John Robertson: New Zealand’s Holy Empire of Make-Believe

New Zealand was supposed to be a secular democracy. But blink, and suddenly we’re living in a tax-funded theocracy built on ghost stories and cosmic real estate claims.

Let’s say it flat-out: this country is being governed, influenced, and guilt-tripped by a belief system that no one’s allowed to call a religion — because it’s labeled “culture.”

Clever branding. But make no mistake: when you elevate ancestral spirits, cosmic destinations for souls, and supernatural forces into legislation, courtrooms, education, and land ownership, you’ve built a church. Not a country.

We don’t call it that, though — because we’re too polite, too scared, or too indoctrinated.

Try this on for size:

Your taxes are funding a public holiday based on stellar necromancy — where the spirits of the dead supposedly fly to a star cluster called Matariki, 440 light years away.

Schools are teaching kids about invisible energies called wairua and mauri as if they’re scientific facts, not sacred fables.

And your legal rights, your property, your voice — they all bend to concepts like mana whenua, which are enforced as if they came down from Mount Sinai instead of a tribal council.

And if you question any of it? You’re labelled a racist. A colonizer. A heretic.

Sorry — did I say heretic? I meant bigot, but same energy.

We are living in a soft theocracy, where only one faith system is state-approved — the one cloaked in carvings and cultural immunity. Criticize it and you’re not debating — you’re blaspheming.

Let’s be painfully clear: this isn’t about Māori culture. Culture is fine. Culture is beautiful. Culture can be danced, sung, and honored.

But religion disguised as culture, used as a bludgeon against democracy, enforced through law and funded by your wallet? That’s not beautiful. That’s dangerous.

We’ve gone from “one law for all” to “one law if the ancestors approve.”

Our leaders won’t say it — they’re too busy doing interpretive dances for approval.
The media won’t say it — they’re too scared of losing the culture war.

Academia won’t say it — they’re too high on their own wokeness to realize they’ve become priests in a temple of postmodern superstition.

So let’s say it.

This is a power grab dressed in sacred robes.
This is myth-based governance.
This is the death of secularism by a thousand sacred cuts.

You can’t run a 21st-century country with 13th-century cosmology. You can’t run resource law on the basis of who has stronger “spiritual vibes” over a river. You can’t expect legal equality when one group’s beliefs get written into law and everyone else is told to shut up and pay for it.

This is reverse blasphemy law. Only instead of protecting God, it protects political mythology — and the taxpayer gets stuck funding the altar.

And this is the gut punch:

We’re raising an entire generation to believe that democracy must kneel to mythology — not question it. That to criticize a supernatural worldview is to commit a sin against “biculturalism.” That truth is racist, logic is colonial, and silence is safer.

Well, screw that silence.

New Zealand doesn’t need a soul-guided constitution.

It needs a reboot — a brutal, unapologetic return to rationalism.

No more sacred exemptions.
No more ancestral veto power.
No more tax-funded pilgrimages to the Pleiades.

Let’s rip the spiritual scaffolding out of our lawbooks, drop the theological cosplay, and build a country where no one’s ghost gets to overrule your rights.

Because freedom doesn’t float in the stars.
It lives down here — under your feet.
And it's time we fought for it.

John Robertson is a patriotic New Zealander who frequently posts on Facebook.