By Olivia Pierson
​[First published on Incite 23/4/19]

Something in the New Zealand psyche is undergoing a current transformation that cannot be denied. It is as if we have awoken from our naive, youthful reverie of only dreaming about the possible, to be confronted by the glare of grown-up reality: the unrecognisable road that our country is being led down.

It started, of course, with the Christchurch mosque shootings, a monstrous mass killing of innocent men, women and children. The fact that a man came here from another country and committed this murder, thereby destroying our peace, horrified us all. 

Then our prime minister, as a matter of personal choice, clothed herself in female Islamic attire, never a great look for a free woman leader of a free country, even if the intention is to show ‘solidarity’ with the victims.  The meaning of that headscarf in Islamic societies denotes something entirely the opposite of personal choice for women; in fact, it symbolises to Islamic women that they don’t have one.

Aside from that ham-fisted gesture from our PM, there was also the televised Islamic call to prayer in Arabic brandished across our media outlets, which is about as foreign to Kiwis as the Japanese Samurai sword and fan dance.  Generally speaking, if folks expect a free flow of sympathy and solidarity with other folks it’s usually a good idea if communication happens in the same language.

Religion was brought front and centre to our minds after these events.

Then came the peculiar advice from police to some Returned Services Association staff in Birkenhead, Auckland, that many upcoming Anzac day services would need to be cut back due to “safety” reasons because New Zealand is still on high terror alert after Christchurch.  The Minister of Police, Stuart Nash, has since denied in Parliament that any such advice was given, but RSA staff stated that it emphatically was given – and not just as advice but as something more akin to orders.

During this volatile week, a high profile Anzac commemoration team in Titahi Bay, Wellington, invited an Islamic imam to come to the service to once again publicly offer up an Islamic prayer.  The backlash at this odd and opportunistic invitation was perpetuated by more than just offended old time vets. Social media, both in this country and across the Tasman from our Australian cousins, voiced their disgust at this forced multicultural inclusivity at our secular nation’s last remaining ‘Holy Day’ with the cry: “Leave our Anzac remembrance services the hell alone!”  As I understand it, that cry was heard and the invitation to the imam was rescinded.

The following week, good old Israel Folau, known to be well and truly on Team Jesus, channeled his inner prophet and posted to his Instagram feed a verse out of St Paul’s letter to the Galatians from the Bible stating: 

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. 
Galatians 5:19-21 KJV

He added a meme which paraphrased this whole verse: “Warning:  Drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolaters, hell awaits you.  Repent.  Only Jesus Saves!”

Though I am not a believer by way of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I could’ve just kissed Israel for quoting the King James Version of scripture. It is sadly rare for Christians in this modern age to use this incomparably beautiful translation, which was authorised during the high-Renaissance and in the time of Shakespeare. 

Churches today busy themselves relentlessly modernising into 8-piece-band ‘Rock Churches’ and watering down all the language of old-time religion into something indescribably insipid and wincey.  They do this not just because of our culture’s chronic infection from postmodernism’s impoverished taste in music and literature, but usually in feeble attempts to affect some measure of ‘cool’ and help keep the younger flock content to stay within the fold.  

The mistake is then made of not giving young and impressionable minds something noble and high-minded to rise to, but instead reducing public worship of the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth down to inelegant, colloquial cant and mindless musical ditties.

So God bless Israel Folau! If the King’s English is good enough for Jesus Christ it should be good enough for modern Christians. 

Then came the despicable backlash of condemnation against Folau from all corners of the sporting, entertainment and political worlds, along with the possible termination of his contract – all because he opined on some well-known ethics of his long-ago defanged Christian faith. This sent a strong message to Australia and New Zealand that freedom of expression does not seem to apply to Christians in this post-enlightenment culture of ours. The Enlightenment’s political innovation of building a wall between Church and State in Western democracies renders Folau’s judgements completely harmless.

What strikes me as totally hypocritical is that under our current prime minister’s watch, Trevor Mallard reformed the parliamentary prayer for the sake of being more inclusive of the diversity of faiths which may be held by our collection of MPs. Yet, straight after the Christchurch massacre of Muslims, another imam opened the very next parliamentary session with an Islamic prayer, begging the question: was Mallard’s “secular” prayer not then inclusive enough for Islam? 

