Anonymous: Extracting the Self - A Survivor’s Account of Spiritual Coercion

The following account is published as Anonymous to protect the privacy and safety of the individuals involved. The experiences described are a faithful record of the author’s journey through a high-control spiritual environment

John Robertson: New Zealand’s Laws Are Enforcing Spiritual Privilege...

New Zealand’s Laws Are Enforcing Spiritual Privilege — And Nobody’s Talking About It 

Open a law, a bill, or a policy in this country, and one thing jumps out: Māori spiritual beliefs, wrapped in the language of culture, are written directly into legislation. Tikanga. Karakia. Haka. Hongi. All mandatory. All elevated above skepticism. And the public is supposed to act like it’s normal. It’s not normal. It’s state-sanctioned ritual.

Steven Gaskell: The Teaching of Māori Spiritual Worldviews in New Zealand Schools

The teaching of Māori spiritual worldviews in New Zealand schools is a legal consistency issue.

New Zealand’s commitment to secular education is grounded in the principle that the state should not privilege one religion over another. Under current practice, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and other faith traditions are clearly defined as “religion” and therefore excluded from classroom teaching, except in contexts where students are provided choice and parents’ rights are respected. In contrast, Māori spiritual worldviews are reframed as “culture” and integrated directly into the curriculum. This inconsistency raises significant legal and human rights concerns.

Graham Adams: The PM pushes old-time religion

While Luxon is pilloried for his religious views, Hipkins is busy inserting Māori spirituality into science.

It is one of the ironies of this election campaign that Chris Luxon is being painted as a religious zealot who will allegedly force Christian beliefs on the nation even as Chris Hipkins is actually introducing mātauranga Māori into education — and most controversially into science.

Last week, Chicago University’s Jerry Coyne, one of the world’s pre-eminent evolutionary biologists, described mātauranga Māori as a mix of “religion, ethics, morality, tradition and superstition” with some “empirical, trial-and-error based knowledge that can be taken as part of science”.

“It is not a ‘way of knowing’,” the professor said, “but a ‘Māori way of living’.”