An insecure secularity? Religion, decolonisation and diversification in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

The question of the location of religion in the public sphere is always a matter of the logics, practices, and politics of secularism.While mythologies of a linear secular teleology have been thoroughly critiqued, the ongoing trajectories for both religious and secular politics are contested and emergent. New Zealand provides an important context for examining these dynamics. While New Zealand is frequently referenced as among the most secular nations in the world, with census data tracking a precipitous disaffiliation from Christianity and a concomitant rapid increase in ‘non-religion’, the actual situation is in considerable flux. A crucial dynamic is the combination of an indigenous Māori cultural renaissance and state attempts to recognise the moral imperative of decolonisation which have resulted in new languages of spirituality shaping both law and politics. Diverse religious groups have also occupied prominent spaces in shaping public concern and setting new agendas for national life. This paper traces the emerging contours of this dynamic religious context and the contributions of religion and spirituality in shaping political leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand.

KEYWORDS:

• Aotearoa New Zealand
• secularism
• spirituality
• Māori cultural renaissance
• decolonisation
• religious diversity

Introduction

Recent decades have seen the emergence of a critical and revisionist literature concerning teleologies of secularisation. Prior orthodoxies held within the social sciences and international relations that secularisation follows a linear, stadial, inevitable trajectory have been roundly critiqued, and instead futurist imaginations have become much more open-ended (Fitzgerald, 2011; Hurd, 2015). Secularisation has been relocated from a sociological process narrating religious decline into a political project involving ongoing negotiation between competing actors. Secularity has emerged as a key concern of the modern nation-state in the attempt to implement political sovereignty (Agrama, 2012; Mahmood, 2015). It remains a potent ideology, but is also increasingly seen as a nebulous and dynamic field rather than a foregone conclusion. Scholars have therefore pointed increasingly to ‘post-secular’ dynamics as an influential and non-determined emerging potential (Gorski et al., 2012).

A key insight within this revisionist scholarship on secularity is the observation that ‘religion’ has a distinctly modern genealogy (Asad, 1993, 2003). Rather than a sui generis realm always and everywhere easily demarcated from non-religious – ‘secular’ – domains, religion is instead understood as an inherently contestable construct. Secularity has never been the exclusive domain of Western political arrangements. But it is also the case that European political history has conferred a distinctive set of religious-secular arrangements and, in so doing, drew heavily on Christian theo-politics. Through colonial expansion and geopolitical dominance these arrangements have played significant roles in shaping political processes around the world.

Within recent scholarship, therefore, religion and secularity are now understood as highly contested categories that are deeply implicated in the rise of the nation-state as a modern mode of sovereign governance. Rather than permanent or unquestionable features of the political landscape, they are dynamic and negotiated. This paper explores the implications of these insights in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Although it has rarely been sufficiently recognised, including among New Zealand academics, New Zealand presents a compelling location for reconsidering the ongoing reconfigurations of secular/religious politics. Developments in this context provide an instructive case study for wider contestations over the roles of religion within the public sphere.

We argue that current political, demographic, and religious changes in New Zealand are spurring a significant reconfiguration of the largely taken for granted forms of New Zealand secularity. While the Christian influence in New Zealand continues to wane, new forms of religiosity present decisive challenges to prior understandings of a secular state. These challenges are less a matter of religious mobilisation than of category obfuscation. Secularity rests upon the imagined capacity to draw a clear distinction between religion and non-religion. But this capacity is increasingly untenable in New Zealand today. While the consequences of these shifts are still being worked out, the example of New Zealand nevertheless illuminates the precarity of secular politics. We focus our discussion in this paper on dynamics of decolonisation and growing religious diversity. Analysis of both of these sites shows that while a publicly secular ethos is frequently espoused and mythologised, social transformations are rendering the New Zealand secular increasingly insecure.

