Why isn’t the Key administration as bad as many of us thought it might be? In particular, where are all the social conservative troglodytes?

The New Zealand Christian Right often seems to have a massive disconnect from our contemporary social context. Older community activists usually refer to this as being ’stuck in the seventies’, usually regarded as the nadir of New Zealand authoitarian social conservatism under Muldoon. Was that closer to the truth than many of us thought?

The rest of the western world went through secularisation and the loss of religious rites of passage during the sixties. While there was a momentary surge in pakeha Pentecostalism during the seventies, religious affiliation only became the province of specific enclaves during the eighties and nineties here. When confronted with the authoritarian conservative religious sensibilities of the Muldoon era, religious disaffiliation began to snowball. Labour realised this before National.

In 1985, homosexual law reform became the crunch point for a conflict between the old populist religious New Zealand and the new technocratic professional New Zealand. After arduous battle, decriminalisation occurred, and since then, the Christian Right has only succeeded in halting the decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia. Insofar as LGBT rights are concerned, we’ve steadily won ground until only inclusive adoption reform and same-sex marriage proper temporarily elude us.

With the exception of the Maxim Institute, the ranks of the Christian Right haven’t been replenished, with the exception of the odd ephemeral dilettante and their equally ephemeral organisations. Of the survivors, the SPCS totters on the edge of oblivion due to steep membership decline, Right to Life New Zealand continues to be a  nuisance when it comes to the abortion debate, and Family First recycles used US Christian Right pap without realising we can match that with LGBT rebuttals of this imported propaganda. Add to that the stress points between conservative Catholics and some fundamentalists over citizens referenda and questions of euthanasia reform, and generational and sectarian differences, and one witnesses a shambles.

As for Catholicism itself, it’s not monolithic, either. John Paul II and Benedict XVI don’t command the loyalties of all thoughtful liberal Catholics, some of whom mine the religious and philosophical heritage of the church for resources to support liberal, democratic, feminist and LGBT reformist stances. Witness the recent work of veteran Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether, for example.  While active opposition to the Vatican isn’t as prominent in New Zealand, there’s still a progressive Catholic presence in Third World solidarity and peace circles.

Under Key, National may finally have realised this, which may explain why it isn’t pandering actively to them. The Key administration isn’t full of hidebound reactionaries, but it isn’t full of reformists either. Inertia rules for the next three years, at least.

Recommended:

Hugh MacLeod: The Religious Crisis of the 196os: New York: Oxford University Press: 2008.

Rosemary Ruether: Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican: A Vision for Progressive Catholicism: New York: New Press: 2008.