Daily Racism towards Maori?

New research conducted by the independent Māori institute for environment and health, Te Atawhai o te Ao has found that 93 per cent of Māori in New Zealand experience racism every day. This came as something of a shock to me, because I did not realise racism was such a huge problem in New Zealand. There is the odd time in my life I have been the object of a racist remark, and I have occasionally witnessed a racist remark towards another person, but I would never have put the figure as a daily one. Where are these people mixing?

Reading further on, we find what counts as racism. According to the article reporting on this, “Racism was experienced by Māori as both act and omission, including micro and macro aggressions, media representation, ignorance and disrespect. This included the invalidation of Māori knowledge, mispronunciation of Māori names, and the celebration of colonisation with colonial statues and monuments.” Now personally, I am unsure as to why these things are categorised as racism.

Take mispronunciation of Māori names. Is this really racism? Are people being discriminated against because of their ethnicity, or is it simply a case of not being used to a certain way of pronouncing vowels. I can’t accurately pronounce French words, but I certainly bear no ill will against the French. Having taught children in a South Auckland context, I have found many of them pronouncing English words incorrectly, but I never assumed this was a result of malice against the English; more just a semi dialect.

Is the celebration of colonisation with colonial statues and monuments racism? Of course not! It’s part of our history, and while there were great evils conducted by some colonists, by and large, the history of colonisation has been a good thing for everybody in New Zealand. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed by so many Maori rangatira precisely because they saw the benefits of a colonial government that protected their rights and interests from other potentially aggressive tribes.

Later on in the article it is claimed, “when shopping or seeking services, 89 per cent of Māori said they were less likely to receive assistance because they were Māori, and most had been followed, watched or asked to open their bags in a shop.” But how do people know that they received less assistance because they were Maori? How do they know they are having their bags searched because they are Maori. And for that matter, how do they know they are less likely to receive assistance? Where is the hard data that demonstrates this is actually the case? These seem to be assumptions.

Living life with a chip on your shoulder can certainly colour your perception of what happens around you. I’ve had my bags searched when exiting a shop, and to be honest I did feel a little annoyed. But moving beyond this step to assuming evil motivations from the store is not helpful. I just don’t know why they chose me and the group I was with, but I am not going to develop a victim complex. And I guess that is my concern with this ‘research’. What counts for research these days seem woefully inadequate. Perhaps even in this criticism, I will be charged with racism for the invalidation of Māori knowledge. But with no objective standards of racism and the assumption that entirely innocent behaviour is racism, we make sin what is not sin, and we turn healthy and strong people into victims. Assuming racism at every turn is not going to help. It will create bitterness and resentment, and that can eat a person up on the inside.

Government and Incompetence

It was recently revealed that the government (or should I say we the taxpayer) forked out $50 million on a Maori Trades and Training Fund which since June 2020 has had the effect of providing 4 jobs. That works out at 12.5 million dollars per job. Admittedly, only $11.4m has been committed to approved projects and just $1.8m has been paid out. Nonetheless, this excels even the usual incompetence we see from the state.

National’s answer is to do a better job of spending the money. Well, I guess that’s a step in the right direction. Achieving some good that is not your responsibility while wasting less of someone else’s money is better than wasting that money and achieving next to nothing. But why should we settle for this?

When will we as a people stop worshipping this false idol of state? It cannot do what it promises to do. It cannot save us. It is given to us by God not so that it can create jobs, or educate our children. It is given to us by God to protect us from the evildoer and punish him. How many times do we have to see a government step outside its God-given role and make a complete cock-up of things before we throw down our idol and advocate for limited government? I can guarantee that an entrepreneur with $50 million could have provided a lot more than 4 jobs.

Bring Back the Doctrine of Vocation

In a recent sermon I heard, the congregation was encouraged to be at a second Sunday meeting (in the evening) as well as the morning service. They were encouraged to attend other weekly meetings of the church, and it was insinuated that it was Satan’s temptation that was causing people to stay at home. There was even that old chestnut, that we need to be careful we are not turning spending time with family into an idol. This was a fairly egregious example of what I have noticed is a serious temptation for many pastors – that of thinking that the church organisation and meetings they run are the most important thing in the lives of every member of the church, and that to miss one indicates a lack of seriousness about one’s faith.

This brow-beating approach to shepherding in order to get the flock to come to more church meetings is unfortunate. As one who has been a Christian for decades, I shrugged it off. I’m not about to be guilt-tripped into attending something because a pastor insinuates it is a sin to not attend. I know the Scriptures. It is dangerous for leaders in the church to put burdens on those they lead that Christ himself does not require. Young Christians however may be fooled by zeal into thinking this is indeed a requirement. The pressure this may put on them when they have a spouse or children and work may indeed cause unhelpful and illegitimate feelings of guilt.

Additionally, I’ve noticed and mentioned in a previous post, the tendency of many pastors to use the Sunday morning service as the opportunity to be evangelists. Instead of feeding God’s beloved sheep and assisting them to apply the gospel to their daily lives, some pastors focus on the gospel message of salvation every week as if their congregations are hardened heathens hovering over the fires of hell.

All this makes me think that our modern clergy need a reawakened understanding of vocation. A book helpful in this area is God at work by Gene Edward Veith Jr. Veith writes, “Churches should not demand so much “church work” from their members that it takes away too much time from their primary vocations.” We the laity are also called. God calls us to our vocations, be they son or daughter, husband or wife, doctor, teacher, labourer, retail assistant, nurse, or homemaker. Yes, pastor, God calls you as our shepherd, but don’t forget that he calls us to our vocations too. It’s easy for pastors to see the good things they are doing (and the vocation of pastor is a good and holy calling!) and expect everyone to turn institutional church-related things into the most important thing in their lives too. But it might be that in attending every church event, I may neglect my God-given calling as a husband or a father. Indeed, it might be that a pastor who fills his time with church events could well be neglecting his God-given calling to be a husband and father too.

