Religion in the workplace: the racist hypocrisy of the karakia criticism

We’ve all heard it. We might even have agreed with it, or said it ourselves, or at least thought the people saying it might have a point. After all, they’re right: we are a secular society. Or we’re supposed to be.

“I just don’t think religion should be in the workplace,” says the reasonable racist. “I don’t object to the karakia, but it shouldn’t be a prayer.” 

It has become an increasingly echoed opinion at a time where Maori are being presented as pushing their culture onto wider New Zealand, and wider New Zealand have started pushing back, egged on by our politicians, pundits, and Atlas Network partners. While I don’t think that everyone who makes these sorts of objections or who agrees with the sentiment is issuing deliberate dogwhistles, there seems to be a lack of awareness and self-reflection from these people about what it is that makes them so uncomfortable.

I’m not someone enjoys religion being pushed on me. I dislike that our banger of a National anthem is “God Defend New Zealand”. I find it difficult that our addiction services are largely hosted by churches and the city mission, and that the Alcoholics/Narcotics Anonymous frameworks are deeply, deeply based in Christianity, with Christian ideals making up the entire mentality of the programme as well as being inextricable from several of the steps, despite being promoted as “non-religious”. And while I think religion is important and relevant to New Zealand and its future, it’s ridiculous that we live in a secular state but that “religious education” in schools, including state primary schools, refers primarily to Christian education with zero requirement to learn about or understand wider religions.

I don’t think a secular state should include state-funded default indoctrination into the religion we supposedly aren’t as a country.

And I especially don’t think we should allow pedophile slavery cults to exist just because they believe in God.

Religion does a lot for people. It connects them, reassures them, fulfils them, supports them, gives their lives meaning. It can also harm them, confuse them, mislead them, control them, and take advantage of their trust and vulnerability. But this is inevitable — humans are very easily harmed and confused and mislead and controlled, and we have an innate need to believe in things greater than ourselves; we crave a framework to make sense of everything and to support our worldview, and being unreligious doesn’t exempt you from that. It just sends you searching for it elsewhere.

There’s a lot of religious (Christian) integration in New Zealand that I disapprove of. But karakia is not one of them.

The mountain of context behind religious Karakia

 

The main point of note is that Christianity is a Pakeha tradition, and the close integration of Maori religion and culture is a result of colonisation and lost culture. Early communication with Maori, including working out how to communicate, was done via missionaries, who came to Aotearoa with the explicit purpose of converting the population to Christianity, at which they were very successful.

They used the process of syncretisation. Missionaries took existing Maori beliefs and traditions and amalgamated them into a single body of religious  teachings, a cohesive practice with the rich depth and history of the Christian Church, but with all the trappings and comfort of Te Ao Maori.

Christianity is a syncretisation specialist when it comes to converting pagan religions, and this is the secret to their overwhelming success. By the time they made it to Aotearoa, they’d been syncretising religions for over a thousand years. Though it was about that long ago they made it to British shores, the lasting  effects of the syncretisation of Britain can still be seen quite clearly  today — Easter, for example, comes from the pagan springtime festival, named Eoster after the Germanic pagan goddess of the dawn.  What we know today as Easter in English language societies is a bastardisation (or rather, syncretisation) of the original celebration and of Jesus’s resurrection: Pascha, or Passover. Early missionaries took a pagan festival and goddess associated with rebirth and the coming of spring, and made it about their own important holy day with its own rebirth traditions. The same was done for yuletide/midwinter celebrations, a festival marking the darkest, shortest, and coldest days of the year, marking the middle of the season and thus the promise of hope for better times. This works wonderfully if you’ve got a story about a baby who is the vessel of hope for all of mankind.

Maori Jesus - as much a syncretisation as White Jesus.

British and European conversion retained a lot of festivals, events and holidays, renamed and given a fresh wash of paint. Missionaries arriving in Aotearoa wanted to bring Te Ao Maori into line with the existing doctrine, and the different timings of traditions of the tribes would have made this difficult — imagine trying to turn Matariki into Christmas for example, when it falls so differently across the country. The Maori were a very scientific people in certain regards, particularly astronomy, as they had inherited a rich tradition and knowledge base as ocean navigators. Christianity had already had its run-ins with science by this point, its calendar was jam-packed, and moving holidays would have made it difficult for future settlers to assimilate with Maori Christianity.

Instead the missionaries appropriated the Maori worldview and moulded it to their own religion. We have just witnessed the new Maori Queen be coronated not with a crown, but with a bible held above her head; this is an example of how it was not British ways that were imported, but Christian traditions and values. Maori are very reverent, very spiritual, and feel a deep connection to the world; all this would have been incredibly helpful to the missionaries as they set about finding common ground between their religion and the native people in New Zealand.

Giving thanks  for provision of food or fortune or resources was an easy comparison to saying Grace, but Maori did this more than just at mealtimes. The shared value emphasised  that being thankful is important, and because pausing to speak or recite words of thanks had huge overlap between these cultures, karakia continued but became an opportunity to thank not the land or the sea or the pagan gods whose domain these were, but the Christian God. That is why so many karakia without Te Reo “closings” (such as the chorus of Haumi e. Hui e. Tāiki e!) instead finish with an obvious loanword — Ameni. This word can turn a non-religious prayer into a Christian one — with non-speakers likely only recognising the Te Reo loanword for “Amen”.

Karakia was used to ask for luck rather than give thanks, and this too was easily correlated to Christianity, as who hasn’t asked God for a bit of help?

Once the missionaries have got things started, they usually find new converts do much of the syncretisation themselves, keen to incorporate their existing traditions and understandings within this new paradigm. Maori must have been quite easy targets, being an island people with no prior contact  with the wider world and competing faiths, and being such an adaptable and pioneering people themselves, they were ideally positioned to onboard Christian teachings. Thus older, pagan forms of karakia were steadily dropped in favour of karakia that used new Christian ideas.

Now there are few records of traditional karakia left. Work is ongoing to write new non-Christian ones for schools and classrooms and workplaces and homes and everywhere else that have the religion taken out of them to be appropriate for all, but with many karakia opportunities and very few people fluent in Te Reo, learning and memorising these  can be challenging for many, especially where they’re long. This contrasts especially to Christian karakia which has a more short karakia that are easy to remember (Christianity loves a soundbite).

Things that are grounded in tradition, things that are old, tend to have Christian roots and often very visible Christian features. We still swear oaths on the bible, still sing “God Defend New Zealand” at rugby games, still celebrate Christmas and Easter and say goodbye as a farewell (God Be With Ye). We use the Christian calendar, Christian expletives, Christian names and iconography for our cities (the first city built here was literally called Christchurch, as in the Church of Christ). We teach it in state schools, give funding to integrated schools so they can be dedicated Christian schools, and send scripture teachers around primary schools with no religious education. We task churches with running programmes that help the country’s most vulnerable, often those at their lowest dealing with abuse and mental health and especially addictions, where they then are sent through a Christian-centric recovery programme with explicit steps like “Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God”. We have a monarch who is literally the voice of the Anglican church, God’s chosen representative on earth — whether you’re in the church or not. And he, our head of state, is coronated by a bishop and then we sing to him “God Save the King”. Or the British do, anyway, while we watch on our TVs and try to see if we can spot the New Zealand Prime Minister in the audience.

We have a lot of Christianity in this country in spaces that are supposedly secular. But for some reason, Christianity is only a problem when it’s in Te Reo.