Start with the family. Marriage rates have cratered from 45.5 per 1,000 in 1971 to a pathetic 8.0 in 2024. Half of all babies are now born outside marriage. Sole-parent households have ballooned; nearly one in five Kiwi kids grows up without both parents at home. The statistical fallout is brutal: children from broken homes are far more likely to drop out, offend, and end up on welfare. That is not “diversity.” It is the predictable result when the Christian ideal of lifelong covenant is swapped for no-fault individualism.
The kids suffer most. One in twenty New Zealand children is known to police for offending before age 14. Youth psychological distress sits at alarming levels. Poorly raised, fatherless boys become the ram-raiders and ram-raiders-in-waiting we see on nightly news. The state throws money at “programmes.” Results stay rotten because the moral formation once supplied free by the church—self-control, deferred gratification, respect for authority—is gone.
Schools accelerated the rot. Critical-theory poison now masquerades as “social justice” in the curriculum. Hedonistic sex education pushes consent-without-consequences and gender fluidity while sidelining marriage and fidelity. The result: functional illiteracy in basics, moral confusion, and a generation that thinks feelings trump facts.
Selfishness, greed and violence follow. Without a shared Christian ethic we get atomised consumers chasing dopamine, not citizens bound by duty. Trust evaporates. Community dissolves. Surveys show three in five Kiwis now believe society is “broken.” No wonder: when the transcendent is stripped out, the state steps in with bigger welfare, more regulation, and ever-higher taxes to bandage the wounds it helped create.
The fix is not parliamentary fiat or taxpayer-funded counsellors. The best thing for New Zealand families and New Zealand life is the oldest: a voluntary return to church. Strong congregations rebuild marriages, raise disciplined kids, restore community, and instil the work ethic and restraint that free markets and free people actually require. Christianity is not nostalgia. It is the operating system that once made this country work. Time to reinstall it—before the hard drive crashes for good.
Christianity is not just the best operating system for the building of free and prosperous nations. It has a virtue even beyond that: it is true.
The kids suffer most. One in twenty New Zealand children is known to police for offending before age 14. Youth psychological distress sits at alarming levels. Poorly raised, fatherless boys become the ram-raiders and ram-raiders-in-waiting we see on nightly news. The state throws money at “programmes.” Results stay rotten because the moral formation once supplied free by the church—self-control, deferred gratification, respect for authority—is gone.
Schools accelerated the rot. Critical-theory poison now masquerades as “social justice” in the curriculum. Hedonistic sex education pushes consent-without-consequences and gender fluidity while sidelining marriage and fidelity. The result: functional illiteracy in basics, moral confusion, and a generation that thinks feelings trump facts.
Selfishness, greed and violence follow. Without a shared Christian ethic we get atomised consumers chasing dopamine, not citizens bound by duty. Trust evaporates. Community dissolves. Surveys show three in five Kiwis now believe society is “broken.” No wonder: when the transcendent is stripped out, the state steps in with bigger welfare, more regulation, and ever-higher taxes to bandage the wounds it helped create.
The fix is not parliamentary fiat or taxpayer-funded counsellors. The best thing for New Zealand families and New Zealand life is the oldest: a voluntary return to church. Strong congregations rebuild marriages, raise disciplined kids, restore community, and instil the work ethic and restraint that free markets and free people actually require. Christianity is not nostalgia. It is the operating system that once made this country work. Time to reinstall it—before the hard drive crashes for good.
Christianity is not just the best operating system for the building of free and prosperous nations. It has a virtue even beyond that: it is true.
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader, and Minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011. This article was first published HERE
13 comments:
With statements as above Hide drags down the plausibility of all organisations he is associated with. Whilst there is correlation between failing Christianity and failing ethics it is not cause and effect.
With just a few alterations, this article could be rewritten to argue that Islam and the Sharia are at the heart of a morally decent and just society.
The Sharia has brought order into chaos time and time again in countries where law and order suffered a complete breakdown owing to internal strife. (No, don't try to change the subject by talking about punishments such as amputation for thieves; compare like with like, which is Sharia with early mediaeval European law, and the former comes out of it smelling of roses.)
Substitute "Islam" for "Christianity" in the sentence " Without a shared Christian ethic we get atomised consumers chasing dopamine, not citizens bound by duty" and it reads just as well, if not better given the social ethics of Islam.