Islam, unlike Christianity, has never undergone an enlightenment, which is arguably the reason for its horrendous backwardness. Just look at last month’s new reforms in Brunei, which now allow for the legal stoning, hangings, amputations and beheadings of homosexuals, fornicators, adulterers, thieves and idolaters, bringing Brunei into step with other Islamic countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

What the devil is going on with this sick government of ours?  They don’t allow believers in our heritage faith, with its central tenet of liberty of conscience, to stand unmolested in the marketplace of ideas, yet they seem to be perfectly comfortable giving special favours to the practitioners of a deeply foreign faith that is still virulently aggressive after 1300 years of existence – and completely absent the civilising central tenet of liberty of conscience.

Thus, religion made its way into the forefront of our politics again this month, whether we like it or not. 

Finally, this turbulent month saw the great fire of Notre Dame Cathedral.  The world watched helplessly as an 850 year old church, built to the eternal glory of God by the temporal hands of man, burned for twelve hours; a Gothic civilisational touchstone of incomparable value was almost destroyed. After this inexplicable shock and after most of the ancient structure was found to be saved, through the screens of our televisions and computers we saw the French people standing together outside Notre Dame and heard them mourn and sing old French hymns, igniting a sentimentality in this now staunchly secular nation for the beautiful achievements of old Christendom and what they may mean.

But what might they mean?

It took 182 years to build Notre Dame of Paris.  It was begun in the 12th century and finished in the 14th. This epoch bore witness to a massive, energetic outpouring of physical and intellectual beauty vividly remembered via the achievements of architecture and art.  It also saw the Christian faith begin to absorb ancient Greek thought through the mind of Thomas Aquinas as he sought to balance the teachings of the greatest rational philosopher known to man, Aristotle, with the revelations of holy scripture and church doctrine.  This was Aquinas’s mission: to marry religion to reason, theology to science.  Aristotle posited the idea of the “Unmoved Mover”, the ungenerate cause of the generative world.  Aquinas believed this to be God, the first cause of all creation.

The 16th century Protestant Reformation was devastating to the centralised ecclesiastical power of the Catholic church, and by the time that the 18th-century Enlightenment began to caress the mind of the European common man, the fight that came to the fore was not just about religion vs science, but more about religion vs politics.  Church and State finally got a divorce and from then on individual belief and devoutness among people in societies became a mere matter of private, individual conscience, as it should be.  Hence Christianity became totally defanged as a political force to subjugate the lives of ordinary men and women.

As the Notre Dame fire ignited an outpouring of grief over the near destruction of this artistic Christian monument of stone, wood and glass, I saw a yearning for unity and something resembling an impetus for the eternal and unchangeable.  A cathedral that has been beloved by the French people, and also by many globe-trotters for 850 years, speaks to something beyond just our own lives; it speaks to the eternal.  There was also the immense grief at watching something of transcendent beauty nearly be destroyed – the moment when the spire fell down in flames caused many people worldwide to exclaim out loud, “Oh no!”, and cry, including this writer.

Outside of the natural world with its transcendent mountain peaks, beauty bound to eternity are concepts which have been most notably intertwined by man within the realm of religious tradition, but as such traditions have become less venerated, one wonders where these concepts can be fused together outside of a past religious impulse?
I’m not making an argument for the veracity of Christianity as a metaphysically realistic, coherent philosophy, because to me it is no such thing.  But undoubtedly, it is our civilisational heritage, the solid bedrock of the many wonders that our civilisation has gone on to bring us, such as great beauty in art, architecture, literature and music, liberty, and a commitment to scientific inquiry with its wondrous gifts of technology and medicine. Above all, this heritage of ours furnished civilisation with a reverence for the dignity of the human spirit.

I’m with Abbot Suger, the French patron of 12th century Gothic architecture, when he said:

"The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material."

Notre Dame has stood as an earthly testament to beauty and eternity for centuries and also a testament to the unchanging truth of the laws of nature. Thank goodness its structure still stands in real time, buttressed by the architectural innovations of visionary men long dead.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​​​​
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By Olivia Pierson
[First published on  Incite Politics, Anzac Day, 25/4/ 2018]

Looking back from an epoch that is sure to be noted in history as an unprecedented time of luxurious peace and prosperity, it is difficult to imagine what it must have been like for a generation which entered its adulthood during the era of WWI. 

