops.

Folks out in those mountains and valleys are mostly shepherds and farmers. The farming happens on terraces that stair-step the mountainsides. At one point we climbed to a peak about 12,000 feet up, which is pretty exhausting for lowlanders used to the thick air around sea level. We met a kid up there who was tending some cattle. And when he wasn't herding, he was doing his studies in a little booklet. But the place we met him had a 360-degree view of Himalayan peaks, which would be a little distracting to me if I were trying to study.

Up top there was a little shrine to some unnamed god. People had climbed up and left coins, combs, scraps of cloth and such. Halfway up we'd met a family known to Fred who had some adorable little pigtailed girls. We noticed a number of burn scars on the girls, which Fred had to explain to us. Evidently the local superstition holds that it's bad spirits that make babies cry, so you drive out the spirits with a hot brand. Some of Fred's trainees showed us their own childhood scars. One had been branded as late as age 12. The consensus was that there's pretty much no way to feel culturally open-minded about that. Yeah, don't burn kids: that's a superior idea.

But we gave the kids lollipops while Fred checked in with the parents, all of us aware that it's a long process, this spreading of good news. Note: lollipops help.

Bob's Top 5 Answers to Questions About India:

5. Yes, and don't hit the cow or you'll go to jail.

4. Every day. But Indians don't think of it as "Indian food."

3. Yogurt. Immodium.

2. Like when a ballgame lets out and everyone's fighting to leave the parking lot. But with colorful saris everywhere.

1. Once you get used to the dance numbers, they're probably no sillier than your average Bruce Willis movie.

Zion shall be redeemed by justice,
and those in her who repent, by righteousness.

- Isaiah 1:27

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No sorrowful tears, no beating of the breast
For a safe repose has taken me. I dance
Ring dances with the blessed saints
In the beautiful fields of the righteous.

Ancient Christian tomb inscription

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Here's some of Krista Tippet's introduction to her interview with Jim:

I've resisted interviewing Wallis as he's risen to a new kind of fame, in part because he has had so much exposure in major media - from Hardball to Fresh Air. But now I've come to see in Jim Wallis' rise not just a story of an individual activist becoming a leader, but of the world changing around us. ... There is plentiful evidence that younger people, including younger evangelical Christians, share Jim Wallis's concern for the poor and the dispossessed, for inequities in global economy and ecology. Half of his audiences across the country these days, as he tells it, are under 30. He does not claim to represent a majority of American evangelicals in his views and positions, but he does draw packed crowds of young evangelicals at Christian colleges. He urges them to emulate the 19th-century evangelicals who inspire him, some of whom founded today's Christian colleges — abolitionists and social reformers who took their Bibles and their God with the utmost seriousness.

After the rise of the Religious Right in the early 1980s, and again after the 2000 and 2004 elections, some prophesied that the U.S. was headed for "theocracy" — a takeover by conservative religious ruling elites. What is happening instead is what Time magazine has called the leveling of "the praying field." Conservative Christianity hasn't disappeared, but it is increasingly met, and measured, by progressive and liberal religious voices in politics and beyond.

There are also conservative evangelicals with a broadened political and social agenda and a willingness to form coalitions with diverse religious and secular others to combat urgent human crises.

Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword."

- Matthew 26:52-52

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To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intake, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries,; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly save from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

- C.S Lewis
The Four Loves

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When a film ends with the recounting of a dream in which a weather-beaten, life-weary man searches for the fire his father is building to warm them, it's impossible not to think of the love we all yearn for and can hopefully muster. It's also a welcome spiritual respite when that film has seduced its audience on a journey into a hell of the relentless violence that follows a man after he steals drug money in the naïve belief that its owners might ignore him, and the slow-moving chase that ensues when a truly psychopathic person pursues the man and the cash. No Country for Old Men, the new picture from the Coen Brothers, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, is probably the most accomplished film released this year.

I'll do my best to avoid spoilers, as it would be unfair to assume that readers have seen it. So I must skirt around the issues that cause me to praise this film so highly. In short, No Country for Old Men is a slow, thoughtful, frightening, and beguiling film about the selfishness of people and the desperate need to restore the virtue of community bonds. Its central character – called Anton Chigurh, and played by Javier Bardem – is one of the most titanic characterizations of evil intent I've ever seen in a film. He simply kills what gets in his way, and even plays sport with some of his potential victims - inviting them to toss a coin to determine their fate. Josh Brolin is the man who finds the money belonging to Chigurh's employers, and Tommy Lee Jones the sheriff baffled by the trail of death that ensues in their wake.

