Real Life: ‘Secular priest’ Niki Harre wants NZ to adopt religion’s best bits

Niki Harre, who heads up the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology, launched herself into Christianity during a sabbatical to explore what’s lost when religion fades away – and has since produced a book recounting her experience.

An atheist academic who lived as a “secular priest” for a year says non-believers in New Zealand can learn a thing or two from those who have a faith.

Niki Harre, who heads up the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology, launched herself into Christianity during a sabbatical to explore what’s lost when religion fades away – and has since produced a book recounting her experience, titled The Calling.

Her experiment consisted of immersing herself in the life of a Christian – including reading the Bible and attending church – all while trying to live the life of a priest by embracing three “vows” of simplicity, hospitality and prayer, and running her own services and rituals.

In an interview with Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night, Harre said she had always been interested in questions about how we live well together, and about a decade earlier had started to apply a religious philosophy lens to those questions.

“Over time, I got this idea that I really was a priest, even though I’m a university lecturer and an atheist,” she explained.

“Part of that was I wanted to have conversations with people about what really matters, and I wanted to have open-ended conversations. One of the things that is really interesting about religious provocations is that quite often the questions aren’t answered – they’re just asked.”

Harre explained that a religious provocation involves making a suggestion and working around a topic, but never closing it off or giving a final answer – something that’s at odds with how society normally operates.

“In the secular world, we’ve become keen on declaring what the solution is to a particular problem. I wanted something more open-ended, something in which humility, service, contribution, duty [and] those kinds of ideas seem to be floating around,” she told Real Life.

“When I was growing up, if you were Christian, you believed in these stories, the stories that we know; if you were not Christian, you didn’t believe – and that was a divider: belief or not belief.

“A lot of atheists still think that religion hinges on these sorts of intellectual propositions … I think the intellectual propositions are there, but what interested me was the focus outwards …

“What religion does – Christianity, in my experience – is it’s always pushing people to go further beyond, further beyond, further beyond. And the stories, the narrative, the dogma is sitting there, but that’s not the essence of a religious orientation.”

While conceding that her experiment had a “fatal flaw”, in that while embracing Christianity and priesthood, she never actually believed in God, Harre realised there’s plenty that can be gleaned from religious communities that would benefit wider society.

“Part of it is community, so there’s this constant gathering; a lot of it is humility and awareness of the unknown, [which] were really in the atmosphere,” Harre told Cowan.

“People often talked about those in their families who are sick or dying or facing major life challenges, and what blew me away was that it would always be said with a gratitude towards nurses, doctors, and the people involved.

“The hope would be for the person concerned to have courage to find their way, so there was some kind of gentleness, but also a facing up to the fact that life is unknown, that bad things happen to good people, and that we will never get our heads around this.

“There’s a collective bearing witness to this thing we call life.”

She also said Christianity had an “x-factor” that was hard to come by in other communities.

“If you have a concept of God or the divine, there’s always something bigger than this material reality, even than the people that you love right here and now,” Harre reflected.

“There’s always that thing beyond that. You’re accountable to the story, to this entity, to being a good person, over and above what it does immediately for yourself or those around you. And I think that adds a certain quality to these communities into interactions.”

• Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.