Tamaki’s ‘freedoms and rights’ stance ironic
‘‘CIVIL disobedience’’ he called it, boasting ‘‘I was willing to be arrested’’.
Brian Tamaki, selfstyled ‘‘Bishop’’ of his Destiny Church, who worshipped with church members during the Covid19 Alert Level 4 and 3 lockdown by livestreaming from his home, said he wasn’t prepared to follow the government’s rules restricting gatherings in church to 10 people under Level 2 (‘‘The laws and legislations put into place have violated our religious freedoms’’) and would lead a service on Sunday, May 17 at the church’s main branch in Druces Rd, in Manukau, South Auckland.
He claimed the Level 2 rules showed the church was an obstacle to the current Government, accused the Government of discriminating against churches, and compared himself to the early apostles, ‘‘arrested for preaching Jesus’’.
It sounds heroic, doesn’t it? A brave believer, prepared to be martyred to defend religious freedom. Well, not quite.
Despite the martyrdom talk, Mr Tamaki had taken pains to ensure rules were observed, and had discussed his plans with the police to make that clear. A spokeswoman said only three groups of people were allowed inside the church, each of 10 or fewer members. They included an audience in the front row of the auditorium, a video team upstairs, and a group at the entrance charged with contact tracing.
More than 100 others attended a drivein in the church’s car park, watching the proceedings on big screens set up there and listening on a dedicated radio frequency. They were encouraged to honk their horns during singing (wouldn’t that mean they couldn’t hear it?). They were told to keep their car windows shut and weren’t allowed to get out of their cars — marshalls patrolled the car park to ensure people complied.
Like Mr Tamaki, other church leaders have been using the internet to provide worship services (and, in some cases, Sunday School) at home during lockdown.
It appears, though, that they haven’t felt persecuted by the Government under Alert Level 2, but have continued to provide those online services.
Those who joined remotely in last Sunday morning’s Choral Eucharist, celebrated in St Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin, but with only the Dean and three others physically present, which was available on Youtube, would have heard a different, more Christian, approach from that of Mr Tamaki.
In his commendably brief sermon, the Dean acknowledged the wish of many parishioners of the Cathedral District to be able to worship in the Cathedral itself again, but drew on Jesus’ words from the day’s Gospel reading, that his followers should show they love God by following his commandment to love others, and suggested that holding back from being physically present in the Cathedral, to reduce risk to others, was showing such love.
In contrast, Mr Tamaki’s Sunday service, entitled ‘‘We stand for the freedoms and rights of all New Zealanders’’, sounded like a political stunt, rather than an assertion of the right to worship freely (of course there isn’t — and wasn’t under
Levels 4 and 3 — a ban on worship as long as people didn’t break their ‘‘bubble’’) and indeed, during his address, Mr Tamaki said the service was to honour ‘‘the freedoms of all New Zealanders’’, under threat due to the Government’s Alert Level 2 restrictions.
Was this public pretence of ‘‘civil disobedience’’ perhaps part of the election campaign of Vision NZ, Destiny Church’s ‘‘Christian nationalist’’, political party, led by Mr Tamaki’s wife, Hannah, which aims to outredneck NZ First?
If so, it seems to be an own goal. ‘‘We stand for the freedoms and rights of all New Zealanders’’ directly contradicts Vision NZ’s promise, if elected, to ban the construction of new ‘‘mosques, temples and other foreign buildings of worship’’ (hang on, isn’t Christianity a ‘‘foreign’’ religion in Aotearoa?), a policy which is clearly discriminatory.
Civis has a Muslim nephew, a fifthgeneration (at least) New Zealander. Why shouldn’t he, or Sonny Bill Williams, build a mosque if he wants to?