When I was about 13 years of age I was a choirboy - cassock, surplice, boy soprano et al. It was quite a commitment. Choir practice was on Tuesday and Thursday evenings; attendance at church was at 10 am on Sunday for Holy Communion and then again at 7 pm for Evensong. The venue was the St Matthews Anglican church in Masterton’s aptly named Church Street and as I recall the congregations were evenly divided gender-wise.
I’m not sure what brought on this burst of piety which only lasted a year or two and probably ended when my voice broke and hormonal temptations in keeping with that experience made other options more appealing. Whatever, I have never regretted the episode as it seemed to herald the possibility of an extraordinary life. Tabloid newspaper headlines of the day would regularly scream: “One time choirboy now feared gangland boss,” or: “Britain’s biggest brothel proprietor was once a choirboy,” or even: “Wealthy playboy started out life as pious choirboy,” although it’s possible I dreamt up that last one.
In his autobiography, My Life, David Lange reckoned the Methodist church was the Labour party at prayer and in Britain it is claimed that the Church of England is the Tory party at worship. I’m not convinced that these categorisations were ever really applicable, though while I was hitting the high notes at St Matthews the Methodists were congregating, literally just down the road, and certainly one of their clergy, the Reverend Russell Marshall, became a minister of the crown in Lange’s fourth Labour government.
Last weekend Easter came and went with much of the populous completely ignoring the death and resurrection and probably spent a good deal of the time lazing about in near perfect weather gorging chocolate eggs.
These days religion seems not to feature hugely in our mainstream media or in the annals of parliament. For our political masters this is undoubtedly an outcome of an oft-quoted, but slightly skewed slogan that religion and politics don’t mix.
But like it or not, politics and religion are inextricably linked. Religion is taken seriously and practised regularly by more than a quarter of all New Zealanders and attracts more players than rugby, yet our mainstream politicians seem to believe that its dictums ought not be seen nor heard. The religious traditions that affect and mould our lives are conspicuous by their absence in most of the speeches and debates that take place in the corridors of power.
And yet there are whole rafts of moral issues that are of direct concern for people of a religious persuasion and these include same-sex marriage, broadcasting standards, holiday trading hours, the integration of church schools and alcohol reform.
There was a time of course when the church and government were virtually interchangeable. The first schools and hospitals were church initiatives, as was social security. The great universities - Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Yale and Harvard were established by the church and history shows that nations of the past rose and fell according to their adherence or otherwise to the Ten Commandments.
Politicians who are agnostics and atheists could scarcely argue against the premise that Christianity is the essential foundation of Western civilisation. Most Western art, much Western literature and a good chunk of Western philosophy becomes fairly incomprehensible without at least some acquaintance with the Bible.
However, perhaps as a direct result of their Christian-inspired good natures, New Zealander’s have also been pretty receptive to other religious influences. Mosques now dot the landscapes of some of our larger cities and the diversity they bring is generally welcomed. Even the Maori renaissance, with its gods and taniwhas, totally contradictory to the good news the early missionaries implanted, is given more than a modicum of tolerance.
And yet when the cardinal links between our religious tradition and political progress that are pivotal to this country’s understanding of itself are ignored, the human story that fused them together remains untold and leaves the field wide open for extremists to set the agenda. The end result is the worst kind of tyranny, directed by opportunistic charismatic leaders who claim with frightening audacity that God speaks to them exclusively. The inevitable outcome is that the positive part of what faith has to offer a community and a country is totally misunderstood and to some extent ridiculed.
Canny politicians, sensing the confusion, sidestep the issues altogether and the vacuum remains.
From my limited observations it would seem that church congregations today are predominantly female. As in so many institutions, the male members of the species seem to have abdicated their responsibilities to seek other more pleasurable pursuits.
Perhaps their voices broke.