We follow these characters - scared of the killer, ashamed of the thief, and hoping against hope for the sheriff. We look away from the screen when the violence occurs, but may perhaps feel a little horrified by the fact that a part of us still wants to watch. And when one character finally stands up to Chigurh, it is not with physical violence, but by simply speaking and refusing to accept his games, forcing him to face the fact that he, and he alone, is responsible for his murderous ways. This film does not suggest that – as some critics have implied – there is no way to stop evil, but rather that we live in an age where we need to find new ways of resisting the violence many of us face. It doesn't provide simplistic answers, but suggests that the path may be found in such things as renewing the bonds of community and mutual respect, refusing to accept the moral reasoning of those who resort to force at the drop of a hat, and embracing something like the vision of the 5th century BCE Chinese thinker Mozi:

'If every man were to regard the pain of others as his own person, who would inflict pain and injury on others?'

The country where violence is king may indeed be no country for old men; but, to my mind at least, the film that takes this term as its title offers nothing less than a prophetic reflection on the most important question facing humanity today: Where do we go from here?

Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com

When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.

- Isaiah 1:15

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Living as we do in a world that suffers so much, two opposing possibilities can easily tempt us: either to turn our backs and live oblivious to the pain or to allow the pain to overwhelm us and despair to take up residence in our hearts. The truly faithful option is to face the pain and live joyfully in the midst of it. Those who suffer most remind us of how tragic and arrogant it would be for us to lose hope on behalf of people who have not lost theirs. They are teachers of joy.

- Joyce Hollyday
Then Your Light Shall Rise

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Leaders from some 50 countries and organizations, including 12 Arab nations, are meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, today to begin negotiations for a peace agreement in the Middle East. News reports tell of " restrained optimism" that the event could lead to a Palestinian state.

The op-ed page of The Washington Post tells the rest of the story. Columnist Richard Cohen has a poignant column on the reality of human stories with conflicting narratives. He cites a new HBO documentary, To Die in Jerusalem, the story of a March 2002 suicide bombing in which a young Palestinian blew herself up in Jerusalem supermarket, killing a young Israeli woman. The film tells the story of the unsuccessful attempt by the mothers of the two women to talk with each other. Cohen writes that the reality of the Middle East is in the story of these two mothers:

The deaths of their daughters do not unite them. They talk past each other. They are virtual neighbors, but the distance between them is huge - roadblocks and checkpoints and mentalities ossified by 100 years of bloodshed. One mother is obsessed with the Israeli occupation. The other is preoccupied with terrorism. One is right. The other is right.

Israel must relent. That's for sure. The Palestinians must forswear terrorism. That's for sure, too. The occupation has to end. Suicide bombings have to end. A Palestinian state has to be created. Gaza cannot remain a terrorist base. The West Bank cannot become a terrorist base. It's all so sensible. It's all so logical. But, really, down where it counts, the mothers of two dead daughters cannot even talk to each other.

Until the leaders of both Israel and Palestine understand both of these narratives and can negotiate a common narrative, the tragedies will continue. I pray this Annapolis conference will at long last begin that process.

It was my friend, Tony Jones, who alerted me recently to the Beliefnet roundtable on evangelicals in power that I discussed in yesterday's post. He basically ruined my schedule that day because I couldn't help but read the whole thread.

A major voice in the roundtable was Jeff Sharlet, a confessed non-evangelical whom top evangelical organizations might be wise to hire - and quick - as a consultant. As an outsider, he sees what a lot that us insiders need to see: that it's time to augment our deeply-held concern for private morality with a new vision for addressing systemic injustice. I'm both hopeful and increasingly confident that for the next generation of evangelicals, this augmentation is already happening. For example, for the next generation of evangelicals, care for the planet is already a key moral issue with both personal and social dimensions, because they see in our "creation mandate" a call to steward the earth for a) our creator (not an insignificant concern!), b) our grandchildren's grandchildren (and undervalued family value to be sure), c) our poor and vulnerable neighbors from Bangladesh to Darfur, and d) our fellow creatures with whom we share the land, sea, and air.

