Two Very Different Questions

Shaw's Board, the Image of God, and the Choice Underneath Everything

A FIVE-PART SERIES

Part Five of Five

Four parts have traced Fabian socialism from Shaw's 1931 newsreel into Australian political life: its acknowledged influence within Labor; the wider logic of gradualism and permeation; the growth, cost and reach of the administrative state; and the weakening of responsibilities once carried more locally by family, Church and community. Part Four ended with a question: how long can the fruit survive once the root has been neglected? And, more confronting still, what are Christians actually prepared to do about it? This final part begins there.

When the state becomes a moral educator

The deepest Christian concern is not merely the size of government, a government can be large in some functions while remaining conscious of moral limits. The more serious question is whether the state begins to assume a formative role that properly belongs first to family, Church and community. Government does not become morally neutral merely by describing its decisions as inclusive, evidence-based or rights-centred.

Every education policy carries an understanding of the child.

Every health policy carries an understanding of the body.

Every anti-discrimination framework carries an understanding of equality.

Every professional code carries an understanding of acceptable belief and conduct.

Every welfare system carries an understanding of responsibility, dependency and entitlement.

The issue is not whether government will embody moral assumptions, the issue is whether those assumptions can be questioned, whether families and religious communities retain room to live differently, and whether disagreement is treated as part of plural democracy or as a defect requiring correction. I examined one concrete expression of this tension in Who Shapes the Child? A Christian Response to the Case Against Parental Rights. That article considered an academic argument for progressively displacing parental authority and asked what understanding of the child, family and state lay beneath it.

Fabian gradualism becomes relevant here, the state does not need to prohibit Christianity outright. It can permit Christian worship while steadily narrowing the space in which Christian conviction may be expressed through education, employment, health care, professional practice and institutional life. Faith remains legal, living according to it becomes costly. Religious freedom is reduced to private devotion. The Church may speak, provided it does not contradict the state's developing account of the human person.

Compassion without transcendence

The same displacement happens on a smaller, more personal scale wherever compassion, equality and inclusion are separated from a transcendent account of truth and human dignity. Secular progressivism often retains a sincere concern for all three. I do not doubt that many people working within these traditions genuinely wish to protect the vulnerable. The difficulty lies in what happens to these values once they lose their anchor.

Compassion can become detached from moral limits. Equality can become a demand that every distinction be denied. Inclusion can become compulsory affirmation. Safety can become a justification for restricting speech. Autonomy can become the highest good, except where personal choice conflicts with administrative or collective objectives. And human dignity can become something defined through institutional recognition, rather than something government is required to recognise because it existed before government.

This is where Shaw's words remain relevant. His properly appointed board did not imagine itself cruel; it would presumably operate for the benefit of society. Its error began earlier: society had assumed the authority to decide whose life remained worth sustaining.

When a civilisation forgets God

None of this is a uniquely modern discovery. Scripture already describes what happens when a people quietly stop believing they answer to anything beyond themselves.

Adam and Eve were not merely told to obey an arbitrary rule. They were given creation as a gift and entrusted with a vocation of stewardship, and the temptation was to reject dependence on God and become “like God”, determining good and evil on their own terms. The result was not greater freedom.

It was shame, accusation and exile, and that pattern repeats across the biblical record: in Cain's refusal to answer for his brother, in Babel's attempt to secure identity and unity through concentrated human power without reference to God, and in Israel's long cycle of covenant and forgetting.

The refrain near the end of Judges is especially precise about what that forgetting looks like in practice:

“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” — Judges 21:25

Israel already had a King. The deeper problem was not the absence of a throne but that every person had quietly become his own moral authority, which is not a description of political liberty but of moral fragmentation. The prophets who followed made this concrete: Israel and Judah were condemned for idolatry, but just as often for corrupt courts, dishonest commerce, exploitation of workers and the mistreatment of widows and orphans. Worship and public justice could not be separated. The people kept offering sacrifices while neglecting righteousness, retaining religious language while abandoning the God whose character gave that language meaning.

None of this licenses tidy conclusions. Scripture does not let me treat every crisis as a specific national sin awaiting a confident verdict, and it does not let me point at secular society while overlooking corruption within the Church. What it does license, carefully, is this: a civilisation becomes fragile when truth is subordinated to usefulness, when public office becomes a means of self-preservation, when family and communal obligations weaken, when law is applied inconsistently, and when rulers no longer recognise any authority above themselves.