‘Yeah, nah’: the New Zealand secular

New Zealand has often been regarded as an exceptionally secular country. As a description of the piety and devotion of its people, the characterisation is debatable. As a way of describing political configurations, the terminology may conceal as much as it reveals: the role of religion in New Zealand politics has long been highly ambiguous. For Griffiths (2011, p. 498), New Zealand can be regarded as a secular state, but this secularity is ‘an uneven, or perhaps permissive’ version. Unlike much of Europe or some of the early colonies that became part of the United States, New Zealand has never had a formal state church, but neither has it enforced a constitutional separation between church and state. Rather, its version of secularity has developed in a piecemeal, idiosyncratic, and often highly pragmatic fashion (Troughton, 2016; Wood, 2005). New Zealand legislation has acknowledged this ambiguity in surprisingly forthright ways. For example, the 1877 Education Act mandated free, compulsory, and secular primary education for Pākehā children in New Zealand (the same was mandated for Māori children in 1894). But religion was not entirely banished from state schools. Indeed, under the so-called ‘Nelson system’, confessional Bible in School classes were allowed under a peculiar system whereby the entire school could be formally closed for the duration of religious teaching, only to re-open again once these classes had ended. As this suggests, Christianity has been profoundly influential in New Zealand public life, and deeply entangled with the state, for much of its history, albeit frequently in tacit ways – implicitly rather than explicitly.

The implementation of secular governance purportedly resolves these ambiguities by instituting a more robust distinction between religion and the state, and relegating the former increasingly outside of public and state spaces. But while some ambiguities are under increasing pressure – including some vociferous criticism of the Nelson system of religious instruction by the Secular Education Network and other advocacy groups and attempts to remove prayer from some forms of state ritual – in other locations new ambiguities are opening up. Institutionalised religion, of which established Christian churches remain the prime New Zealand example, is experiencing a contraction of its previous political space. But other forms of religiosity are less easily disciplined or are increasingly amenable for public articulation. We see particularly important pressures are arising from dynamics of decolonisation and increasing diversity. One outcome of these processes is that religion is increasingly unbounded, with potentially far-reaching effects.

Decolonisation

Recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) has been a cornerstone of the decolonisation movement in New Zealand. Widely regarded as the nation’s founding document, the Treaty gave the Crown the right to govern. It also made specific promises to Māori concerning their freedom to live as Māori, protection of their lands, possessions, and taonga (treasured things), as well as access to the rights and privileges accorded to all British subjects. By the late 19th century the Treaty had been thoroughly sidelined by the state, however. Chief Justice James Prendergast’s 1877 determination that it was a ‘simple nullity’ also ensured that it was marginalised within law.

It was a faith healer and founder of the Rātana Church, Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana, who played the pivotal role in the most influential movement for recovery of the Treaty within state and society. Rātana and his followers brought a petition to King George V in 1924 seeking redress for Crown breaches of Treaty promises. Honouring the Treaty was a key platform in Rātana’s new political party, which entered Parliament in 1932 and subsequently dominated Māori electoral politics. In alliance with the Labour Party, it held all the Māori parliamentary seats for fifty years from 1943. Yet most Māori in Rātana’s time were rural and it was only in the 1960s, with government policies of post-war assimilation, urbanisation, and the emergence of youth-led protest movements, that ‘Treaty issues’ attained wider public and political salience. A famous land march from Te Hāpua in Northland to Parliament in Wellington, led by 79-year-old Whina Cooper, presaged later highly-visible land disputes and occupations. The hīkoi arrived in Wellington just days after the passing of the Treaty of Waitangi Act, 1975, spearheaded by Matiu Rata, the Minister of Māori Affairs and a Rātana Church member. This Act established the Waitangi Tribunal, which was charged with investigating Māori grievances about government actions considered contrary to the Treaty. The legislation was amended in 1985, allowing the Tribunal to investigate claims dating back to 1840 – of which there were many. The Treaty began thereafter to be written into legislation, with adherence to Treaty ‘principles’ a new governmental and societal imperative.

