Just Left

The Embarrassment of Arroyo

I cringed over the last week to see Helen Clark welcoming Philippines president Glorya Arroyo to New Zealand for the Interfaith Forum at Waitangi.

Matt McCarten largely canvasses the issues in his column today. I visited the Philippines for a week in 2001 and met with elements of the urban poor organisations who have been struggling to deal with the brutality and authoritarianism of the Philippines regime.

The Philippines is a seriously dysfunctional country. Arroyo's government has chosen to wage war on poor Islamic areas of her country. She invited U.S. forces back only years after they had finally been kicked out for the first time since 1898.

When I went through six years ago, the democratic forces were at a tipping point. The removal of the previous President by people power rallies and protests, including the backing of the Catholic Church, had been followed by hope that Arroyo would be better: would actually take steps to make life better for the poorest in the country and begin to forge a more independent regime - independent, that is, of the Philippines Army and of the US.

It is clear that this has not happened. The forces of democracy are under worse siege than they were then. Arroyo has not become a model democratic leader. She allows the abuses of human rights to continue on her watch. She runs a neoliberal economic policy that does nothing to spread wealth and power away from the intensely conservative, militarised oligarchy that has ruled the Philippines since colonial times. She proclaims that she is in the service of God and attacks those who oppose her as un-Christian.

To have her as an invited guest in this country was embarrassing. To see Helen Clark shaking her hand made me blush. This woman should be persona non grata in New Zealand. I hope she doesn't come again.

Ian Harris worth a read

Ian is the "Honest to God" columnist in the Dom Post (and perhaps elsewhere). His take on Christianity seems to be a thoughtful and interesting one. The latest column (a few snippets below) is worth a read:

New Zealand is still a Christian country by majority, but only just. In this year's census, 53 per cent of the population still considered themselves Christian. But if the biggest single grouping determines our religious character, we are a God-shaped blank. Nearly one in three of us, a total of 1,297,104, ticked the "no religion" box.

That figure has risen by 269,052, or 26 per cent, in the past five years. Any denomination would eat its heart out to net an increase like that. Instead, Catholics nudged up 22,800 to 508,812, Anglicans shed 29,868 to 554,925, and the Presbyterian/Reformed grouping lost 30,102 to 401,445. Methodists were fourth biggest at 122,073, a gain of 1368. Those churches can take some comfort that they account for three in every four of the 2.1 million people who identified themselves as Christian. They will take less from the fact that since 2001 their share of the total population has fallen from 47 to 39 per cent. The trend, evident since the 1920s, continues ever downward.

....

Christians should meanwhile be asking themselves the hard questions about their dwindling numbers. It is the Christian West, after all, that gave birth to the secular society, yet so often the churches see the secular as negative rather than something they can find synergy with. The sooner that changes, the better.

One factor working against the churches might in time turn in their favour. The great majority of the "no religionists" are under 40. They know little about either traditional Christianity or what a Christianity re-imagined for our secular society might be like. If they ever get around to inquiring about that, at least they should be more open than their elders to new ways of thinking about God, without a lot of unlearning to do first.

But the churches seem largely unaware of the opportunities presented by secular society. Also, with new faiths growing strongly around them, they must learn to shed their ingrained attitude of superiority toward other religions, as, too, must the other religions. No religion has a monopoly on truth.

The evolving multi-faith reality also poses a challenge to those who are indifferent or hostile to religion. For the census confirms that even in our secular society, religion has a firm place. Secular tolerance demands that it be respected and safeguarded, not the butt of dismissive sneers.

 

Maxim Destructs

So the Maxim Institute's credibility is finally finished, with the revelation in the Christchurch Press that their main propagandist, Bruce Logan, has apparently been extensively plagiarising work.

I couldn't understand why anyone took them seriously in the first place; as a far right moral conservative think tank, they should always have been treated skeptically. They damaged the anti-Civil Unions campaign immensely through their casual links with fringe groups like Destiny, but this really seals the deal.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, really. Now nobody will take them seriously on anything.

Civil Unions

So the moaners are moaning, the supporters are supporting, and according to the media the Civil Union Bill will be back in the House and passed quite soon.

I am not sure I agree with Colin James that this might prove the high-water mark of social liberalism in New Zealand.  This country, perhaps more than any other, has refused to turn its face away from the bright lights of Enlightenment civilization.  We remain, one might claim, the "City on the Hill" for civilized people everywhere. While Kiwis are sometimes suspicious of the motivations driving social change, they rarely actively oppose it in any numbers - and even more rarely try and wind it back.

This is a good thing.  With countries like the United States beginning to reconnect religion and politics, our little secular oasis could quite possibly become a destination of choice for coming generations of intellectual talent from around the world.  It's an intriguing prospect.  Imagine New Zealand as a sort of refuge for talented people in all walks of life -- a place away from the gale of war, of fundamentalism, of hate and of crisis sweeping the rest of the world -- and be very glad we are so far away from everywhere.

I'm confident that Civil Unions will pass into law, and that in a couple of years nobody will remember what on earth the fuss was about.

The challenge facing liberals (who are both left- and right-wing) is to be much better at explaining the moral reasoning behind our positions.  In the absence of strong moral claims about why what we support is right, we leave all the running on "morality" to the conservatives, and that is not ground any of us should be considering giving up.

As Martin Luther King said, "discrimination anywhere is discrimination everywhere" - and we should be able to celebrate soon enough the end of one aspect of legal discrimination against a minority in our country.  Cheers to that.