The State of Religion in NZ

The State of Religion in NZ

by Nina Fowler and Joseph Bulbulia,

All Blacks, Apologetics, Superstition and Suicide Bombers

The Death of Religion

“God not dead but religion dying” shouted the pre-Easter headlines, “New Zealanders are becoming less religious, survey shows”. The cause of the furore? A Massey University study which found 40 percent of New Zealanders have no religious affiliation, compared to 29 percent 17 years ago. Just over a third of New Zealanders identify as religious.

Significant statistics, yet the papers neglected to mention the full scope of the survey or, understandably, explore the murky depths of what being ‘religious’ actually means. Professor Philip Gendall, the researcher in charge of the survey, sent Salient a little more detail.

The results of the Massey survey, actually part of an international study conducted every seven years, are complex. Participants were quizzed on God, the Bible, the role of religion in society, morality, and a range of other beliefs. Despite most of the population admitting to some kind of faith, only 35 percent identified as ‘religious’ and 40 percent said they never attended a ‘religious service’.

Head researcher Professor Philip Gendall doesn’t think the survey was necessary to deduce the state of affiliated religion in NZ. “Just by looking at the numbers of people going to church, by measuring people’s behaviour, it seems affiliated religion is playing a lesser role in society. Once upon a time, everyone went to church on Sundays. We would never have been able to have Sunday shopping.”

He emphasises that a decline in affiliated religion does not necessarily mean religion is dying. “Societies change and religion is part of that. People are becoming disaffiliated from traditional organised religion and in that sense the country is becoming less religious, although it does depend on how you measure religiosity.”

Religiosity and Graduation Ritual

How exactly do we measure religiosity? The most typical criteria might include belief, practice, tradition and ritual, but the definition could also be extended to include ways of moving the body like yoga, traditional songs, irrationality, or forms of community building based on absurdities—like organised sport. If we cut the definition too short, we risk missing that which is utterly strange and perplexing in our most commonplace behaviours and superstitions.

Last week’s graduation ceremonies are a case in point. We would have looked utterly nonsensical to a Martian ethnographer, yet to us, the graduation-believers, everything made sense. Consider how the ceremony opened. After we paraded through the central business district in our black gowns, we assembled on stage and sang the New Zealand anthem. With perhaps a thousand people, we stood up, took off our hats (square velvet with tassel set carefully to the right) cleared our throats, and with others, in unison, belched out:

“God of Nations at Thy feet,
In the bonds of love we meet,
Hear our voices, we entreat,
God defend our free land.”

What did these words mean to us? Were we thinking about a “bonded” embrace? Where we speaking up so Zeus would “hear our voices”, put world-making on hold, and come down to defend us from the intruders (who?). Rather curious thought, when one thinks about it. We generally don’t… probably because, while participation is an option, the graduation ceremony is more than the sum of the participants.

Imagine what would happen if a participant actually challenged the university’s continuation of the practice, if a lecturer (graduands are too transient) were to approach the Vice Chancellor and his group of champagne-supping Deans, and ask whether we shouldn’t eliminate these silly references from the graduation, on pain of irrationality? Indeed, the dissenting participant would argue, why not eliminate these stupid gowns, all that marching and music, and the dread repetition of handing out degrees? Why not eliminate the ceremony all together? The Vice Chancellor would probably react with “get more sun and have a holiday”, while a more vicious response would be incurred from eager parents and graduands if the lecturer in question made their views public.

The Suspension of Disbelief

Everyday superstitions can be as irrational as everyday rituals. Marc Wilson, a senior lecturer at the Victoria University School of Psychology, has been doing his own research into the beliefs of the New Zealand population. In 2008, Wilson collected extensive data from more than 6000 New Zealanders. Turns out 24 percent of New Zealanders believe world governments have covered up the existence of UFOs, 50 percent of us believe ESP exists, and 44 percent believe astrology can be used to predict the future.

Wilson’s inclusion of ideas about urban legends raises similar questions about the willingness of New Zealanders to believe in what a rational mind would consider falsehoods—for example, that evil people put razorblades in Halloween apples or that swimming after a meal causes heart-attacks and drowning (43 percent of us!). Every one of us carries certain irrational, unfounded beliefs, simply because we’ve been told something is true by someone else.

The results of the Victoria and Massey University studies indicate that most New Zealanders express some form of paranormal belief, even if only a small percentage of the population profess to being ‘religious’. There is enough demand for horoscopes to warrant daily updating in The Dominion Post. We tell each other our dreams, without identifying why we believe they give us deep insight into the world. Scratching a little deeper, we find that our evidence for belief often rests on the flimsiest grounds.

The same principles apply to what we value most of all: our attitudes to the environment, to the intentions of government, to our admiration for heroes, to our beloved sports teams (according to Wilson’s study, 40 percent of New Zealanders believe that the All Blacks were deliberately poisoned before the ’95 World Cup final). Are we really in touch with our reasons for taking one job over another, for selecting a particular brand of wine, or deciding to spend the rest of our lives with someone?

Researchers who begin looking into these questions find that they can easily manipulate and predict our judgments, irrespective of our reasons. Indeed, researchers find that we are experts at inventing reasons and then believing whole-heartedly in these self-inflicted prevarications. It seems unlikely that these tendencies will be swept away by the steady winds of scientific progress; they will not decline as church numbers do.

Situational factors can affect people’s commitment to their belief. Wilson found that by suggesting to participants that being a little more (or less) inclined to paranormal belief correlates with intelligence, he could get people to express markedly different answers to his questions. Worrying about dying had a similar effect. After reading 40 questions about different ways of dying, participants not only identified as more ‘religious’, but reported greater levels of paranormal belief.