These moves profoundly reshaped the national political landscape. Māori experiences and aspirations attained greater visibility and began to affect non-Māori in new and important ways. The Crown-Māori relationship shifted, greater wrestling with the nature and impacts of the nation’s colonial history occurred, and recognition of claims to self-determination and understanding of the importance of cultural differences became more widely accepted. The project of decolonisation thus emerged as a major political dynamic with reverberations experienced throughout the country and at all levels of government. Māori rituals, values, spatiality, and ontologies have become increasingly influential among politicians and policy makers.

While decolonisation has now been widely analysed as a major dynamic shaping New Zealand politics, the extent to which decolonisation has complicated and reconfigured New Zealand secularity has been far less widely noted, recognised, or debated. Decolonisation has resulted in new public attempts to include Māori ‘culture’ within public space and this has also seen increased visibility and public expression of ‘spirituality’. Translation between te reo Māori (the Māori language) and English poses many difficulties, as direct correlates are often lacking. Nevertheless, Māori scholars frequently locate wairuatanga as central to te ao Māori (the Māori world), where wairuatanga is translated as ‘spirituality’ (Foster, 2009; Mead, 2003; Smith, 2004).¹ Wairuatanga plays an expansive and complex role within Māori ways of being. The attempted inclusion of kaupapa Māori (Māori agendas and concerns) into public, state, legal, and political spaces in New Zealand often involves negotiation with Māori spirituality. In seeking to illustrate this point, our goal is not to adjudicate on whether Māori practices really are cultural, spiritual, or religious. Rather, we are interested in the ambiguities between these framings, and the effects these ambiguities have on attempts to sharply demarcate religion from its others – a process which is necessary for conceptualising a secular state or secular public sphere. It is, therefore, the ‘irrevocable indeterminacy’ (Agrama, 2010, p. 500) of te ao Māori that interests us here.²

One of the ways in which Māori spirituality is becoming an increasingly important site for state governance is in regard to geography. Māori whānau, hapū, and iwi (extended family, kinship groups, and tribal federations) have long histories of being intimately connected with particular landscapes or whenua (Durie, 2012; Harris & Tipene, 2006; Keenan, 2012; Lockhart et al., 2019). These entanglements have produced a sacred geography in which particular sites are understood as being of immense spiritual value. The landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand is permeated by wāhi tapu (sacred places) (Manuel, 2020; Matunga, 1994). Many Māori communities identify taniwha (nonhuman water spirits or guardians) as associated with particular waterways and they are narrated as influential actors in shaping human relations with the environment (McConnell, 2019; Strang, 2013). Māori requests that the government take into account the presence, and importance, of these metaphysical entities have until recently rarely been successful. There has, however, been a significant shift over the past two decades which has resulted in government departments increasingly negotiating with requests to protect taniwha and their habitats (Jøn, 2007; Macduff, 2003a, 2003b).

The need to respond to Māori spiritual connections with the land is directly acknowledged in government reports, which increasingly contain languages of spirituality. Our Land 2021, a report produced by the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ (2021) as part of its environmental reporting, begins by discussing the ‘distinct and special’ relationship Māori, as tangata whenua (people of the land), have with the land. This relationship is regarded as both ‘physical and spiritual’. Te Puni Kōkiri, the Ministry of Māori Development, discusses land in the following terms: ‘Whenua is the place we are nourished – physically by the food that grows and lives there, emotionally by the aroha [love] of the whānau that connect there, and spiritually by the mauri, the life-force’ (Te Puni Kōkiri, 2021). Such usage of languages of spirituality is now an everyday feature of New Zealand bureaucracy.