The final crisis may look economic, political or demographic. The weakness beneath it is often moral and spiritual. Australia is not ancient Israel, but the account of human nature travels. The record does not let me merely predict decline in others. It requires me first to ask whether I am doing what is right in my own eyes while continuing to speak in God's name.

When government assumes a quasi-religious role

The modern state does not usually claim divinity, it begins to occupy a quasi-religious position when it assumes the authority to define human identity, determine acceptable moral belief, form children, regulate conscience and promise security against every form of risk.

Expertise can acquire a kind of priestly authority.

Policy becomes the means through which society is purified.

Administrative inclusion becomes reconciliation.

Political progress takes the place of repentance.

The state becomes the agent through which humanity is expected to save itself.

From a Christian perspective, that hope is misplaced. Government can restrain some wrongdoing, punish crime, correct particular injustices and provide material assistance. It cannot conquer pride, greed, lust, envy, resentment, cowardice or the will to dominate.

Those passions do not disappear when private power is transferred to public institutions; they enter the institutions with the people who build them. This is a theme I explored more fully in the final instalment of The Accountability Gap: Consent Under Pressure — Did Australia Meet Its Own Standard? Institutional failure does not require uniquely malicious people. Fallen people build systems, and those systems inherit the same tendencies towards self-protection, simplified messaging and resistance to scrutiny.

That is why power requires limits and accountability, whether it is exercised by a corporation, political party, court, government department, media organisation, trade union, think tank or church hierarchy.

Neither the market nor the state can save us

A Christian critique of Fabianism should not become a defence of unrestrained capitalism.

Markets can also reduce the person to utility. Workers can be valued only for their output. Consumers can be manipulated. Corporations can become politically powerful. Profit can become the measure of what is worth preserving, and a market may decide that a person with disability, an unprofitable rural service or an elderly customer is too costly.

Shaw was not alone in helping to create intellectual frameworks in which human questions could increasingly be translated into measurable institutional outcomes. From a very different ideological direction, the economist Milton Friedman published an influential 1970 essay in the New York Times Magazine arguing that the corporate executive’s primary responsibility was to the owners of the business. He famously concluded that business has “one and only one social responsibility… to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”

Friedman was more nuanced than the slogan is sometimes made to sound: elsewhere in the essay he expressly included society’s ethical customs alongside law, and he recognised that executives remained persons with obligations of conscience, family, charity and faith. The significance of the argument was therefore not that Friedman denied human dignity, but that corporate decision-making was given a powerful organising metric: profitability.

How far that doctrine has since travelled from its own qualification is a debate this series will take up properly in its next instalment, on capitalism and global corporatism. Here it is enough to note what Part Four already acknowledged: the market can perform a similar reduction. An elderly person, a worker, a rural community or a person with disability can become a cost to be managed just as readily on a balance sheet as in an administrative file. The Christian standard judges both.

The Christian alternative to Fabianism is not an altar call to laissez-faire capitalism. Neither the market nor the state can redeem the human person. Both are tools. Both can serve legitimate purposes. Both require moral limits.

What follows from that standard is a positive vision, not just a critique of two failed alternatives.

Property should be understood through stewardship, not absolute possession.

Freedom should be ordered towards truth and responsibility, not appetite alone.

Authority should serve rather than dominate.

Community should be grounded in love and mutual obligation, not merely consumption or compulsion.

The totality of Christ's kingship

Having tested both the state and the market against that standard, the practical question is what Christians are meant to do with the answer. None of it makes sense, though, on the premise that faith is a private matter, walled off from law, education, culture and public life, and permitted to operate only within the space the state has not yet claimed. That premise is not a modest, tolerant compromise. It is a theological error, and Christians who build a parallel household economy while quietly accepting it will find they have built on borrowed ground.

The Christian claim is not that Christ presides over a religious department of life alongside others he does not touch. It is that he is Lord over the whole of it.

“For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” — Colossians 1:16–17

That is not a claim about Sunday. It is a claim about Monday's classroom, Tuesday's hospital board, Wednesday's court, and every professional code drafted anywhere in between. It does not follow that the Church should seek to run the state, and this series has already warned at length about what happens when any human institution, church included, is handed power without limit or account.

