Barrie Davis: New Zealand is Christian

In The Post, 6 July, reporter Sapeer Mayron answers the question: “Was Aotearoa ever a ‘Christian nation’? Short answer: No.” That presupposes that there is something called ‘Aotearoa’ and The Post reporter seeks to realize it by naming it. So, it is propaganda which may be discounted and dismissed.

However, considering the question further reveals how establishing Christianity in New Zealand achieved “the deliberate lifting of a people of lower culture to full equality in political, social, and moral communion with one of the most advanced races in the world.” (Sir Apirana Ngata, 1928)

Christian Religion and Maori Literacy Before the Treaty

Christianity was initially brought to New Zealand by the Church Missionary Society (CMS). The Anglican CMS began operations in New Zealand at Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands where Samuel Marsden preached his first sermon to a largely Maori congregation on Christmas Day 1814. Thomas Kendall, a schoolmaster of the CMS, arrived with Marsden and founded the first mission at Rangihoua with William Hall and John King.

The missionaries believed that their first task was to civilize the Maoris by education in literacy and religion. Kendall prepared the first book in Maori at Sydney in 1815, A Korao no New Zealand, which was an attempt to write some lessons for the instruction of the Maoris. The CMS concentrated first on schools and Kendall started the first mission school in 1816, teaching only in Maori.

Kendall took two chiefs to London in 1820, Hongi Hika and Waikato. With their help, Professor Samuel Lee, who was sponsored at Cambridge University by the CMS, wrote A Grammar and Vocabulary of the New Zealand Language (1820) which laid the foundations of written Maori. Wesleyan missionaries arrived in New Zealand during 1822 and, with help from the Anglicans, also established a missionary station at Whangaroa.

After lobbying by Marsden, Reverend Henry Williams, a naval officer, began a mission at Paihia in 1823 and in 1826 he was joined by his brother William Williams, who was proficient in Maori. From 1835, William Colenso, who was employed by the CMS as a printer, published William Williams’ translation of the New Testament into Maori. From 1838, the Old Testament was translated and published incrementally, and in 1839, the Book of Common Prayer.

The Maoris were interested both in the Christian religion and learning to read, and stocks commonly ran out soon after each print run. Maori interest in the Christian faith grew as they considered and debated Christian teachings.

As a result of the largely Anglican effort, spiritual belief in atua was transitioned to the Christian monotheistic God. Maori interest in religious practice was relocated into Christianity and Maori karakia were increasingly replaced by missionary prayer, a trend which we are now irrationally reversing.

Maori evangelists increased the Church activity during the 1830s and after 1834 new missions were established at Kaitaia, Whangaroa, Manukau, Waikato, Matamata, Rotorua, Tauranga and Poverty Bay.

Bishop Jean-Baptiste Pompallier and his Catholic Marist workers set up their headquarters in the Bay of Islands in 1839. From there they established further stations in the Bay of Plenty, the central North Island and the south-east coast of the South Island.

So, by 1840, there were three missionary groups for the Maoris to choose from: the Anglicans, represented by the CMS, the Wesleyans and the Roman Catholics. From the late 1830s large numbers of Maoris were being baptized into one of these denominations.

By 1838 a fourth of the natives had been baptized and thousands more were influenced by Christianity and benefited from their schools. By 1839, the Anglicans had ten stations that were run by 34 Europeans and 23 Maori missionaries and teachers. In 1840, the Wesleyans had 16 men on eleven stations. By 1841 Pompallier reported that he had set up twelve stations throughout the country and baptized 1000 Maoris, fewer than the CMS but more than the Wesleyans. All of these stations were in the North Island, which the Maoris called Ao tea roa, the South Island comprising only about 2,000 Maoris.

By 1842 there were over 3,000 Christian Maoris in the Bay of Islands region, and others elsewhere with the opening of still more CMS stations at Waimate, Maraetai, Kauaeranga, Puriri, Mangapopuri, Rotorua, Otaki and Waikanae.

In summary, the Church played a leading role in establishing New Zealand, including for the Maoris. By 1840 a significant proportion of the Maori population were baptized Christians and a further portion were informally Christian. By the time of the Treaty, the North Island (Ao tea roa) was already a Christian place.

Christianity is of Evolutionary Significance

Many Maori chiefs signed the Treaty in part due to their trust in missionaries, who were seen as moral guides. The Treaty itself was framed in Christian moral language, and the missionaries viewed it as a covenant; a concept derived from Christian theology which enhanced previous Maori beliefs. Whereas last century Maoris tended to disparage the treaty, today there are some Maoris have reclaimed the idea that the Treaty is sacred.

The religious development which the Maoris experienced in the nineteenth century was similar to the Romans introducing Christianity to Britain during the second to fourth centuries AD. Christianity was a development of Greek philosophy as all of the New Testament writers had been trained in Greek Universities, which is why the NT was written in Greek. The story of Jesus first brought Greek rationalism to Jewish peasants, then to Celtic tribes, and later to Maori ones.

Christianity is about development of the conscious human rational faculty with Christ – aka the Word, language being the centre of consciousness – as its principle, as evidenced in the writings of St Paul and St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). That is, the Christian theologians, after Plato, believed that the rational mind is a procession in God as Creator or principle of the cosmos. If you substitute the theory of evolution in nature for the notion of procession in God, they were not far wrong.

Something similar to the British development also happened to the Maoris except that they were 1,200 years or more behind the British. The persistent Maori claims to beliefs in ‘celestial entities’ is an indication that the Maoris still have some catching up to do. And the inclusion of Maori spiritual beliefs into advice to Parliament (Gary Judd, here) is an indication of how readily Europeans will regress into a primitive state.

