KEY POINTS:
Parliament's prayer is now unlikely to be removed, or de-Christianised. The Prime Minister has seen to that with an emphatic distancing of herself and her Government from the Speaker's survey of MPs on both possibilities. In the tradition of Pontius Pilate, she has washed her hands of this
matter. National's John Key also sees no reason for change so the chances of a crusade against the prayer are over, for now.
It was a half-hearted effort from the start. Emerging from the afterglow of the conference on tolerance at Waitangi, it almost seemed to be designed to goad Christian fundamentalists who had protested at that gathering over the failure to declare a state religion. There was some deeply felt response, but even the Catholic Church's leader, Archbishop John Dew, was relaxed about broadening the prayer beyond its use of Jesus Christ as the channel to Almighty God. Many of the MPs who spoke publicly seemed to favour retention of a prayer but wanted it unhitched from its Christian heritage, something achievable by removing its second-to-last phrase, "through Jesus Christ our Lord". The prayer would still be a prayer but those of non-Christian belief would presumably be comfortable with it beginning the business of the House. Except, of course, those whose religion does not bow before one "Almighty God" and those who have no religious belief whatsoever.
Before these permutations could be put to the test, the country's political leadership has declared the matter to have no priority. Helen Clark has better things to do than be drawn into the God debate; John Key shows his familiarity with the Judaeo-Christian paradigm by defending the prayer as having been around since Adam was a cowboy. In short, it was a debate that Helen Clark and Labour did not need, and John Key and National ought not to have had. The issue of Christianity's place in New Zealand, which was highlighted at Waitangi and exploited by one church group, is not as fragile as many would like to think. More than 2 million of the 3.6 million people surveyed for the 2006 Census nominated Christian as their religion, at 55 per cent down five percentage points in five years. A further million-plus professed no belief and the rest came from across the spectrum of organised or personal faith.
Pentecostal Christians, who together numbered 92,000, probably have a louder voice and obtain more publicity than their numbers would warrant. It is some of them who see the draft national statement of religious diversity as a Trojan horse in which other faiths can infiltrate New Zealand's social fabric to the detriment of Christianity. This overstates the case. Immigration might well be attracting more Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists and others to this country, but a sizeable proportion of immigrants will also be Christian.
Christianity is not under threat from other religions as much as from itself. The biggest change in the Census was in those professing no belief, many of whom might well have had a Christian upbringing or at least exposure to the various churches. How the mainstream, niche and Pentecostal Christian churches exhibit their faith and the teachings of their founder in an increasingly secular, as much as pluralistic, society is the greater challenge.
The public backlash that Helen Clark foresaw from a move on the parliamentary prayer is probably not so much a defence of the faith as it is a suspicion of change and resentment of enforced homogeneity. The same could apply to the (religious) national anthem, the name New Zealand, the monarchy and our anachronistic flag. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.