Our Country: Our Choice

New Zealand by 2020

Lloyd Geering*

The year 2020 is now less than twenty-five years away. Roughly two-thirds of the people who will be living then are already alive today. Much with which we are already familiar will still be there then, save for any unforeseeable disasters such as major earthquakes, epidemics or war. But there will also be much that is different, simply because cultural and social change is accelerating.

There has been more change in the last 5,000 years (since urbanisation) than in the previous 100,000 years. There has been more change in the last 300 years (since industrialisation) than in the previous 5,000 years. There has been more change in the last 50 years (since computerisation) than in the previous 250 years. This suggests there may be more change in the next 25 years than during the whole of this century. But what sort of change will it be? Even a small and geographically isolated country like New Zealand will more and more reflect the trends beginning to emerge within today's global village.

Accelerating growth in trade, travel, communications, a common technology and a common body of secular and scientific knowledge, make it increasingly difficult for any nation to live an independent life. Each culture will retain some links with its past but these will become ever more tenuous as the emerging global culture extends its influence, for better or for worse.

Before sketching what I would like to see happen, I will set the scene by describing what current trends lead me to expect. For example, I am led to conclude that by the year 2020 New Zealand will be less obviously Christian than it is today. All religion of the traditional kind will be less evident but religion (or spirituality) of a new and more secular kind will be very much alive, and it will continue to reflect much which has been in the great cultural traditions of the past, including Christianity. By 'religion' I mean whatever grasps humans as their 'ultimate concern' (to use a phrase from the theologian Paul Tillich). In the next century it will be increasingly manifested in new forms and will probably not even be called religion. Already the term spirituality is tending to replace it.

If religion is defined in terms of our being grasped by an ultimate concern, then to find what issues will form the agenda of religion in the 21st Century we have only to turn to what have been some of the dominant moral trends inspiring and even unifying New Zealanders during the last two decades of this century. First there was the anti-apartheid movement. Then came the anti-nuclear movement. Along with these there is a whole host of humanitarian aid programmes of a global or supra-national quality, such as Amnesty International and Save the Children Fund. There is the growing awareness of all sorts of environmental issues, which may be called Green Consciousness. Here we begin to see the vague profile of the ethical-spiritual-religious face of New Zealand in the 21st Century. It is reflected in the unconscious re-emergence of some basic religious terms, such as 'salvation' and 'sanctuaries.' The term 'salvation' is today being resurrected with a new relevance and new urgency. The salvation of the earth, and of all forms of life within it, will increasingly become the dominant concern of humankind in the globalising century to come.

Secularisation

In reaction to the erosion of traditional forms of religion caused by secularisation there have appeared some strong pockets of resistance, notably Christian fundamentalism and Maori culturalism. This is a worldwide phenomenon, for religious fundamentalism is as characteristic of the Islamic world as it of the Christian world. There is also a resurgence of indigenous ethnic cultures round the world, all understandably fighting to retain their identity against the great flood of secularisation which threatens to sweep them into an anonymous global future.

By secularisation is meant not only the process which is causing us to see this world as the only reality, no matter what our ethnic or religious tradition has been in the past, but also human autonomy. This emerged chiefly during the European Enlightenment. It provided the foundation for the rapid expansion of empirical science by giving people the confidence to question inherited tradition. The freedom to question tradition has been particularly devastating to all traditional forms of religion and culture.

It means that the organs of religious authority inherited from the past are becoming obsolete. Whether it is the Word of God in the Bible, the voice of the Pope or the voices of the Maori kaumatua, they will more and more fall on deaf ears. The authority of religious leaders and the mana of Maori leaders will carry weight only to the degree that it suits others to appeal to it for their own ends. The ordained priesthood and ministry have already lost most of their former authority. The once clear line between priesthood and laity is already becoming blurred and will soon count for nothing.

Traditional religious festivals and rituals will fade into insignificance unless they can be fully secularised (as has happened with Christmas, which is now a secular family festival). Sunday will become like any other day and the institution of the week will become blurred. The traditional religious institutions will continue to fall into decay. Large church buildings will become less frequently used. Many will become redundant and the best of these will be preserved as historic monuments.

Perhaps all this may be most simply illustrated by taking the case of the Roman Catholic Church. This is not the major Christian denomination in New Zealand, of course, but on the world scene it more than equals all the others put together, in size, momentum and influence. The coming decades will be quite catastrophic for the Roman Catholic Church. Because it is centrally and authoritatively ruled from the Vatican, it has been described as the last great absolutist empire.

Absolutist rule is on a collision course with the secularising process and with human autonomy; this is the reason for the breakdown of absolutist political rule, first in Europe, and more recently in Soviet Russia. Signs of a coming crisis for Catholicism are already appearing (though in different ways) in such places as Holland, Ireland, Latin America and Africa, as well as in New Zealand.

The Catholic Church in New Zealand may find itself in much the same situation as the other so-called mainline churches - all growing smaller in size and becoming further marginalised from the hub of society. They will be little different from the many other religious groups, often referred to as sects. They will all increasingly become part of a vast religious supermarket from which individuals choose or reject what suits them. The traditional ones will find themselves competing with numerous New Age religions, secular ideologies and sporting activities.

