The Destiny of Those Maori Remaining in New Zealand
We have spoken of the great Maori diaspora—many of whom have left New Zealand to escape the pervasive influence of Maori whanau culture, which hangs as an albatross around their necks. We believe it to be an indirect cause of the high incidence of child abuse amongst Maori today.
The problem with whanau culture is that it elevates the whanau above the nuclear family, thus undermining the roles and responsibilities of parents to their own children. It represents a rejection of God's command that a man shall leave his parents and shall cleave to his wife when he marries. In modern Maori culture, whanau claims regularly supersede and trump the legitimate claims of children upon their own parents. This, in turn, entices and tempts far too many Maori parents to look to their extended families to take over what it is their responsibility to provide for their own children. This has led to the neglect of Maori children, since passing responsibility over to the whanau for one's children fails far too often. The extended family has not soul to damn and no butt to kick. All too often no one couple ends up standing as a strong tower of refuge for vulnerable children. Shared parenting all to often produces neglected children who slip through cracks.
A third reason for such an appalling record of child abuse within Maori communities is state welfare. Sir Apirana Ngata is reported to have said, when social welfare was first introduced by Michael Savage, that “this will be the death of our people”. To be sure, it has been the death of a good many pakeha as well. But Maori have proved particularly susceptible to its deadly effects. We believe the reason is the combination of secular state welfarism with Maori whanau culture. Maori extended families and whanau socialism easily combine with the ideology and values of state welfarism to make a destructive and deadly cocktail. Sir Apirana Ngata was right.
The whanau socialist model was already in place when European Fabian socialism was institutionalised in New Zealand in the nineteen-thirties by the first Labour government. Because whanau socialism already undermined private property rights, and forced many Maori families to look to the whanau for economic support and sustenance, it was a small step for Maori to extend this beyond their extended family to the government. Hence Maori to this day have been strong supporters of socialist political doctrines and institutions. Their culture leads them to regard national social welfare as intrinsically right and therefore receiving support from other people not only an ethnic right, but a fundamental civil right as well. Maori are culturally inclined to socialism and progressive political and economic doctrines fit hand in glove with Maori cultural beliefs.
Those who argue that it is relative Maori poverty which inclines them to socialist doctrines over-simplify the case. Relative Maori poverty continues entrenched first and foremost because the economic demands of the whanau keep many Maori families in a state of poverty and dependency. In such a culture if any Maori family prospers, their economic obligations to their blood relatives rise. Consequently children rapidly become dependent upon “others” and when the increasingly impoverished whanau will not provide, Maori naturally look to the state. It is just exchanging one form of socialism for another.
Welfare dependent families, which are disproportionately represented in the Maori population, often reproduce their welfare dependency, binding the next generation to degradation and destruction. Husbands and fathers as providers become an optional extra. Women become the dominant adult in such families because welfare is normally dolled out by the State through and around the power matrix of mother or the woman who happens to be the designated care-giver du jour. In such a degraded state, children easily become an economic tool, a means of extracting more money from government. Welfarism leads to inter-generational cycles of poverty, which causes and results in the neglect and abuse of children. Throwing more money at the “problem” is the worst possible thing that could be done. It is also the most naïve, simplistic, and stupid.
Does this mean that Maori are beyond hope? Not at all. This is not primarily an ethnic or cultural problem. It is a spiritual problem. Religious constructs have pervasive cultural consequences. False and wrong religious constructs normally have pervasively bad cultural consequences. But Maori are not beyond the grace of God; His hand is not shortened that it cannot save. There is a great need in our day for biblically informed teachers to help Maori Christians, in this particular instance, reform their ethnic cultural inheritance around the constructs of the Scripture, to enable the development of a reformed Christian Maori culture and a reconstruction of biblical families. This will necessitate a rejection of aspects of the whanau culture and a reformation of those aspects which are redeemable. The need is great.
It is from the Church and the Believing community that the answers and help will come, not from more government-extorted welfare and a paradigm of victim-entitlement. Let us pray for the Lord to raise up Maori leadership which will completely reject the ungodly claims of whanau upon Maori families and the much vaunted “Maori way of doing things”. Such racial and ethnic pride is completely unbecoming true faith in God. Maori long ago tragically decided they would adapt the pakeha's God to their own way of thinking. Maori must reject such pernicious idolatry.
Let us ask God to raise up Maori who will call for Maori to repent of their Unbelieving cultural assault upon biblical marriage and family. The idol of whanau-uber-family must be broken and Maori must do it—in faith, with their eyes upon the Lord, not upon the State.
One final word—some may be wondering whether Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church might be the first signs of a reformation within Maoridom back to biblical faith. We fear not. Without discounting or denigrating whatever good Destiny may have done, we believe it is right at the point of neglecting to reject the idolatry of whanau culture that Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church have failed the Maori people. To our mind they have simply substituted the blood whanau culture for an ecclesiastical whanau culture. The prior claims of the ecclesiastical whanau—which has elided across from the ethnic whanau culture—continue to undermine the biblical insistence on the primary authority of the nuclear Christian family.
To this extent we believe Destiny represents a false dawn and a pseudo-reformation. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot give the old household idols a new coat of paint and claim, thereby, that you are serving the Living God. The God of our fathers, it will do us all well to recall, commands first and foremost that there will be no other gods brought into His holy presence.
May it please God to be gracious to the people at Destiny and lead them to understand this. May He also once again remember mercy to those Maori who remain in New Zealand.
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