By John McLean
In the wake of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, which ended once and for all the centuries old French threat to England, the British Government, in gratitude to God for Wellington’s victory, provided a million pounds to the Church of England to build churches in newly developing areas. These were known as the “Waterloo churches”. To this was later added another half million in 1824.
Since then governments have followed the sound policy of not using taxpayer/ratepayer money for building churches that, by their very nature, are for the benefit of believers of one sect only. In other words, if believers want a church, the religion and its members should pay for it. However, this wise and fair policy is being jettisoned in respect of the potential rebuilding of the Church of England’s cathedral in Christchurch which collapsed in the 2011 earthquake.
Already the rebuilding fund has received or been promised $25 million by the Ardern government in 2018 (a $10 million grant plus a $15 million interest free loan), and another $3 million from the Christchurch City Council. And now Winston Peters, for no other purpose than to buy votes in Christchurch with taxpayers’ money, has said that, in the event of re-creating the coalition government after the election, he will INSIST on the Government coughing up another $15 million to the Anglican Church for this purpose.
He has been in politics for so long that he seems to regard taxpayers’ money as a slush fund for him and his party to dip their hands into for their own political purposes, e.g. the utterly worthless Provincial Growth Fund that he got Ardern to agree to – a billion dollars a year – and which his colleague, Shane Jones, dished out to areas that had voted for NZ First or which were being targeted by that Party for the future. If Mr. Peters, not a noticeable churchgoer, is so keen to see the cathedral rebuilt, then why doesn’t he dip into his own millions and make a personal donation?
The cathedral (either whole or fallen down) and the land it stands on is owned by the extremely rich Anglican Church. If they failed to insure it, then they should bear the loss themselves and not expect the hard-pressed taxpayer to cough up.
A further reason why public money should not be used in its rebuilding is that hardly anyone goes to church these days and so why is such a large and expensive new building needed? And the reason why they no longer attend church is because the Church of England – as well as other organised mainstream “Christian” churches – has been taken over by too many “woke”, Left-wing, socialist clergy who prefer to preach politics rather than religion from the pulpit and so one may as well stay at home on a Sunday morning and read the Bible for an hour rather than subject oneself to Left wing indoctrination that is more and more the antithesis of Christ’s message and biblical teaching.
The drift of true believers away from mainstream churches began in the 1960s and 1970s when both the World Council of Churches (which includes the Church of England) and the Vatican started supporting violent revolution against the governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. Instead of preaching salvation in Christ, they started preaching salvation from capitalism and from what their little Left wing minds regarded as “political oppression”. It was called “liberation theology”, which the Catholic Church practised in Latin America as well, with the ever troublesome and Protestant-hating Jesuits in the vanguard. In Nicaragua the Marxists of the Sandinista movement were joined and often directed by Jesuits, three of whom became Ministers in the revolutionary regime. The bloody Sandinista revolution led to c. 80,000 deaths out of a 1979 population of only 3,164,525. The newly invented “Catholic Social Teaching” is simply Marxism in clerical garb.
Resisting governments of any kind has no foundation in Scripture – quite the contrary. In his epistle to the Romans (13.1-2) Saint Paul wrote: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king as supreme, or unto governors” while Saint Matthew’s gospel (22.21) states: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”. At the time the government of the Roman Empire in which these words were written was absolute and not always fair.
The height of this Left wing, anti-Christian crusade by clerical wolves in sheep’s clothing was reached in 1966 when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, in violation of the Fifth Commandment “Thou shalt not kill”, started screaming for Britain to declare war on the settlers in Rhodesia, which would have involved British people killing British people. Fortunately, the then Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, showed that he had a better understanding of the Ten Commandments and he rejected Ramsey’s hate-filled suggestion.