Muslims take the family very seriously - much more so than most Westerners nowadays - which includes the 'covenental' (a theological term used by this writer, which I am using in the sense of "two can play that game") nature of marriage and the obligations it entails towards spouses and children.
Some of my Muslim acquaintances while I was in Lebanon for 17 years used to bait me by mentioning such travesties as no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage - and all I could do was nod sheepishly!
Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating Sharia law - for one thing, I like my Scotch too much. But Rodney Hide exemplifies the self-righteousness of the smugly uninformed and thereby places his head on the chopping block, and I am happy to oblige him by taking a swing with the axe.
So, for all his liberal pretensions, Hide is actually in favour of the oldest and largest command and control organisation ever created. Islam is currently better at it but Christianity has had another six hundred years of interfering in peoples lives for the purpose of exercising power. Has it not occurred to him that all the positives he attributes to Christianity are quite capable of being achieved by humans without resorting to talking snakes and original sin. After all human-kind has existed for an awful lot longer than Christianity, and survived and prospered. I suggest that trend has continued, not because of Christianity, but in spite of it.
No surprise that politics is getting intertwined ever since recidivist and unrepentant sinner Trump got elected by folks who label themselves as Christian but whose actions are the very opposite of Christian.
If Jesus returned to our time and saw the rhetoric coming from Peter’s and Seymour, it’s pretty obvious what He would have to say to his flock.
Rodney Hide has been beaten to the post.
The new moral framework / religion is already being forced upon us.
It's some sort of paganism wrapped up in folklore, mythology, superstition, anthropomorphism, star gazing, moon worship and reciting incantations (Karakia) to evoke spiritual guidance.
We need to believe rivers and mountains are people and goblins or trolls (Taniwhas) hide under most bridges we trip-trap across.
The self-appointed high priests of this new "religious / moral" framework collect offerings (Koha) much like organized crime syndicates operate.
Is it complete nefarious trite?
Absolutely - welcome to hell.
Some of the nastiest people I have met have been Christians. However , they did not conform to the teachings of Jesus who was clear his kingdom was not of this world but spiritual.Throughout the history of Christianity, powerful religious organisations often formed brutal unholy liaisons between state/king and church which Jesus never advocated. The bible never advocated Christianity was to take over the whole world by conquest , however Sharia law dictates Islam must do this by Jihad.
The treatment of women in Muslim marriage have women subjugated to men , sexually and in law. A Muslim man can marry a non-Muslim woman not vice versa .Child marriage of girls and polygamy is prevalent in some Muslim countries.
There is no place for atheist/Kuffar/infidels in Islam. Nor free speech, leaving the faith could result in capital punishment. You won't find that in the bible either. The message has been perverted so often, historically.
The abolition of slavery was not going to happen naturally without Christians advovating it. The Beginning of Western Science was by devout Christians and particularly Newton.This depth did not spontaneously occur in other cultures.
One thing going for Christianity is the constant commitment to return to first principles.
So Rodney, I agree, many of our social problems are because people have abandoned the true and wise message of Christianity. Adultery has wrecked havoc in my own family and caused a multitude of problems for particularly children.
A lot has been said about Islam and women & marriage. Some of it needs contextualising, bearing in mind that the Sharia goes back over 1400 years.
Child marriage: where the girl was pre-pubertal, consummation could not occur until she was menstruating. Do let me remind you that the age of marriage for girls in English law was 12 until the mid-18thC.
Polygamy: a man can have up to 4 wives but only if he can afford them. This custom came about in the early years of Islam when there was a shortage of men owing to incessant wars, and there were a lot of widows and orphans around. The property rights of married Muslim women were much more favourable than those enjoyed by English women until the late 19thC/early20thC. An interesting and relevant aside: a 2014 study in the UK revealed surprisingly high levels of support for polygamous marriage among educated Muslim women - they said it gave them more independence.
As for science, it is a tautology to say that Western science came about through Western early scientists (including Newton, it is said here, who was a Deist and was regarded as a heretic by the Vatican and by many Protestants). Science in the Islamic world in the mid-Middle Ages was streets ahead of that in the West.
Added in to this cauldron of opinion, is the shift of christianiddy in the last fifty years to left wing politics.... quite forgetting that left and right in politics are both dependent upon "judgement" ... which is God's prerogative. Take politics out of religion and start thinking anew - with prayer.