One of the most significant pieces of legislation that has acknowledged Māori spiritual relationships with the land is the recognition of legal personhood in the 2014 Te Urewera Act and the 2017 Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act (Geddis & Ruru, 2020; Kauffman, 2020; Winter, 2021). These Acts recognise specific landscapes as legal persons with rights. The Te Urewera Act (New Zealand Government, 2014) recognises this region as a living, spiritual being with its own mana (spiritual authority) and mauri (life force).³ The Whanganui River is similarly recognised in the Te Awa Tupua Act (New Zealand Government, 2017) as a ‘spiritual’ entity.⁴ Negotiations are currently underway to recognise the legal personhood also of Taranaki Mounga.⁵ The legislation is regarded internationally as a world-leading mechanism of recognising the rights of nature (Finlayson, 2020). But it is particularly the incorporation of languages of spirituality in New Zealand law that we want to note here. This language significantly disrupts claims of state secularity.

Discourses of Māori spirituality have also become increasingly prominent in other public domains. In the following paragraphs we focus on three of these – state-funded health, ritual practice in public events, and debates about the place of matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) within education – to illustrate the breadth and importance of these shifts.

Durie’s (1994) ‘Te Whare Tapa Whā’, a popular and widely-used model for Māori health, describes well-being as involving attention to all four ‘sides’ of the wharenui (meeting house): taha tinana (physical health), taha whānau (family health), taha hinengaro (mental health), and taha wairua (spiritual health). This last area is frequently linked with languages of ‘spirituality’, ‘religious beliefs’, ‘belief in a higher power’, ‘unseen … energies’, and the ‘sacred’.⁶ State-funded health services are frequently critiqued for neglecting the spiritual dimensions of Māori health. Consequently, taha wairua is increasingly recognised as a vital dimension of health and well-being, as is apparent in its inclusion within the health and physical education curriculum introduced by the Ministry of Education in 1999 (Egan, 2019) and similar government documents.

Over the past few decades public events in New Zealand have increasingly incorporated karakia (ritual chant or prayer) in te reo Māori as a key component of state ritual. The inclusion of karakia takes place within events organised by the civil service or within state-funded primary and secondary schools, welfare organisations, trade unions, and national memorials. This change has been so widespread that karakia are now a ubiquitous part of public events in New Zealand. One example of this is the annual commemorations for the 2019 Christchurch Mosque Attacks, held in Christchurch each year, which include karakia as part of the proceedings.⁷ Similarly, previous rituals involving Christian public prayer have frequently shifted languages into te reo Māori and, if anything, these have become increasingly prominent – while remaining distinctly Christian, the articulation in te reo Māori is widely seen as rendering them less confessional and more ‘public’.⁸

An important case of the incorporation of karakia into public ritual is found in emerging ritual commemorations of Matariki (Māori New Year). Over recent decades the momentum for celebrating Matariki has grown significantly and, for the first time, it was designated an official public holiday in June 2022. The national celebration of Matariki is an important milestone in temporal decolonisation. Matariki is based on astronomical cycles with the celebration of the Māori new year taking place at the annual rising of the Matariki cluster of stars (also called the Pleiades) in the middle of the New Zealand winter.⁹ Matamua (2021a, 2021b) notes that Māori communities are increasingly making use of traditional karakia as part of these celebrations, including in order to commemorate the recently deceased and to present food offerings.¹⁰ Innovation in public ritual by adopting Matariki as a public holiday thereby creates space for new forms of public, state-sanctioned Māori spirituality.

One of the most prominent debates in the New Zealand media in 2021 concerned the roles and locations of mātauranga Māori. One of the major triggers was a letter by seven academics published in the weekly magazine New Zealand Listener entitled ‘In Defence of Science’ (Clements et al., 2021). This short piece argued against recent proposed changes to the secondary school curriculum which aspired to recognising parity between mātauranga Māori and other epistemologies, including Western science. The authors of the letter took issue with the recommendation of parity, as well as the view promoted by the reformists that Western science was part of the colonising project. They argued that while indigenous knowledge ‘is critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy’ it was not the same thing as science itself, which was framed as the ‘discovery of empirical, universal truths’. The letter received swift and critical responses from across the university sector and the furore has become known as ‘the mātauranga Māori debate’ (Stewart, 2021).