Veith puts things this way, “We may assume that what happens on Sunday mornings is not enough, as if coming into Christ’s presence through the proclamation of His Word is a small thing, and as if the daily lives of ordinary Christians are not themselves arenas for divine service.” Pastors need to see their role as shepherds as Paul explained in Ephesians. Pastors are to equip the saints for works of ministry. Unfortunately, because we do not have a solid understanding of the doctrine of vocation, we miss that those works of ministry will often occur outside the institutional church meetings. The sum total of my ministry is not handing out the order of service at church, manning the kitchen, playing in the church band or being part of a welcoming team. These are good things, but my core ministries are being a father and a husband, and whatever God calls me to as I earn money to provide for my family. Paul writes earlier in the epistle of Ephesians, that we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. On a Sunday morning, what we need to see from our pastors is an acknowledgement of the good works God has called us to do in our vocations, and then the opening of the Scriptures to help us in that regard as we are reminded of Christ’s kingship and authority. As Paul writes to the young pastor Timothy, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Preach that word so that your congregation may be ready for every good work during the week.

Sounds Familiar

At this day, however, the earth sustains on her bosom many monster minds – minds which are not afraid to employ the seed of Deity deposited in human nature as a means of suppressing the name of God. Can anything be more detestable than this madness in man, who, finding God a hundred times both in his body and his soul, makes his excellence in this respect a pretext for denying that there is a God? He will not say that chance has made him differ from the brutes that perish; but, substituting nature as the architect of the universe, he suppresses the name of God.

John Calvin – Institutes of Christian Religion 1.5.4

We should not give god-like powers to the State

In Defending Marriage, Anthony Esolen lays out 12 arguments defending marriage. The final argument is that we should not give god-like powers to the State. A great quote from this chapter follows.

‘What the State essentially does, when it requires us to be parties to the lie that a man can marry a man, is to deny the anterior reality of marriage itself. It says, “Marriage is what we say it shall be,” and that implies, “Families are what we say they are,” and that implies, “There are no zones of natural authority outside the supervision and regulation and management of the State.” We’ve given up on the foolish notion of the Divine Right of Kings, dreamed up by totalizing monarchs of the late Renaissance. Now we have the Divine Right of Bureaucratic States. The old kings used to make common cause with smaller zones of authority, guilds and towns, for example, in order to check the ambitions of the noblemen. The new kings have obliterated those smaller zones of authority in principle, and seek to do so in reality also. That is in large part what public schools are now for; the education of children against the authority and direction of their own parents.’

Moral Confusion

One of the great marks of our time is our moral confusion and schizophrenia about the most basic issues of life. For all our technological prowess, we are moral babes.

A classic case is the issue of unborn babies. Are they human beings with all the dignity and rights that come with that, or are they just a bunch of cells that can be removed at will? The answer is…it depends.

Last year, one of the hosts of Breakfast, Hayley Holt, suffered from a miscarriage during one of the lockdowns. Quite rightly, Holt was devastated, and suffered greatly especially with the lack of support due to the lockdown. It was absolutely wonderful to see her co-hosts grieving with her and offering her words of hope and support.

What makes this incident so striking, is that a few months earlier, Holt interviewed Dr Alison Knowles, euphemistically termed ‘abortion practitioner’ (rather than cold-blooded baby killer) about the abortion law reform. In this interview Holt says in passing, “whilst it is a women’s right,” suggesting she herself might be pro-abortion. In the same segment, her colleague John Campbell, although congenial, does grill the pro-life interviewee in a way that slants the whole piece as supporting the law change.

An implication of this double-minded approach is that the value and worth of a human being (in this case an unborn one) is based on something extrinsic. An unborn child has rights and value to the extent his mother wishes him to live or not. But surely this is a reprehensible moral system. We know that in 2020 a four-week-old baby, Maree Kiwana-Makanihi Takuira-Mita Ngahere died as the result of a brain injury. She had been beaten multiple times by her father Jahcey Te Koha Aroha o te Raki Ngahere. Clearly, despite having Aroha in his name, Jahcey did not value his poor daughter. But in this case, we say that what he has committed is murder. Maree’s value is not based on whether her father or mother values her…at least it isn’t after she is born.

Scandalous Waste?

In a recent post, we considered the importance of long term thinking in Christian life. I hinted at the importance of long term thinking with regards to family, as I have done previously in a post entitled Your Most Valuable Ministry.

Recently my wife and I have been reading a book called The Disciplines of a Godly Family by Kent and Barbara Hughes. There is a lot of gold in this book, but we were particularly struck by a couple of quotes in the introduction, which I will reproduce here.

We must not succumb to the deceptive mathematics of worldly thinking that considers the pouring out of one’s life on a hidden few as a scandalous waste of one’s potential.

And a little earlier in the introduction.

Society applauds the person who designs a building more than it does the one who attends to the architecture of a child’s soul. Our culture values a face that is known to the public far more than it does a countenance reflected in a child’s eyes. The world sets a higher priority on attaining a degree than on educating a life. It values the ability to give things more than it does giving oneself. This approach to self-worth has been relentlessly sown by modern culture and has taken root in many Christian hearts, so that there is no room for another self – even if it is one’s own child.