The Anglican Church is committed to supporting acts of violence against so-called “right wing” governments that get up the nose of its bigoted bishops. The Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1988 declared that it “understood” those [the terrorists who were committing brutal murders in the black townships of South Africa] who “after exhausting all other ways, chose the way of armed struggle as the only way to justice”. (Natal Witness, 8 August, 1988) Among the crimes that their dear terrorists were committing were “necklacing” (murder by putting burning rubber tyres around the necks of their fellow blacks whom they regarded as “stooges” of the government). In the intervening years the Anglican bishops of New Zealand have never renounced this violent affront to the Fifth Commandment and yet these are the ones who are now screaming for decent, peace loving New Zealand taxpayers to cough up for their vanity project in Christchurch.
A further reason why taxpayers and ratepayers should not pay a penny to the Anglican Church for rebuilding their cathedral is that the Church itself, never having paid tax like the rest of us, is RICH beyond all imagination. Having been operating in New Zealand since the beginning of settlement it managed to obtain vast tracts of land from early Governors for either a very small payment or no payment at all – always claiming its “charitable” status.
It owns large tracts of land in Auckland’s rich eastern suburbs as well as schools, farms, forests and other investments all over the country. True, it has offered $38 million from its own funds towards the Christchurch cathedral rebuilding but its wealth would enable it to pay the whole lot without apparent difficulty.
However, the main reason why the proposed new cathedral should not receive a penny of public money is that the upper hierarchy of the Anglican Church in New Zealand consists largely of dishonest liars who are doing immense damage to New Zealand’s social fabric. Their revised church constitution of 1992 introduced a form of apartheid into their own organisation as they divided their Church into three race-based segments, each with equal authority:
Maori
“tikanga Pakeha” (Europeans)
“tikanga Pasefika” (presumably New Zealanders of Pacific Islands blood)
The Church of England is now trying to impose this form of race apartheid on the whole country in various ways, e.g. supporting race based “Maori wards” on local body councils.
Furthermore this 1992 constitution under which their Church operates has formally adopted the principle of “partnership” in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi even though it was a treaty of cession and never a “partnership”, that word not being mentioned in the document and in fact not even having been dreamt up until the 1970s. Article 1 of the Treaty states: “The Chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes and the other chiefs who have not joined the confederation, cede to the Queen of England forever the entire Sovreignty[sic] of their country”. Couldn’t be clearer.
The Church is so unsure of itself in propagating this lie that, in their Submission to ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill, they had to resort to the further lie that they “reject the notion that the underlying principles of Te Tiriti and its current interpretation [“partnership”] are a recent invention”. Which is exactly what they are.
And anyway why should a Church become so involved in what is a political and legal matter? In the grounds of Saint Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in New Plymouth they even had a big billboard urging people to “Oppose the Treaty Principles Bill”. By way of explanation it should be pointed out that this particular church has long been a hotbed of hatred against white civilisation and colonisation in general. It seems that they would have preferred the Maoris of New Plymouth to continue being the victims of tribal warfare, slavery and cannibalism. Anything except the rule of the horrid “white man”.
By trying to drive the knife of separatism through our society the Church of England is one of the least deserving institutions to receive taxpayer dollars – especially since it doesn’t pay any tax itself. In its present state much of its hierarchy – especially the upper clergy – are liars and hypocrites who are causing untold damage to our society by advocating racial division and giving virtually unlimited support to every greedy, race-based demand of the tribal elite regardless of its merits. Of course, not all Anglican clergy are of this stripe. There are many good vicars who are more interested in preaching the gospel than playing politics but these are not usually promoted to the higher and better paid positions because they are not considered “safe” by the woke elite who have well and truly taken over the upper echelons of the Church.
It is an insult to every taxpayer or ratepayer to give money to this socially destructive organisation and the $25 million that the government has committed should be revoked forthwith – as should the $3 million from the spendthrift Christchurch City Council.
Christ owned only the clothes that He wore and the tools in His carpenter’s shop, and the extreme wealth of the Anglican Church (and other Churches) is an affront to Christianity. Apart from an opening ceremony the proposed new cathedral would never be filled. The people of Christchurch would be better off living their lives according to the Bible instead of listening to biased and often hate-filled political sermons inside a half empty, $220 million building financed largely by unwilling taxpayers – both Anglican and non-Anglican. It is time to pull the plug of public money for this unnecessary monstrosity. Let it be built with the Anglican Church’s own money and not ours.
