ABSTRACT
If you ask a Maori in, for example, a settlement such as Ruatoria where Maoris constitute a majority of the population, what he understands by religion, expect him to scratch his head in thought, before at length replying ‘Whose religion?’ Religion and Christianity may be synonymous words for him, but what they mean will vary between ‘a human recognition of a superhuman controlling power’, on the one hand, and ‘the preaching of one thing and too often the doing of something else’, on the other. It was religion in the latter sense that the Christians who ‘brought Jesus to civilise the natives’ in earlier days seemed to follow, showing up their God in an adverse light in the eyes of the ancestors, whose traditional gods acted swiftly and usually harshly. For all that, the ancestors were well able, soon after their contact with Christianity, to distinguish the Message from the messengers. The Maori of Ruatoria will accept that Christianity is an integral part of his fellow Maori’s life, but that each will also have his own brand of religion, for historic and other reasons; for instance Maoris have the same religion as their forebears. While the Christian God provides Maoridom with its first Redeemer, he appears mostly to ignore needs at the temporal and profane level, leaving this domain to the ancestral gods who continue to cater for those needs. The tohunga, formally trained experts in various academic disciplines, say that in the ‘long ago’ the gods took an active interest in the affairs of humans, and interaction among them and the ancestors was the norm rather than the exception. Thus, in the long ago, marvellous events occurred, which would account, at least in part, for a past which today sounds more like fable than anything else.
