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Why More Māori Are Rejecting Christianity · Abide Meditation App

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  Speaker 1: Over the past couple of decades, something big has been
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  Speaker 1: happening in New Zealand's religious landscape, especially among the Maori people,
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  Speaker 1: the indigenous people who since the early thirteen hundreds have
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  Speaker 1: lived on the islands of Alteroa now called New Zealand.
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  Speaker 1: In two thousand and six, about thirty seven percent of
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  Speaker 1: Maori identified as having no religion. By twenty eighteen, that
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  Speaker 1: number had jumped to about fifty four percent. At the
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  Speaker 1: same time, Maori affiliation with Christianity dropped from forty six
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  Speaker 1: percent to under thirty percent. In other words, as Christianity declined,
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  Speaker 1: non religion rose at almost the same rate. Now, when
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  Speaker 1: people think about atheism, they often picture vocal secular movements
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  Speaker 1: in the West, thank Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, the
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  Speaker 1: so called New Atheists, But this frames atheism as a
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  Speaker 1: predominantly white and predominantly European and American phenomenon. However, around
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  Speaker 1: the world, indigenous peoples are increasingly identifying as non religious,
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  Speaker 1: often at higher rates than the general population. In New Zealand, Australia, Canada,
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  Speaker 1: census data shows a clear trend. More and more Indigenous
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  Speaker 1: people are stepping away away from organized religion. But this
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  Speaker 1: phenomenon is woefully understudied. Sociologists by and large have not
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  Speaker 1: been paying enough attention. So a team of researchers at
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  Speaker 1: Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand set out to understand
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  Speaker 1: non religion within Malori communities. What they found was that
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  Speaker 1: for many maoriatheism is often tied to colonial resistance rather
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  Speaker 1: than just personal disbelief, as in for many Maori atheists,
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  Speaker 1: rejecting religion and particularly rejecting Christianity, is not just about
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  Speaker 1: intellectual skepticism or the lack of belief, but a politically
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  Speaker 1: motivated position pushing back against colonial oppression and asserting Maori identity.
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  Speaker 1: Pre colonial Malori culture was rooted in a polytheistic worldview
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  Speaker 1: that saw the divine, human, and natural worlds as inseparably linked.
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  Speaker 1: While their culturally distinct, the Malori people shared traditions with
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  Speaker 1: other Pacific islander groups who trace their ancestry to a
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  Speaker 1: pantheon of around seventy gods known as ottawa. But these
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  Speaker 1: Ottawa are not distant abstract gods. They are kin All
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  Speaker 1: Ottawa are siblings who descend from the primordial parents wrang
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  Speaker 1: and new U and Papatauanaku, who gave birth to a
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  Speaker 1: range of deities governing different aspects, like Tongaroa, who governs
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  Speaker 1: the ocean in all marine life, and Rongo, the Ottawa
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  Speaker 1: of peace and cultivated food. Humans are genealogically and biologically
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  Speaker 1: connected to these primordial parents because they descend from the Ottawa.
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  Speaker 1: In other words, humans are not separate from the natural
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  Speaker 1: or supernatural worlds. They're fully integrated into an interconnected system
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  Speaker 1: where those distinctions don't really exist. And the Malori people
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  Speaker 1: built tribal societies consistent with this worldview, which is referred
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  Speaker 1: to as Teo Maori, a holistic way of understanding the
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  Speaker 1: world that emphasizes key aspects such as faka papa or genealogy.
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  Speaker 1: Everything is connected through ancestry, from humans to ottawa, to animals,
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  Speaker 1: and to the natural world, and this worldview was the
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  Speaker 1: backbone of the Malori way of life until European contact.