An important element within this debate concerns spirituality. In keeping with modern Western epistemological distinctions between scientific ‘knowledge’ and religious ‘belief’, dissenters from the view that mātauranga Māori deserves parity with science have argued that indigenous knowledge is infused with non-empirical, mythological, and particularistic (as opposed to universal) metaphysical beliefs (Lillis & Schwerdtfeger, 2021).¹¹ It is for these reasons that global icons of atheism, including Richard Dawkins, saw it as necessary to wade into the debate, albeit in his case rather clumsily (Dawkins, 2021).¹² On the other hand, many advocates for mātauranga Māori either promoted it as empirically-based or refused to accept a belief-knowledge dualism (Henry, 2021; May, 2021). In either case, the emergence of mātauranga Māori as a national consideration in education and science should be seen as an incisive critique of secularist attempts at drawing a sharp demarcation around religiosity. Importantly, this critique is not launched on the basis of an assessment of the fallibility or inadequacy of secularist politics, but rather is proactively launched on the value and political necessity of the project of decolonisation.

The New Zealand example is not a case of the rise and public expression of Māori spirituality as simply being equated with the decline of Christian religious ritual or its ‘conversion’ into indigenous spiritual practice. Indeed, much (but by no means all) Māori ritual practice continues to draw upon the legacy of Māori involvement in Christian hāhi (churches), including ritual practices. The colonial origins of Christianity within Aotearoa New Zealand and the decolonising usage of Christian ritual are in tension with each other, but while some Māori see this as an intransigent conflict others continue to navigate the tensions inherent in this paradox.¹³ Our point is not that indigenous spirituality replaces Christianity, but rather that while public Christianity has indeed declined over the past three decades, this by no means results in a purely secular public sphere or a secular state. Instead, we see a growing salience to wairuatanga, or Māori spirituality, across a range of domains (health, education, law, environment, ritual practice, and science/knowledge) that undermines attempts at implementing a rigidly secularist politics – reliant as secularism is upon the discursive and political demarcation of religion from the other parts of public life. With such demarcations being systematically undermined through the political project of decolonisation, New Zealand secularity emerges as an indeterminate and fraught project cutting against the grain of political momentum. A decolonising Aotearoa New Zealand is not congruent with a rigid form of political secularism. It also provides fertile space for the emergence of new forms of public religion and spirituality.

Diversity and pluralisation

Secular regimes are ostensibly responses to the presence of diversity. Changes to the complexion of diversity therefore invariably complicate existing secular arrangements, opening space for their renegotiation. In recent decades New Zealand’s demographic profile has changed dramatically in response to changing patterns of migration. The nation is increasingly ethnically and religiously diverse. This new diversity challenges earlier paradigms, and is a second pivotal factor reshaping the contemporary New Zealand secular. Whereas classical theories frequently identified pluralisation as a crucial driver in the growing secularisation of society, in New Zealand’s political domain the opposite tendency is more apparent. Increasing diversity and pluralisation has disrupted old norms, producing new spaces for public religion and unsettling the secular bounding of religion.

That New Zealand is increasingly religiously diverse should not be taken as implying a homogenous past. In the 19th century New Zealand’s religious landscape was replete with competing sects – a ‘veritable forest of denominations’ as one visitor astutely observed (Siegfried, 1914, p. 311). But while Māori traditions and small populations of other religions were present, so far as the state was concerned the diversity in question was predominantly Christian and also mainly British in origin. It was the presence of these competing Christian denominations that gave rise to the nation’s secular arrangements in the 19th century. Secularity primarily concerned the demarcation of religion and state in the context of competing sectarian Christian claims.