It does follow that Christians cannot accept, as the price of social peace, an arrangement in which their convictions are permitted to exist as private sentiment but are forfeited the moment they touch how a child is raised, a business is run, or a patient is treated. Acknowledging Christ's total claim on life is not the conclusion of this argument. It is the starting point every durable alternative has to begin from, because a household built to withstand pressure needs a reason for its resistance that goes deeper than preference, and “this is simply what I would rather believe” has never been that reason.

From diagnosis to construction

Four parts of this series have traced what can happen when increasingly administrative systems translate human needs, responsibilities and moral questions into categories to be measured, funded, licensed or withdrawn. None of that changes the more basic fact underneath it: a person's worth was never the state's to measure in the first place. It was given, before any system existed to award or deny it. Everything that follows in this piece rests on that claim, not as a slogan but as the starting point for a different kind of work.

That changes where the effort should go. The natural instinct, having watched an institution drift from its founding purpose, is to try to reform it, to elect the right people, appoint the right regulator, win the right court case. Those efforts are not worthless, and I am not counselling Christians to abandon them. But the earlier parts of this series have shown how incremental arrangements can become embedded, survive changes of government and prove remarkably difficult to unwind. A committee changes; the funding condition remains. A minister changes; the professional code does not.

So the horizon has to shift. The primary task in front of Christians is not principally to win back institutions that have drifted from their purpose. It is to build, alongside and underneath them, forms of life that do not depend on those institutions' permission to exist: households resilient enough to carry more of their own responsibilities, embedded within local networks of Christians who actually carry one another's burdens rather than merely discussing them, and economic practices that reduce, where possible, a family's dependence on state approval or ideological compliance for its basic security.

That is interdependence, not independence. Part Four already warned against the opposite error, that “the perfectly self-sufficient individual is as much an abstraction as the perfectly manageable society,” and nothing here should be read as rugged individualism scaled up into the nuclear family.

This is not a retreat from public life. It is what subsidiarity actually means once it stops being a phrase in a policy paper and becomes a description of where responsibility is genuinely carried, at the smallest and most local level capable of carrying it, with wider institutions supporting that capacity rather than replacing it. Recovery, on this account, does not begin with the next policy cycle. It begins with what is nearest and most durable: a marriage, a household, a street, a parish.

Transmission as resistance

If Christ's claim on the whole of life is the starting point, the most concrete place that claim gets tested is not in a courtroom or a parliamentary submission. It is at the kitchen table, in the ordinary, unglamorous work of raising a child who knows whose image he bears.

This is not a peripheral concern next to the public arguments this series has made. It may be the most important form of cultural faithfulness available to an ordinary Christian family, precisely because it requires no permission from anyone. A state can narrow what a school may teach, what a professional may say, what a charity may fund. It has a much harder time reaching into a household where parents have decided, deliberately and over years, what their children will be told about who they are and to whom they belong.

Scripture treats this transmission not as a tactic but as a command:

“Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” — Deuteronomy 6:6–7

That is a description of ordinary days, not a special curriculum. The physical and spiritual continuity of Christian households, children who grow up knowing they were made, not merely produced, and who carry that conviction into their own adult lives and their own households in turn, is the condition on which any long-term Christian alternative to an administrative account of the person actually depends.

Institutions can change dramatically within a decade. A conviction faithfully passed from a parent to a child, and from that child to the next, is a slower and considerably harder thing to legislate away. This is generational stewardship of the Imago Dei, not a phrase for a sermon, but the actual mechanism by which a truth about the human person outlives the political conditions of any single generation.

The order of responsibility

Part Four argued that responsibility can be shared without being surrendered, that a Christian could delegate part of the work of loving his neighbour but could not delegate away the responsibility itself. Part Five asks what happens when Christians begin taking that seriously again.

Responsibility begins with what is actually ours to carry. Marriage. Children. Parents. A household's own economic resilience, its capacity to absorb a job loss or a difficult season without becoming unnecessarily dependent on distant institutions for its basic security. That is not a lesser concern next to the theological argument. It is the argument, applied. Christians should rebuild here before anywhere else: strong marriages, sober household finances, and formation that assumes children will need to give an account of what they believe and why.

Then comes the parish and the neighbourhood, the small group, the street, the network of families who actually know one another's names and circumstances well enough to notice when help is needed before it is asked for. This is not a second-tier concern behind the household; the Christian household is itself formed within the Church, not prior to it, and the order described here is practical, about where a particular kind of care is most naturally carried, not a claim about which institution matters more.