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  Speaker 1: In seventeen sixty nine and seventeen seventy, the British captain
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  Speaker 1: James Cook sailed around New Zealand, made contact with the
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  Speaker 1: Malori people and recommended to the King of Britain that
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  Speaker 1: the islands were ripe for colonization. Like most eighteenth century
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  Speaker 1: European exploration, the gold was resource extraction and settlement. After
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  Speaker 1: Cook's voyages, the British New Zealand companies set up some
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  Speaker 1: questionable trade deals with the Maori, and relations quickly devolved
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  Speaker 1: into violence. The British introduced firearms and foreign diseases, fueling
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  Speaker 1: conflicts both against and among the Maori. In eighteen forty,
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  Speaker 1: the British officially took control of New Zealand as a
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  Speaker 1: dependency with the signing of the Treaty of Whitongy. On paper,
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  Speaker 1: this treaty was supposed to guarantee Maori control over their
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  Speaker 1: own lands and societies, but in practice it became one
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  Speaker 1: of the most contested documents in New Zealand's history, and
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  Speaker 1: it still is. For over a century. Maori have argued
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  Speaker 1: that the British Crown and colonial governments never honored the treaty,
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  Speaker 1: and certainly today Maori are not in control of their
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  Speaker 1: lands and instead come under the administrative rule of the
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  Speaker 1: New Zealand government and the Crown. For the first generation
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  Speaker 1: of Maori who lived under British rule, conversion to Christianity
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  Speaker 1: was a significant part of colonization. Christian missionaries started arriving
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  Speaker 1: on the islands in the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds
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  Speaker 1: and worked to convert the Maori people to Christianity. Missionary
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  Speaker 1: reports claimed that by the AID eighteen fifties, between sixty
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  Speaker 1: and ninety percent of Maori identified as Christian, though historians
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  Speaker 1: doubt these statistics. Regardless, the colonial government systematically worked to
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  Speaker 1: erase Maori traditions, language and identity, including Taya Maori their
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  Speaker 1: polytheistic worldview. On top of that, there was also tremendous
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  Speaker 1: loss of life among the Maori people from disease in war,
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  Speaker 1: and some indigenous leaders feared that their people were facing extinction. Then,
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  Speaker 1: in nineteen forty seven, New Zealand gained statutory and dependence
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  Speaker 1: from Britain, meaning that it returned to self rule while
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  Speaker 1: still recognizing the British Crown as the head of state,
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  Speaker 1: but tensions between Maori and the government remained high. By
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  Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, Maori political leaders were leading protests against
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  Speaker 1: the British and advocating for recognition of their rights. Then,
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  Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five, this activism led to the establishment
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  Speaker 1: of the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which helped to fuel
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  Speaker 1: a Maori led cultural renaissance. As New Zealand increasingly embraced
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  Speaker 1: a bicultural national identity, Maori and White now relations were
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  Speaker 1: still fraught. In nineteen ninety, Queen Elizabeth Second visited the
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  Speaker 1: Ice Islands and a protester literally threw a wet t
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  Speaker 1: shirt in her face, but she seemed remarkably unconcerned about
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  Speaker 1: you all anyway. The girl was quickly caught by onlookers
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  Speaker 1: and handed over to the beliefe, who dealt with her
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  Speaker 1: most unceremoniously. But a big part of the Malori cultural
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  Speaker 1: renaissance was about honoring and preserving tel Maori. After conversion
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  Speaker 1: to Christianity and generations of living in a Christian society,
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  Speaker 1: many had to relearn ancestral traditions. Language revival was a
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  Speaker 1: key part of this. The Malori language Tehreu Mari, had
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  Speaker 1: been nearly wiped out after the British effectively banned its use,
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  Speaker 1: but during the renaissance there was a major push to
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  Speaker 1: bring it back through education and activism. This long history
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  Speaker 1: of colonization and conversion left many Maori people in a
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  Speaker 1: state of deep tension when it came to religion. Christianity
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  Speaker 1: had become a big part of many Malori communities, but
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  Speaker 1: it also came hand in hand with land loss, cultural erasure,
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  Speaker 1: and pressure to abandon traditional beliefs. So what does it
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  Speaker 1: mean for Malori to identify as atheist? Is this shift
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  Speaker 1: just about personal belief or is there something bigger going on?
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  Speaker 1: That's exactly what researchers at Victoria University wanted to explore,
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  Speaker 1: and they found that today for sam Maori, leaving Christianity
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  Speaker 1: is not just about believing in God. It's about rejecting
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  Speaker 1: something that was imposed on their ancestors. It's a way
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  Speaker 1: of reclaiming identity. Now, as we talk about in our
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  Speaker 1: intro to atheism video, atheism is more complex than we
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  Speaker 1: might assume. Strictly defined, we can think of atheism as
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  Speaker 1: the absence of belief in a God or God's but
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  Speaker 1: it's also useful to think of atheism as a spectrum
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  Speaker 1: of intensity in non belief or absence. One classic distinction
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  Speaker 1: is between what scholars refer to as negative or weak
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  Speaker 1: atheism versus positive or strong atheism. Positive atheism cannotes strong
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  Speaker 1: conviction the belief that there is no God. Negative atheism,
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  Speaker 1: on the other hand, emphasizes the absence of belief, which
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  Speaker 1: can include people who simply don't think about religious questions
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  Speaker 1: or those who consider the existence of God unknowable, which
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  Speaker 1: often overlaps with agnosticism. But despite these differences, both groups
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  Speaker 1: share commonalities. For example, both perspectives tend to reject personal
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  Speaker 1: experience or revelation as valid ways of knowing when it
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  Speaker 1: comes to metaphysical claims. Another form of atheism is dubbed
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  Speaker 1: uncertain unbelief. This is when someone rejects theism but has
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  Speaker 1: ambivalent views about other supernatural phenomena. Unlike a strict materialist atheist,
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  Speaker 1: they may still entertain concepts like spirits, fate, karma, or
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  Speaker 1: embodied mystical experiences their unbelievers in a traditional theistic sense,
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  Speaker 1: but they experience openness towards supernatural elements outside of a
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  Speaker 1: theistic framework. We see this complexity in mariatheism as well.