Individualism

Closely linked with the current decay of religious institutions is the increasing reluctance of people to commit themselves permanently to anything, be it a church, club, society, political party, or marriage partner. The replacement of the two-party system by MMP is all part of the same process; political alignments will be short-lived. In an age of rapid change, and with our modern understanding of the human condition, we are increasingly aware of how much personal change we often undergo through life. So we must leave ourselves free to change and respond to new circumstances. Taking lifelong vows was once regarded as highly virtuous. Now it may be regarded as precarious and even unethical, in that the person one finds oneself to be today may not have the right to bind the person one will become in the future.

But let us not think that the decline of the traditional religious institutions will automatically open the door to a life of joyful freedom in some coming secular Utopia. The great traditions of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam at their best were long-term civilising forces. They were able to curb personal violence and anti-social behaviour by providing value systems and goals which were sufficiently motivating to bring stability and cohesion to the societies which they permeated. As these traditions recede they leave the more brutal capacities of the human condition (still present beneath the veneer of civilisation) free to re-emerge.

As the traditional socialising forces decline, self-centred individualism is given a freer rein than it ever had even in pre-civilised times. In the political arena this is reflected in current economic policies with their emphasis on impersonal market forces, individual effort, user-pays and shedding of responsibility for the welfare of others. But this is all of a piece with what is occurring at the other end of the social spectrum, where it leads to the plundering of other people's personal property, mindless vandalism of public property, and personal violence stretching to rape, murder and terrorism. Once again this is a worldwide phenomenon from which New Zealand is not excluded and it is one opened up by the decline in the civilising effects of the great religious traditions. Thus social unrest and anti-social behaviour will accelerate in the coming decades. 

There will be increasing calls for a return to the religious or ethnic cultures of the past and for the re-introduction of stricter control backed up by force from a higher authority. But as with the opening of Pandora's box, there can now be no return to the former social securities. What we humans now have to do is to learn how to use our new found freedom for the benefit of all and not just for ourselves alone, something which rightwing ideologies are loath to acknowledge.

Our present wasteful use of the non-renewable earth's resources, coupled with our increasing pollution of such basic commodities as air and water, and our interference with the delicate ecology of the planet, will be the burning issues of the 21st Century and already threaten to make it a very turbulent one.

Our failure to acknowledge our common humanity across the barriers of gender, race and culture, coupled with our reckless disregard for the Mother Earth on which the human future depends, are today's equivalent of the sins against the divine Heavenly Father about which traditional preachers had so much to say. Even now there are far-seeing economists and scientists who, like the prophets of old, are telling us that our emphasis on economic growth, consumerism and technology, have alienated us from our own spiritual nature and from our own best interests in life.

A testing time

It is true that in the globalising century religion and spirituality will be much more humanistic than in the past. Appeal to supernatural forces will have no place in the future except for the proverbial flat-earthers. But that does not mean at all that our experience of transcendence, awe and mystery will disappear. It will be rather that we experience these emotions in contemplating the universe itself in all its infinite magnitude and diversity.

The mystery of life, long associated with an other-worldly supernatural power will be reassociated with nature. It is nature itself, for want of any better term, which, through aeons of time, has brought forth life on this planet and brought forth us as creatures who are able to ponder it and hold it in awe.

There is more than ample room for the full gamut of the emotions associated with the religion of the past as we contemplate both the wonder of being alive in this amazing universe and the responsibility we must now accept for preserving and fostering earthly life. The saving of the earth calls for much more selfless dedication than the traditional forms of religion often did. The ecosphere itself has now become the God "in whom we live and move and have our being." Indeed, the care of Mother Earth, and all which that involves, is to a large extent replacing the traditional religious duty of humans to show obedience to the Heavenly Father.

The 21st Century we are now preparing to enter will prove to be a severely testing time for the future of the human species. It will take all the collective will we humans can amass to halt our exploiting, polluting and destructive way of life and, of our own free choice, turn our collective energy into avenues which respect the earth, preserve life and promote harmony in the ecosphere. The forms of spirituality adequate to the challenge call for the highest degree of personal selflessness. The salvation of the earth and of all its forms of life is not primarily for oneself but for the benefit of all. It is not just for those living at present; it is much more for the benefit of those yet to come. The religion of the century to come will either manifest the highest degree of altruism ever known or it will be the last century of human civilisation.

*Lloyd Geering

Lloyd Geering was born in 1918, educated chiefly in Otago and holds Honours degrees in mathematics and Old Testament Studies. Inducted as a Presbyterian minister, he served in Kurow, Dunedin and Wellington. He held Chairs of Old Testament Studies at theological colleges in Brisbane and Dunedin before being appointed as the foundation Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University.

Since his retirement in 1984 he has continued to lecture widely throughout New Zealand. He was awarded an Honorary DD by the University of Otago in 1976 and a CBE in 1988.