During the second half of the 20th century, the shape of diversity shifted dramatically, largely in response to changing government policies. Non-British European migration proliferated after the Second World War, but the most profound changes occurred with the passing of ‘white New Zealand’ policies, especially from the 1960s. Labour shortages and political decolonisation in the Pacific, and a Treaty of Friendship in 1962, led to encouragement of immigration from Western Samoa under a quota scheme. Pacific migration grew and diversified thereafter so that by 2018 Pacific peoples made up 8.1% of the national population (Census, 2018). Further policy changes from the late 1980s, in the era of neoliberal reform, drew migrants from further afield, especially Asia – initially Southeast Asia, and more recently South Asia and mainland China. By 2015, Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, had become renowned for its ‘superdiversity’, the World Migration Report (2015) ranking it as having the fourth largest foreign population of any major city. In 2018, 28.2% of Auckland’s population identified with an Asian ethnicity, as did 15.3% of the national population. In 1961, 92% of New Zealanders had identified as European, 7% as Māori; by 2018, Asian and Pacific New Zealanders had grown from 1% to 23% of the population.

Changing religious demography followed. In 1961, just 0.1% of the census population had identified as Hindu and 0.2% as Jewish. The remainder almost entirely identified as Christian of one form or another, or comprised those who objected to state (8.1%) or claimed no religion at all (1%). Census Christians declined from about 90% to 38.6% between 1961 and 2018, while in the same period ‘no religionists’ grew from 1.2% to 48.2%. By 2018, other major religious traditions were also proliferating, notably through growth in Hindu (2.7%), Muslim (1.3%), Buddhist (1.1%), and Sikh (0.9%) populations, as well as a multitude of other religious and spiritual traditions. In 2014, New Zealand was rated the 21st most religiously diverse country in the world (Pew Research Centre, 2014), based on 2010 data which have been rapidly superseded. If anything, diversity has accelerated since that time. This religious pluralisation is not only because of a broader range of religions vying for public space, but Christianity too has been significantly reshaped through growing ethnic diversity.

The implications of this changing religious profile fold out in a range of ways that affect the state’s interest in religion, including presenting new challenges for delimiting a public religious presence. State discourses have tended to welcome ethnic diversity, but they have been more ambivalent towards religious traditions and identities. Religion is frequently subsumed within the state’s ethnic categories, serving both to afford religion a public presence while also deflecting meaningful engagement. In response to growing diversity the New Zealand state became increasingly concerned with issues of social cohesion. While much of this was focused on cultural or ethnic groups, there was also consideration of questions of religious diversity, particularly in relation to regional inter-religious conflict, controversies, and discrimination targeted towards religious minorities in New Zealand. This has been particularly notable in the wake of the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks in 2001. In response, the New Zealand state made a significant investment in interfaith initiatives.

Following the Bali bombings of 2002, in which 202 people were killed, the Indonesian government took a lead in regional interfaith dialogue. The New Zealand government supported this, funding delegations to regional gatherings. After the first such gathering in 2004, deliberations with religious leaders in New Zealand and at an interfaith workshop during the New Zealand Diversity Forum of the Human Rights Commission (HRC) in 2006 led to production of a Statement on Religious Diversity in 2007. This process was led by Paul Morris of Victoria University of Wellington with Race Relations Conciliator Joris de Bres. The final Statement published under the auspices of the HRC included a foreword by Prime Minister Helen Clark. Articulated within a human rights approach, the Statement aimed to provide ‘a framework for the recognition of New Zealand’s diverse faith communities and their harmonious interaction with each other, with government and with other groups in society’ (2019, p. 4). Much of the state’s bureaucratic investment was coordinated through the HRC, especially in connection with its New Zealand Diversity Action Programme which was established in response to the desecration of Jewish graves in Wellington in 2004. Support for celebratory festivals and events, such as those connected with Diwali, were among the activities encouraged to foster understanding of diverse cultural and religious groups.

Such initiatives nevertheless left New Zealand unprepared for the terrorist attack on 15 March 2019, where 51 people were killed in a premeditated attack that targeted Muslim worshippers at Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch. This event had a profound impact, the implications of which are still being worked through in policy. In terms of New Zealand secularity, it provided further impetus to reconsider the extent and forms of state engagement with religion, and to striking new expressions of public religion.