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  Speaker 1: The scholars in this study interviewed some maoratheists ranging in
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  Speaker 1: age from thirty to sixty years old, and they found
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  Speaker 1: that each of these atheistic categories were represented. Many of
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  Speaker 1: the mariatheists were positive or hard atheists who rejected religion
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  Speaker 1: on the grounds of intellectual doubt. They did not believe
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  Speaker 1: in the existence of God or the supernatural. However, as
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  Speaker 1: they conducted their study, the scholars found that the maoratheists
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  Speaker 1: did not only object to God, they also expressed moral
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  Speaker 1: critiques of Christianity, rejecting it as what they called a
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  Speaker 1: colonizer's religion. For example, consider this interview with one Malori
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  Speaker 1: woman in fifties who said that Christianity was the tool
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  Speaker 1: of decimation of her culture. She added that it was
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  Speaker 1: difficult for her to accept that many of her family
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  Speaker 1: and friends were still Christian. When I see my own
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  Speaker 1: family bowing down to that tool, I just want to
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  Speaker 1: run and shake everybody. What are you doing? What are
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  Speaker 1: you doing? Another woman in the study also considers the
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  Speaker 1: colonial history of missionaries. I've only become very angry against
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  Speaker 1: religion over the last five years after I found out
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  Speaker 1: what they've done to my culture. We've lost a lot
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  Speaker 1: of our culture from the Anglican missionary societies. She actually
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  Speaker 1: concluded that she was unsure that Maori identity and Christian
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  Speaker 1: belief could even coexist because of this history, which she
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  Speaker 1: believes prevented the tail Maori worldview from continuing over generations.
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  Speaker 1: According to this reasoning, Christian beliefs are irrelevant to the
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  Speaker 1: Maori people because Christianity is not indigenous to the land.
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  Speaker 1: One man in the study recalls watching the writer Joseph Campbell,
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  Speaker 1: who's famous for writing about world mythologies. The man said,
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  Speaker 1: the big takeaway I took from him was that every
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  Speaker 1: culture has these creation myths, and all of a sudden,
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  Speaker 1: I went, whoe is this Bible thing? Is this just
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  Speaker 1: the creation story from the Middle East? And so it
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  Speaker 1: was about then that I went, all right, I can't
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  Speaker 1: buy this Christian stuff because that doesn't belong to me.
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  Speaker 1: It's not of my people. So this maoriatheist uses the
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  Speaker 1: concept of indigeneity to push back against Christianity by framing
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  Speaker 1: it as a foreign religion that does not belong to
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  Speaker 1: his people. Since it came from the Middle East, he argues,
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  Speaker 1: it has no real connection to Maori tradition. These opinions
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  Speaker 1: are not unique to mariatheists. Atheism has often been tied
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  Speaker 1: to political resistance to colonialism, especially in places where Christianity
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  Speaker 1: and Islam were introduced through colonization. In parts of Southern Africa,
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  Speaker 1: for example, people have rejected Christianity and Islam as part
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  Speaker 1: of pushing back against colonial influence. According to the scholar
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  Speaker 1: Leo Igue, atheism provides Africans who are dissatisfied with Islam
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  Speaker 1: and Christianity with alternative meanings cosmology and morality. We've also
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  Speaker 1: seen atheism employed as a political tool during revolutions for independence,
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  Speaker 1: such as in Angola during the nineteen seventies. Also noticed
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  Speaker 1: from these interviews that mariatheism reflects a strong moral critique religion. Now,
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  Speaker 1: not all atheists share this experience. A lot of atheists
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  Speaker 1: are simply indifferent or even have positive attitudes toward religion,
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  Speaker 1: but studies on non religion have found that many atheists
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  Speaker 1: do anchor their atheistic identity in moral judgments of the
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  Speaker 1: perceived immorality of religion, seeing religion as oppressive, hypocritical, or
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  Speaker 1: socially harmful. This was the major theme in Christopher Hitchin's
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  Speaker 1: bestseller God Is Not Great, and it's a pattern we
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  Speaker 1: see across many different atheistic people. So in many ways,
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  Speaker 1: maloraatheism offers moral criticism, similar to how other atheists see
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  Speaker 1: religious institutions and religious people as hypocritical and perpetrators of prejudice.