Those of this generation who survived the ‘Great War to End all Wars’ would also experience the indiscriminate culling of populations by the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which took more lives than had been lost in the war itself.  The Lost generation would go on to see the stock-market crash of ’29 and live through the subsequent Great Depression, then witness the unspeakable horrors of WWII just as they crossed into their jaded middle-age.

As if all that didn’t make life imposing enough, imagine also the exasperation of this generation at the Social Justice Warriors of their time, who demanded they sally forth without the comfort of some seriously stiff boozy tipples. Thank the gods (Bacchus in this case) for the ready availability of naughty speakeasies, which I’m sure helped them through some extremely downcast moments.  

As life progressed for this generation after the Great War had been fought and won, they didn’t have a clue what lay in their future; events unfurl from day to day without any bigger picture sharpening into focus. One can only ever do one’s best with the hand that one is dealt.

But the Lost Generation, despite the cards that they were dealt, had marinated in the staunch cultural values of the previous generation, many of whom had raised them and taught them in educational institutions.  This slightly older generation are known in generational theory as the Missionary Generation, whose greatest exemplar was Winston Churchill (born 1874). 

Regarding Great Britain, our once blessed Mother Country, I cannot think of a finer citation of the Missionary Generation’s defining ethos than the speech given to young students of the Lost Generation, dramatically presented in the Master’s Dinner at Cambridge University in the film Chariots of Fire (a particular favourite of mine).  When life must go on, as it must, consider the magnitude of words like these upon a young man’s ear and heart after a crippling war:

“I take the war list and I run down it, name after name, which I cannot read – and which we, who are older than you, cannot hear without emotion. Names which will be only names to you, the new college, but to us summon up face after face full of honesty and goodness, zeal and vigour and intellectual promise, the flower of a generation; the glory of England and they died for England and all that England stands for.  And now by tragic necessity their dreams have become yours.  Let me exhort you to examine yourself, let each of you discover where your chance of greatness truly lies. For their sakes, for the sake of your college and your country, seize this chance! Rejoice in it! And let no power or persuasion deter you in your task.”

Despite magnificent exhortations such as these, the Lost Generation went down in history as nihilistic, careless, cynical and hedonistic, represented in literature by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby:” 

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

And then there is Hemingway’s book, “The Old Man and the Sea.” I could just weep at the palpable sense of utter defeatism even though it’s not meant to be about defeat, its whole theme speaks about a world hell-bent on destroying man even though man struggles with everything in himself to triumph.  It seems to be no small coincidence that Hemingway eventually ended his own life by suicide.

But then I recall exceptional men of this generation such as Harold Abrahams, one of the heroes in Chariots of Fire who studied at Cambridge and won his hard-fought-for gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 1924. His story in the film is one of a hyper-sensitive Polish Jew who extends himself spectacularly, though still feels the sting of anti-semitism as a thing “caught on the edge of a remark,” or “in a look.” 

As truth is often so much more notorious than fiction, Abrahams, an athletics journalist, went on to become the radio commentator bringing the 1936 Berlin Olympics to England over the airways. While Abrahams was engaged in this task, the black-uniformed Third Reich was sitting and watching Jesse Owens, the black “Buckeye Bullet,” win all his track and field events. The irony on abundant levels here is almost heart-stopping.

By way of another very interesting fact, at the ’24 Paris Olympics, Harold Abrahams became firm friends with another exceptional man, New Zealander Arthur Porritt, who won the bronze medal for third place in the same 100 meter sprint which rewarded Abrahams with gold. 

Porritt eventually became New Zealand’s 11th Governor General and he and Abrahams dined together at 7pm every 7th of July until Abrahams died in 1978.

In Chariots of Fire, Porritt was renamed “Tom Watson” as a point of sensitivity observed in deference to his legendary, if not slightly ridiculous modesty.  Porritt (whose own father served in WWI) had a distinguished military career as a surgeon which saw him land on the beach at Normandy in WWII on D-Day. 

Both Abrahams (born 1899) and Porritt (born 1900) were men of the Lost Generation who came of age during a war that would alter the whole course of human history and their beloved old Empire.  Like England, they lived on to fight another day (in Porritt’s case, another war), despite witnessing the cream of their generation annihilated in warfare, twice.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night.  
[“For the Fallen” by Robert Laurence Binyon]


If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​​​