Students, Apologetics and Universal Truth

For Melanie, a 21-year-old Victoria student, her relationship with God is “everything”. She accepts that other members of the community may not share her belief, but isn’t worried that her faith might be seen as irrational.

“How do you know anything is true? This society assumes that if you can’t see it, it’s not real. That’s not really good enough for me. I’ve experienced God and I’ve spoken to others who have, and to me that’s more important. I believe God is a universal truth, and I think that’s different to being a widely held belief. In New Zealand, you might say a widely held belief is not to believe in God, but that doesn’t make it true.”

‘B’, a 23-year-old former student, said Salient’s questions about her particular faith made her feel “slightly silly”.

“There are so many different understandings of religion, and no reason why my particular random understanding of spirituality should be of any interest! Also some things that my religion leads me to do are also done by those who have no religion. For example, I try to be green to care for God’s creation—buy a moon cup for Jesus! But being green is not limited to Christians.

“I have travelled, lived in Buddhist countries, gone through a I-want-to-convert-to-Islam period. I think many people from all over the world, and many traditions have desired to reach enlightenment, commune with God, whatever. I don’t want to say, this is God, that is not, here is true faith, there it isn’t… I find life in Christianity and I am committed to that, but I don’t want that commitment to stop me from recognising and respecting the taonga of others.”

The historical discipline of Apologism is built around the concept of truth and how it relates to religious belief. Trevor Mandar, described as one of New Zealand’s foremost Christian Apologists, runs seminars to help Christians give a clear reason for their faith. He says an understanding of truth is an essential foundation of belief.

“There are a variety of ways for people to think about truth, but only one is undeniable. Truth is what the facts are, truth corresponds to reality. No matter what you believe, this is something people from all religions can agree with… People tend to define truth by their experience and beliefs. Once you recognise that this is not an objective definition of truth, it’s a good place to start for inter-faith discussion.”

Mandar says self-professed atheists fail to acknowledge their own set of subjective beliefs. “Atheists deny an ultimate standard of right and wrong, yet an individual may still follow the belief of their community or peers even if there is no logic in it.”

A Fraught Question of Morality

The concepts of religion and morality are often perceived to go hand-in-hand, whatever way you think the correlation pendulum swings. The most extreme of fundamental Christians may view non-believers as immoral, some non-believers may find the religious community around them intolerant and prejudiced. Images of religious fanatics crashing airplanes or preachers railing against homosexuality may lead us to conclude that religious beliefs cause great moral harm.

Perception and reaction aside, what does the data really tell us about the relationship between religion and morality? Many surveys reveal prejudices, but behavioural data paints an different picture. Going back to the 1970s, researchers have considered how religion and morality interrelate. Though it may surprise us when we think of the Taliban or those pinched-faced preachers, social psychologists have found little support for the proposition that religion matters much to moral behaviour. Action-based correlations actually tend to be positive—Christians, it turns out, give more to charity; fundamentalists cheat less on average, and their social groups last longer.

Being a religious ‘believer’ may affect prejudicial behaviour. Circumstances matter, and groups bound by strong feelings of solidarity often organise development to prop up the group feeling at the expense of scapegoats. If context matters, then rituals should be considered moral technologies: strong melodies, rousing speeches, images of fallen soldiers or lost jobs. Such equipped appears artfully concocted to inflame prejudice and in-group feeling.

Yet, before we come to any confident conclusions about ‘religious belief’ and ‘prejudice’, we need to remember what we are really measuring, and whether this measurement entitles us to the pleasure of generalisation. The dynamics of circumstance and commitment are complex, and inferring to large conclusions comes too easily to almost all of us. Restraint is rare. Yet without intellectual restraint, we are every bit as irrational as those villains with the suicide vests or the cherry-faced sermoniser on the television.

It is almost certain that those lucky enough to be reading Salient, including the authors of this article, have caused vastly more harm than the common or garden-variety suicide bomber. If we were to trace the implications of our ‘innocent’ habits, like buying lunch rather than making our own and giving the difference to charity, could we still throw a stone at that scowling preacher or that hungry clueless fanatic in a beard? Evil, as Arendt put it, is ‘banal’, and we may participate in crimes dramatically inconsistent with the moral pictures we carry for ourselves. And what of our moral technologies? Think of how carefully we have organised our circumstances to keep avoidable disease, starvation, injustice, torture, and death far out of view.

On the other side, consider those old religions whose numbers are flagging; how easily we forget the vast matrix of charities stretching around the globe populated with hard-working ‘believers’—all those shoulders set to the wheel, for Jesus, or Mohammed, or Krishna, or Yahweh. How does the good they are doing weigh into up against the monstrous remarks uttered by religious bigots, or the patriarchy of enforced sheet wearing, or by preferential hiring? We simply don’t know. We can’t weigh everything up. That question is rather too large, though asking smaller questions might help us to make better progress…

The Future of ‘Spirituality’?

Leaving morality to the side, if our religions are indeed slowly fading, is this good for anyone? Many of our fellow unbelievers may rejoice at the thought of empty churches. Yet do we really want a world in which we gradually grow more alike each other in our secular beliefs and practices? In such a world, when would our lust for the steady march of progress end—would we feel a similar delight when astrology was stricken from the daily paper, when our anthems were updated to reflected modern sensibilities, when our children began deriding McCahon’s art, when ANZAC day fades into oblivion? Would the sun really shine brighter on such a world, or would it lose something?

While some traditional religions appear to be shedding numbers and other ’spiritualisms’ appear to be growing, genuine progress begins with honesty. We simply do not know the relationship between these facts and our larger moral and intellectual circumstances. Indeed, almost nothing is known about the causes and effects of religion. It would be irrational to think otherwise.

http://www.salient.org.nz/features/the-state-of-religion-in-nz

This story was syndicated by the Aotearoa Student Press Association via Salient www.salient.org.nz

ENDS

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