The European rational faculty is not yet strong, yet a rational approach is of essence if we are to have a viable democratic country.

The Colonists Built NZ to Christian Norms

The Constitutional Charter of New Zealand 1840 (aka Letters Patent, 16 November 1840) did not mention the Treaty of Waitangi. Nevertheless, it made New Zealand a British Colony incorporating the North and South Islands and Stewart Island, with its own political, legal and justice systems. The New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 laid the foundation for New Zealand’s parliamentary democracy and introduced representative government; and the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1947 gave full legislative independence. None of those Acts were dependent on the Treaty of Waitangi which wasn’t recognized in New Zealand law until the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975.

Whereas Christianity is fundamental to the constitution and creation of New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi was not. The Treaty is not New Zealand’s founding document. Instead, the Bible is the founding document of the West, including New Zealand. If they had stopped with the Treaty there would be no New Zealand; New Zealand was founded by Royal Charters written from a British Christian tradition based on the Bible. While it may not be fashionable to say so now, those are nevertheless the historical facts of the matter.

The New Zealanders, as the British called them, had enquiring minds and were interested in all things British. You might call it the pakeha taonga, which included not only material goods but also European culture, knowledge and language. The missionaries helped to preserve the Maori language by putting it into print and making translations of the Bible, Prayer Book and hymns. Furthermore, early colonial education laws often included provisions for religious instruction including Christian values. Literacy was a great cultural advance, but before 1840 it did not give access to European literature and technology.

To encourage assimilation through language and religious values, the Education Ordinance of 1847 issued by Governor George Grey stipulated that religious instruction, industrial training, and English language education were compulsory in schools, which was a significant change for CMS schools. In the 1870s Maori leaders petitioned Parliament that Maori children should be taught in English only in the CMS schools. I have given a fulsome quote in an Appendix as it is quite enlightening if you have not read it before.

The push by Maoris for European education continued well into the twentieth century. Peter Fraser, the Minister of Education, wrote to Sir Apirana Ngata in 1936 asking him to “let me know what your people would expect of our school system.” Ngata replied: “the question you pose is one that I have raised with my people of the Tairawhiti [Eastern electorate] and the reply has always been the same – we send our children to school to learn the ways of the Pakeha.”

It is disappointing that a coterie of capricious Maoris and their quixotic supporters have recently reversed that position and it is a folly to indulge them.

The people who discovered New Zealand in the 18th century and built it in the 19th century identified as Christians at a time when religion was the basis of civil society. They were fundamentally Christian by virtue of their European culture which was based on the Bible, the foundational book of Europe, and structured by the Church, which was largely tied to the political and legal system. Hence, Christianity was the ‘soul’ of England which served to develop and structure the nation over the last 1,400 years (Ackroyd). The colonists brought their Christian culture and practices to New Zealand in the nineteenth century and created the country accordingly.

New Zealand’s constitution and its institutions, including the Westminster Parliament and the Christian Church, were copies of the British system, secular and sacred. Britain’s apparatus was developed within a tradition which has the Bible as its central foundational document.

The products of that apparatus were the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. The British brought those advances to New Zealand and made them available to the Maoris who needed to become literate in English to participate them. The first task of the missionaries, then, was to teach the Maoris literacy in English, followed by British science and technology, which are a product of the British Christian tradition.

So, not only did the British colonists create New Zealand according to their Christian culture, but they also taught the Maoris how to participate its benefits, thereby lifting a people of lower culture to equality in political, social, and moral communion with the most advanced race in the world.

Barrie Davis is a retired telecommunications engineer, holds a PhD in the psychology of Christian beliefs, and can often be found gnashing his teeth reading The Post outside Floyd’s cafe at Island Bay.

References

William Pember Reeves, The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa, Fourth Revised Edition, 1950, pp. 99-104.

Judith Binney, “The Coming of the Pakeha, 1820-1840”, in Tangata Whenua: A History, 2015, pp. 167-177.

Paul Moon and Peter Biggs, The Treaty and its Times, 2004, pp. 31-5.

Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 2003, pp. 140-52.

The Oxford History of New Zealand, Second Edition, ed. G.W. Rice, 1992, pp. 36-41.

Peter Ackroyd, The English Soul: Faith of a Nation, 2024, pp. 9, 242-249.

Appendix: English Only in CMS Schools

Wiremu Parker says in a chapter essay “The Substance that Remains” (in Wards, Thirteen Facets, 1978, p. 187):

Maori Language

Those who say that the suppression of Maori culture in schools was a deliberate pakeha device to do away with Maori culture would be well advised to do a little research. The truth is that well-intentioned, but as we now know misguided, Maoris and pakehas were convinced that they were acting in the best interests of the Maori people. Mr Takamoana, one of the first newly elected Maori members of Parliament said in Parliament in 1871 ‘that the whole of the Maoris in this Island request that the Government should give instruction that the Maoris should be taught in English only.’9 Another petition by Renata Kawepo and 790 others, and also one from Piri Ropata and 200 others asked for every endeavour to have schools established throughout the country so that Maori children could learn the English language.

As early as 1876 a petition to Parliament from We Te Hakiro and 316 others, asked that all children of two years of age, when just able to speak, should be taught the English language, so that their first language should be English. The petition also asked that not a word of Maori be allowed to be spoken in the school, and that the schoolmaster, his wife, and children be altogether ignorant of the Maori language.

For years the leaders of the Young Maori Party preached up and down the country what both A. T. Ngata and Dr Maui Pomare believed that ‘the first subject in order of priority in the school curriculum was English, the second most important subject was English, the third most important subject was English and then arithmetic and other subjects.’