Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced the release date of his new book on “pastoral encouragement”, with a high-profile US politician making a special contribution.
Scomo’s book, Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness, will be available on the market on May 21, marking exactly two years since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defeated him in the 2022 Federal Election.
The 288-page book will also have a special foreword written by the former Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence.
Morrison and Pence are thought to have a strong relationship, developed during their time in office. According to reports from The Sydney Morning Herald, Morrison phoned Pence, not Trump, when the Trump administration failed to secure a second term in office at the 2020 US election.
Pence is also very open about his strong Christian faith. In 2022, Pence released his own faith-centred memoir, titled So Help Me God.
According to an article in Politico, Mike Pence often says: “I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.”
Who is Mike Pence?
After a relatively short career as a lawyer, Mike Pence began running for Congress in 1988 when he was 29 years old. It took him 12 years before he was finally elected in the House of Representatives in 2000.
For his whole life, and particularly since entering the US politics world, he has held strong conservative views driven by his Christianity, including anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-abortion stances.
In the 2016 US election campaign, Pence was chosen as Trump’s running Vice President for the Republican party.
He served as the second-in-charge of the US and throughout his term in office, Pence unabashedly stood by and defended Trump no matter what.
The Trump administration lost power in the 2020 election when President Joe Biden was declared as the winner. In the final days of the Trump administration, Pence was scapegoated as somehow having the power to meddle with the election results and cause a Republican loss.
The scapegoating intensified at the January 6 2021 riots at the Capitol building in Washington D.C. where Trump supporters chanted “hang Mike Pence”, the Jan. 6 select committee found.
Pence entered the race as a presidential candidate for the Republicans in the 2024 election. While former Vice Presidents generally have greater support and greater success in the running for the presidency, Trump created a lot of enemies for Pence. In October 2023, Pence withdrew his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
More on Scomo’s book
Mike Pence will write the foreword and feature on the cover of former Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison’s new book, which is months away from release.
The book will detail how Morrison, the 30th Prime Minister of Australia, was guided by his Christian faith in leading the country during 2018-2022, throughout “one of the toughest periods since the second world war”.
His publisher, Thomas Nelson, a branch of the Harper Collins Christian Publishing, writes on its website that unlike other books written by former Prime Ministers, Morrison’s will be “less political memoir and more pastoral encouragement”.
The inclusion of Pence’s foreword is expected to assist the book in expanding its market interest globally, especially in the US.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the US religious publishing market made $US757 million ($AUD1.175 billion) in 2022.