Michael Lindsay offered an appropriate last word that implies a critical question:

If evangelicals end up merely using politics for sectarian aims, we will all be worse off. Their gospel will be less attractive to non-Christians. Other religious groups will feel increasingly marginalized. Faith will be seen as another tool for manipulating the public. So history will have to be the judge of whether this [recent resurgence of evangelical political power] has been merely the triumph of another interest group or if the evangelical ascendancy has contributed to a more enlightened democracy, where engaged citizens use their faith to serve the common good.

"The common good" – there's that phrase that seems to be coming up more and more lately. Could it be nestled, next to love for God, right at the heart of what Jesus meant by "gospel of the kingdom of God?" Could this more holistic, integral gospel be the common ground and higher ground where evangelicals and others can come together in these fractious times?

To flip Lindsay's assessment around, if evangelicals "use their faith to serve the common good," then we will all be better off. This is the hope many of us share with roundtable participant David Kuo, a hope rooted in the conviction "that the gospel of Jesus is so life-transforming, so utterly staggering, that to put that gospel into action through sacrificially loving their neighbor would change the world."

Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) is board chair of Sojourners, and his most recent book is Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope.

A week before Thanksgiving, I spoke in Lake Tahoe for the clergy convocation of the California-Nevada Conference of the United Methodist Church, a sprawling geography that comprises a wide array of congregations in big cities and small rural towns. The wide variety of clergy reflected that of the churches—the group included many women, persons of color, younger pastors, folks with a spectrum of theological views, and ordained and non-ordained leaders. It was obvious that this group of Methodists was working hard on issues of diversity.

But the most stunning diversity was in the presence of people from around the world, not as mission guests or visiting Methodist dignitaries. Rather, the group included local congregational leaders who hailed from the all the "souths": the South Pacific, South Africa, South Asia, South Korea, South America, and even south Jersey, South Carolina, and southern California. There, on the shores of an alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, gathered the Global South and the emerging community of world Christianity in the form of Methodist clergy.

We spent the day talking about postmodern Christianity and cultural change as related to mainline churches. Early in the conversation, an Indian pastor graciously raised the relevance of postmodern analysis in relation to his community and worldview asking, "Isn't this a western phenomenon?" His questions and their implicit challenges to a western worldview drew the group into a new conversational space. We began to think about cultural change globally—looking at postmodernism and its effects through a prism of worldviews. We did not argue about issues of sexuality; we did not get into a theological fight; we never resorted to ignoring others. We ruminated on God's work in history. We talked about something important—about how the world is changing and why. We listened to and affirmed each other, hospitably opening ourselves to understand and integrate perspectives different from our own. What resulted was, for me, one of the most stimulating intellectual and spiritual days I have experienced in a long time.

I grew up United Methodist in Baltimore in the 1960s. In those years, my childhood church was nearly ripped in two by the Civil Rights Movement. Even the thought of sharing "our" church with African-American Methodists frightened much of my neighborhood to the point of fleeing both the congregation and the city. It would have been impossible to imagine that, some 40 years hence, I would participate in a Methodist community encompassing such a rainbow of ethnicities.

I am sure that good Methodists of the California-Nevada Conference will demur, saying how far they have to go and how imperfectly they practice diversity. But 40 years is a pretty short time to go from a fractured community fearful of race toward the room I experienced at Lake Tahoe. And it demonstrated to me the power of diversity as a Christian practice. If their diversity was merely a "program" of the denomination, it would breed resentment and suspicion. But the level of trust in the room (we even talked about trust) indicated that their diversity went far beyond program—that it is a genuine attempt to enact Christian community in bringing together humankind through Jesus Christ. Their diversity was a practice of faith, an action that Christian people do for the sake of God in the world.

Frankly, the world has never needed the Christian practice of diversity more than it does today. By creating global community in a room on the shores of Lake Tahoe, the Methodists of the California-Nevada Conference provided a hopeful example of what may be possible for the rest of us on a larger scale. It may not be perfect, but I can testify that for one day, we did it. We really acted like Christians—Christians of every imaginable stripe—in the same room, doing important work together. We proved—or maybe discovered—that the only limit to diversity is the love of God.

Diana Butler Bass (www.dianabutlerbass.com) is the author of six books including Christianity for the Rest of Us (Harper One, 2006), just released in paperback. She says she lives in Alexandria, Virginia. But, from her speaking engagement schedule, we think she lives on United Airlines.

To be with God is really to be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. God is a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

- James Baldwin
Nobody Knows My Name

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But Peter said to him, "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God's gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you.

Acts 8: 20-22

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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.