Churches need to recover their responsibility for practical service and not only public commentary, and Christian schools, charities and mutual-aid networks need the courage, competence and independence to carry real weight rather than merely existing as a moral alternative in principle. The elderly, poor, disabled and isolated must not become examples used to win an argument about the size of government. They must be encountered and loved as people, in a specific place, by people who know them.

Wider cultural formation comes third, not because it matters least but because it is the easiest duty to perform and the least demanding, and a household that curates its media diet while neglecting its marriage or its neighbour has not actually done the harder work this order asks for. It matters nonetheless.

What forms a household's imagination day to day, what it watches, scrolls and absorbs without noticing, either reinforces the conviction that human worth is given by God or steadily erodes it in favour of whatever a feed's engagement incentives happen to reward that week. Choosing what shapes that formation, deliberately and with some cost attached, is part of the same duty as the other two, carried at the scale where it is actually a household's to carry.

This is not a call to withdraw from public life. Christians can still support sensible public provision where it is genuinely necessary, while asking whether that provision is proportionate, transparent, and exercised at the level closest to the people it serves.

Conscience should be protected not only for Christians but for people with whom Christians strongly disagree, and every political party should be measured against the same standard. But the order matters, and before Christians condemn secular society for forgetting God, it asks a harder question first: has the conduct of the household of faith itself made him visible?

“For it is time for judgement to begin with God's household.” — 1 Peter 4:17

A confidence measured in generations

None of this is offered from despair, and it should not be received that way either. The present administrative order, however comprehensive it looks from inside a single decade, is not eternal. It is a human arrangement, built by fallen people on a specific and mistaken account of what a person is, that worth can be assigned, withheld or administered by a sufficiently well-designed system.

No administrative settlement is permanent. Governments change, professional codes are rewritten, funding arrangements are replaced, institutions rise and fall. The Christian claim about the human person does not depend upon any of them surviving. Shaw's board could ask its questions of every citizen for a century and it would still never once be correct about what any of them were actually worth.

Christian households and local communities that keep doing the ordinary, unglamorous work this piece has described, forming marriages, raising children who know they are made in God's image, carrying real weight for the person next door, will still be doing that work long after the particular administrative arrangements of 2026 have been revised, replaced or forgotten.

That is not a prediction about any specific policy or election. It is a claim about which foundation actually holds weight over time. Confidence of this kind is not measured in election cycles. It is measured in generations, which is precisely the timescale on which the household and the parish, not the department, have always done their best work.

Two very different questions

George Bernard Shaw imagined a board before which every person would be required to justify his or her existence. The board would ask:

Who produces?

Who consumes?

Who contributes?

Who is useful?

Who is costly?

Who is more trouble than they are worth?

And who gets to decide?

Christianity turns the question around. It does not ask whether the weak have justified their existence to the strong. It asks whether the strong recognise Christ in:

The weak.

The sick.

The poor.

The prisoner.

The stranger.

The unborn child.

The person with a disability.

The elderly neighbour who fears becoming a burden.

The person whose care will cost more than he could ever repay.

Their lives do not require justification before the state, the market or the collective. That is the theological answer. The political question follows from it.

The more confronting questions are whether Australia is gradually replacing love of neighbour with outsourced compassion; whether the decline of Christian belief is leaving moral language in place while removing the foundation beneath it; whether Labor's Fabian inheritance encourages an expanding confidence in government as the primary agent of social formation; whether conservative governments have resisted that architecture, or merely administered their own version of it; whether growing bureaucracy is strengthening the vulnerable or increasingly managing them from a distance; and whether a society that no longer believes human beings answer to God will eventually require human beings to answer to boards, systems and experts. And whether Christians are prepared to do more than criticise that possibility.

Christ does not tell me that the suffering person must justify his existence. He tells me that my response to that person reveals something about my own.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” — Matthew 25:40

The series began by asking who must justify their existence. Christ does not answer that question so much as refuse it. The weak, the sick, the poor, the prisoner, the stranger, the unborn child, the person with a disability, the elderly neighbour who fears becoming a burden, none of them ever needed a system's permission to exist, because their existence was never the system's to permit.

Systems calculate. God gives.

Thank you for reading.

God bless,

Mark