Soon after the attack, on 8 April 2019, the government moved to establish a Royal Commission of Inquiry. Its initial brief did not include any reference to social cohesion, but this dimension was incorporated as a response to community demand (New Zealand Government, 2020, executive summary 43). Part 9 of the Report, ‘Social cohesion and embracing diversity’, gave rise to a number of critical recommendations, including a requirement for public sector agencies to ‘prioritise the collection of data on ethnic and religious demographics’ for policy purposes (r. 32), and to ‘invest in opportunities’ for young people to learn about ‘the value of ethnic and religious diversity’ (r. 36). Government was also urged to create opportunities for ‘regular public conversations’ that promote understanding of social cohesion, and the ‘value’ of ‘cultural, ethnic and religious diversity’ to a well-functioning society (r. 37). New hate speech legislation was also recommended, which would incorporate ‘religious affiliation’ as a protected characteristic. In 2021, a new Ministry for Ethnic Communities was established.¹⁴ Its brief includes administering funds to ‘support community development and social cohesion’ and to create a comprehensive hub for information on ‘ethnicity, religion, and language’ (Ministry for Ethnic Communities, 2022). This work represents an extension of the state’s attention to ‘religion’, albeit in tight connection with ethnicity and with emphasis on social cohesion. It expands substantially upon the work of the HRC in its publicly mandated role to promote the right to religion and understanding between religious communities (de Bres, 2007, p. 9).

If the mosque attacks have led to greater willingness of the state to engage religion, responses to the attacks also gave new visibility to Muslims, with implications for the shape of public religion and more generally the New Zealand secular. Muslims have been present in New Zealand since the 19th century, although until recently this was only in very small numbers. The most substantial growth in the Muslim population has occurred since the 1990s. This growth coincided with a period of rising suspicion about Islam in the West, including explicit Islamophobia. While Muslims seldom obtained a high public profile in New Zealand, there is significant evidence of distinctly anti-Muslim prejudice within the wider population (Greaves et al., 2020; Highland et al., 2019; Shaver et al., 2016). After the terror attacks, New Zealand Muslims entered the public sphere to an unprecedented extent. Notably, they did so indisputably as victims rather than as perceived threats. The Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s much publicised declaration to Muslims in New Zealand, ‘You are Us – Aroha Nui’, was quickly and broadly adopted. It featured prominently in religious services and other ritual gatherings, and can be understood in distinctly religious terms: this was an inclusive affirmation and also a religious statement.

Inclusion was marked ritually, with incorporation of Islam into prominent state rituals. On 19 March 2019, Parliament opened with Islamic prayer, after Speaker Trevor Mallard led a multi-faith delegation of religious leaders into the House of Representatives. On 21 March, the first Friday prayers following the attack were held publicly at Hagley Park in Christchurch, opposite the Al Noor Mosque. This service included Islamic prayer (adhan) followed by the Jummah Salah (afternoon prayer) at 1:32 pm and a two-minute period of silence, which was observed nationwide. Imam Gamal Fouda’s sermon at the national memorial asserted that the events of 15 March were of profound religious and political significance: ‘they are not just martyrs of Islam, they are martyrs of this nation New Zealand’ (Stuff, 2019).

Alongside these processes of religious reconfiguration are a series of further changes in how the state relates to Pacific peoples, where government agencies have increasingly sought to proactively engage Pacific religious communities. While many of these engagements have had a low profile, we can nevertheless see a trajectory of more active engagement. This is apparent in on-the-ground welfare provision, where government agencies navigate a complex set of imperatives to engage with religious communities (Searell, 2020). While secularist assumptions are frequently still operating within government departments, pragmatically Pacific religious communities can be seen as important potential partners in programme delivery. An important example of this is the extensive collaborations of public health officials with Pacific churches in Auckland to address Covid-19, including through immunisation drives.

In all these cases there is considerable ambiguity about the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘culture’. We argue that this ambiguity is not simply a matter of inadequate definitional clarity. Instead, many of the actors involved perceive a utility to boundary obfuscation. The ambiguity affords possibilities. The New Zealand state allows flexibility around the culture/religion divide as this facilitates constructive engagement. This cultivated ambiguity, however, also leaves the secular state in a precarious location. An increasingly tenuous secular-religious distinction opens up new possibilities for public religion.