May it be established once and for all that Newton was a theist Christian of unusual beliefs by not believing in the Trinity - to him Christ was not equal to God which was an Aryan belief. Unlike deists , who view God as a 'watchmaker' uninvolved in human affairs after creation, Newton firmly believed in divine revelation, prophesy and supernatural events. He warned against viewing the universe as purely mechanical clockwork.
Western Science , like that of Newton's was very different from earlier teleological value-laden study of nature as in Islamic science advancing to the fundamental shift to a mechanistic, quantitative and secular approach. Islamic science did provide essential foundations such as al-Haythams' optics and in algebra but the Scientific Revolution marked a radical departure in how knowledge of the natural world was sought.
Islamic Science acted within a religious framework, where the study of nature was seen as a way to understand God's signs and align with Quranic injunctions. It was a holistic approach combining scientific enquiry with spiritual, moral and juridical perspectives.
Compare this with Newtonian Science where his mechanics such as in Principia promoted a more autonomous, secularized science. A shift from understanding the meaning behind nature to discovering the mathematical laws that govern its operation. This reflected Newton 's ( a highly religious man) belief in God as a law maker and giver with God's laws being accessible to man.
A study of Islamic women's views on polygamy sounds suspect to me . Psychology reveals it can cause all sorts of conflicts and psychological disorders for women.
Christianity has a strong belief in preserving children's childhood particularly since the 19th century.
I will concede that labelling Newton as a deist is rather arbitrary - it depends exactly on how one defines deism, and the definition used by scholars has changed over the centuries.
I think Force and Popkin in "Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology" (1990) put it quite succinctly: "Newton has often been identified as a deist. ... In the 19th century, William Blake seems to have put Newton into the deistic camp. Scholars in the 20th-century have often continued to view Newton as a deist. Gerald R. Cragg views Newton as a kind of proto-deist and, as evidence, points to Newton's belief in a true, original, monotheistic religion first discovered in ancient times by natural reason" (note not a word about science here)
i.e. categorisations vary over time and depending on which criteria are applied (a far cry from "established once and for all" as above).
Studies on Muslim polygamy in the UK include reports tabled in the House of Lords in 2015 and 2025. Sample sizes have usually been somewhat small but meta-analyses suggest that while most Muslim women disapprove of the practice, there is a growing body of young (surprising!) Muslim women who prefer polygamy as it gives them greater personal autonomy.
The last claim in the preceding post appears to concede that Christianity's attitude towards "preserving children's childhood" was poorly developed before the 19thC. As I noted earlier, the age of marriage for girls in the mid-18thC was 12. People in glass houses must be very, very careful about throwing stones!
Because of his heterodox Christian views , with just the rejection of Trinitarianism in the Nicene creed , Newton had to keep his radical theological writings hidden. If known about, he would have lost his C. of E. Cambridge University teaching position.
For Newton the mathematical harmony of the universe and the force of gravity were not just mechanical phenomenon, but constant evidence
of God's active providential dominion over space and time hence Intelligent Designers claim Newton was a proto-ID advocate.
Newton's writings proved to the intellectual world that one of history's greatest scientists could simultaneously be a devout fundamentalist reader of the bible and a radical theological reformer.
Force and Popkin's quite recent research argued Newton's science and religion were deeply intertwined. Newton in his epistemological
views combine intense empirical study with a belief in divine revelation (theology)often referred to as 'the book of Nature' and the book of scripture.
For me, Newton was quite clearly a Theist.
Newton was a fascinating guy with eclectic interests - he also devoted a great deal of time to alchemy including ongoing experimentation to find the Philosopher's Stone, and was reportedly a fan of Prophet Muhammed whom he said was a 'revelation' of his god to the Arabs. His views on religion align quite closely to those of the Baha'i faith in this regard (although that faith was not founded until more than 200 years after his death).
To me as a non-believer I am not really interested in Newton's theology, but rather the effect that he had on the epistemology of science. He de-emphasised god(s) as being the agents that directly cause natural processes in favour of mechanistic explanations that were subject to empirical investigation. I am of the opinion that the label 'proto-deist' probably suits him quite well.
But we do appear to have strayed somewhat from the thrust of Hide's article....... :-))
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