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  Speaker 1: The researchers also found that Maura atheists were confronting stereotypes
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  Speaker 1: about what it meant to be truly Maori. See, there's
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  Speaker 1: a common stereotype that being indigenous and being spiritual go
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  Speaker 1: hand in hand, as if spirituality or mysticism is a core,
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  Speaker 1: inherent part of authentic Indigenous identity. And in the study,
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  Speaker 1: those that were interviewed reported that they've been questioned by
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  Speaker 1: other Malori people about their own authentic identity because they
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  Speaker 1: were atheists. They felt discriminated against for being neither religious
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  Speaker 1: enough nor Maori enough. One Maori man in the study said,
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  Speaker 1: so to be Mauri, you need to speak to Reo,
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  Speaker 1: do this, this be spiritual? Do karakia, which are Maori prayers.
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  Speaker 1: So you have these very strict categories or performances. He
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  Speaker 1: voices frustration over what he perceived are cultural expectations that
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  Speaker 1: are placed on him about what it means to be
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  Speaker 1: Maori in a post colonial world, what prayers to say,
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  Speaker 1: how to speak to deities, even which language to use.
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  Speaker 1: He felt that these cultural markers were treated as mandatory performances,
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  Speaker 1: as if conforming to them was the only way to
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  Speaker 1: prove his Maori identity. He goes on to say, so
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  Speaker 1: to perform to demonstrate your true adherents of being Maori,
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  Speaker 1: you must be able to do these things and behave
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  Speaker 1: in these ways. So Mari who identified as atheists often
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  Speaker 1: felt ostracized for acting outside of these expectations, feeling that
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  Speaker 1: they're being viewed as somehow less Maori, or that their
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  Speaker 1: rejection of religion is just another form of colonial influence.
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  Speaker 1: But the researcher's findings pushed back against this idea, showing
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  Speaker 1: that non belief can be just as much a part
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  Speaker 1: of Indigenous identity as belief, and that atheism itself can
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  Speaker 1: be a way of reclaiming that identity. The sociologist Jonathan
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  Speaker 1: Simmons had similar findings in his research on Indigenous atheism
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  Speaker 1: in Canada. Some participants in his study expressed that openly
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  Speaker 1: questioning Indigenous ceremonies led to more resistance from their own
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  Speaker 1: community than simply identifying as atheists. This created a dilemma
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  Speaker 1: for many. They were trying to balance their personal honesty
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  Speaker 1: that they simply don't believe in these ceremonies with wanting
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  Speaker 1: to maintain strong ties to their communities. Several people in
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  Speaker 1: the study describe feeling trapped between their non belief and
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  Speaker 1: their responsibility to indigenous solidarity, fearing that rejecting traditional spirituality
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  Speaker 1: might be seen as a betrayal of their own culture.
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  Speaker 1: As the Victoria University researchers conclude, mariatheism is a complex
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  Speaker 1: and politically charged response to a history of colonization and
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  Speaker 1: cultural revitalization, making it somewhat distinct from the narratives of
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  Speaker 1: increasing secularism that are commonly applied to atheism in Europe
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  Speaker 1: and North America. However, despite this unique historical and political context,
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  Speaker 1: the research sure is also found that Mari atheists articulated
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  Speaker 1: their doubt and moral critiques of religion in ways that
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  Speaker 1: are strikingly similar to atheists elsewhere. The vast majority of
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  Speaker 1: the participants expressed familiar concerns about religions perceived in consistencies,
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  Speaker 1: perceived hypocrisy, and social harms, which echoes patterns scene in
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  Speaker 1: studies of atheism worldwide. But the study opens the door
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  Speaker 1: to understanding how atheism manifests in non European and non
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  Speaker 1: white contexts, where atheism itself can be a decolonizing project.
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  Speaker 1: So this was episode four in an ongoing series about
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: atheism and non religion. If you want to catch up
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: on the whole series. You can find a link to
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: the playlist in the description below. We have what is atheism,
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: why do people become atheists? And is Buddhism and atheistic religion.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: If you found this episode on mari Atheism fascinating, we
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: have an exciting opportunity for you. We're hosting an exclusive
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: online lecture with doctor Sarah Rahmani, one of the scholars
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: behind the very research we discussed in this episode. She
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: actually helped us make this video, but there's only so
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: much we can cover in thirty minutes, so doctor Rahmani
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: will dive deeper into the study, breaking down all of
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: her findings not only in this study, but in her
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: upcoming co authored book, Maria Atheism as a Decolonizing Project.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: The lecture will be hosted live on Zoom on Thursday,
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: March twenty seventh, at three o'clock pm US Eastern Time,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: the best time we could find to line up the
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: New Zealand time zone with the US time zone. I'll
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: be there moderating the Q and A session after doctor
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Rothmanni's lecture, so you can bring your own questions to
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: the discussion. Registration costs whatever you want starting at one dollar,
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: and if you can't make it live, don't worry about it.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: We'll be sending out recording to everyone who registers. To
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: sign up, click the link pin in the comments below,
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: and I hope to see you there.