To pray or not to pray has once again become a question.
Not to pray and to be punished for it was once a favoured resolution of this question; perhaps it is making a comeback?
"Telling people what to pray is always delicate business and those who care are struggling" (Francis Noordanus, ODT Letters 4.4.25). Telling people what to pray is not so much a delicate business as an abhorrent one, however authoritative the teller might feel him or herself to be.
"Those who care" - about what? Doctrine? Relevance? The wellbeing/submission of the tellee? Would any of these caring persons be happy to tell or to be told what to think? Perhaps the popular educational aspiration to encourage critical thinking is misguided.
It is also worth remembering that in the Christian world the very existence of Protestantism is owed to those who refused to allow the Roman church to tell them what to pray and what to think, leading to the less than delicate business of religious war and violent sectarianism.
Now, of course, most of the Western world at least has embraced a secular politics, the imperfections and inadequacies of which most of us are aware, but, given our cultural history, it’s the most satisfactory system so far.
However, we are told by our correspondent there is a "local confusion over what a secular government can embrace" and an unwillingness on the part of some to conform to a degree of religious ritual in the business of local government or in the context of work. We have a conflict between "the secular materialist/humanist mode" and "spirituality".
The relation between politics and religion is not straight-forward. Political doctrine can take a religious aspect: the invisible hand of the market, for instance, assumes a divine power, a faith that shapes the lives of mere mortals. And religion can insert itself into the political marketplace, asserting its unarguable, faith-based premises into the political debate.
If you think this is far-fetched or overstated, look at the Christian Nationalist movement in the United States. Or any of the theocracies that dot the globe.
Clearly the infusion of Te Ao Māori into our civic institutions, from education through to local government, is as much political as it is spiritual - it’s making a political point.
However, the opacity of the spiritual makes it an especially comforting and inviolable justification for policies and actions which otherwise might be debatable and legitimately discussed from a variety of perspectives.
I’m not suggesting here that karakia before a meeting is the slippery slope to theocratic dictatorship, but the current controversy does point up some assumptions that need to be explored and elucidated.
"The Treaty of Waitangi was established between a Christian monarchy - one still officially defined in this country as king ‘by the grace of God’ - and a people with an integrated spiritual world view."
The fact that the two parties to a political document signed 200 years ago each had religious beliefs tells us nothing about the reality on the ground in 1840 or the motivation behind the signing.
"Integrated spiritual world view" has all the character of 21st century idealism imposed on a historical event and tells us nothing about the evolution of cultural, social, political and spiritual life in New Zealand and beyond since. It doesn’t really help our present controversy.
One of the particular characteristics of post-Renaissance Western culture is the emergence of the individual as a locus of value (thanks, perhaps, to the aforementioned Protestants). There is a constant tension, philosophically and politically, between the common and the individual good and when they are out of kilter, there’s trouble.
Contemporary symptoms of individualistic imbalance might be seen, on the one hand, in the libertarian right wing of politics and, on the other, the individualised focus of identity politics of the left. Neither seems to see the world as a whole and appear to assume for their acolytes a kind of religious quality.
Religion and religious institutions are not the political forces they once were. While an individual’s religious predilection might influence political choices among other behaviours, it is probably fair to say that it does not have a defining role in an individual’s public life - principally the workplace - that it might have had in the past.
Its associated rituals, usually shared with other like-minded individuals, are really a private matter.
Cults aside, one has a legitimate choice if for some reason these rituals and the values associated with them don’t suit.
So, to pray or not. If the purpose of the ritual is to bond its participants, but some of them feel unable to commit themselves to it, it is likely to be self-defeating.
An imposition causes resentment and brings its own validity into question if the best it can do is force people to go through the motions.
• Harry Love is a sometime honorary fellow in classics at the University of Otago.