Conclusion

We have argued that the largely taken for granted forms of New Zealand secularity are currently in transition. Oft-touted and much mythologised, the New Zealand secular is more malleable than has frequently been assumed. It is also more precarious. Secular politics requires an attempt at drawing a line between religion and other spheres of life. In New Zealand, this manoeuvre has been challenged and undermined by recent political, social, and demographic changes. Our point is not that the New Zealand secular is on the cusp of collapse. We make no claims about the future, which remains as inscrutable as always. Instead, we argue that the present ambiguities and complexities amply illustrate that the future of New Zealand secularity is far from secure.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Wairuatanga or spirituality is generally viewed by Māori as being associated to beliefs and attitudes expressed within a mātauranga Māori framework. Wairuatanga permeates all aspects of our daily existence though we are not always conscious of it. It has been described as an energy force that has special characteristics, functions and qualities that are connected to values and ideals and is maintained through cultural rituals, rites and practices’ (Foster, 2009, p. 8; italics in original).

2. Agrama argues that the relationship between religion and secularism is irrevocably indeterminate, but he also notes that the extent to which this is the case varies across time and political configurations. Our point here is an extension of this argument; that is, some formations are more amenable to specific techniques of secular governance than others.

3. ‘Te Urewera is ancient and enduring, a fortress of nature, alive with history; its scenery is abundant with mystery, adventure, and remote beauty. Te Urewera is a place of spiritual value, with its own mana and mauri’ [s 3(1 & 2)].

4. ‘Te Awa Tupua is a spiritual and physical entity that supports and sustains both the life and natural resources within the Whanganui River and the health and well-being of the iwi, hapū, and other communities of the River’. [s 13(a)].

5. We are grateful to Michaela Richards for conversations around legal personhood, and particularly for helping us understand some of the complexities around the sacred landscape of Mount Taranaki. Reference to Taranaki Mounga here recognises the dialect of Taranaki iwi.

6. For example, see the websites provided by: Ministry of Health (2017); HealthNavigator (2021); Mental Health Foundation (2021).

7. We are grateful to April Boland for enlightening conversations around this observation.

8. See, for example, discussion of public karakia and debates over the New Zealand parliamentary prayer (Lineham, 2020, p. 15; Oxholm et al., 2022, p. 8; van der Krogt, 2015, pp. 79–80).

9. Matariki is an abbreviation of ‘Ngā Mata o te Ariki Tāwhirimātea’ (The Eyes of the God Tāwhirimātea). See Hardy (2012) for helpful historical background and analysis of the development of Matariki.

10. ‘For some Māori, the morning rising of Matariki is more than just a period of celebration. It is a chance to reconnect with traditional practices, enact spiritual beliefs, reaffirm bonds with community, acknowledge the environment, bid farewell to those whom have passed since the last Matariki period and to celebrate the promise of the future. The regeneration of this native observation of Matariki is being led in some places by groups of Māori cultural practitioners. During this ceremony a reading of the bounty of the year is conducted, the names of the dead of the year are recited and released (Te taki mōteatea) and the smoke from the food is offered to the cluster as sustenance (Whāngai i te hautapu)’ (Matamua, 2021a).

11. See Harrison (2015) for analysis of the modern distinctions between the categories of science and religion.

12. Dawkins includes the thoroughly polemical line: ‘Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks’.

13. See Kaa’s (2020) seminal study of the experience of Te Hāhi Mihinare/Māori Anglican Church as it has navigated a colonial past and pioneered the work of decolonisation. We are grateful to Arama Tairea for conversations about the ‘Christian paradox’ in relation to projects of colonisation and decolonisation in Oceania.

14. The new Ministry developed out of the Office of Ethnic Affairs, which itself began as a Desk within the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1995.