Queen's Pawns Take Bishop.

Suppose They Declared An Apocalypse And Nobody Came: There is much more evidence of Christian faith, hope and charity in Jacinda’s “Team of Five Million”, than there is in any number of false prophets, “Gotcha!” journalists, and “Let the Devil take the hindmost!” business leaders.
  

BRIAN TAMAKI’s feelings of disappointment must have been overwhelming. Looking down from the steps of the Auckland Museum at the 800-1,000 people who turned up to his anti-lockdown rally, the would-be national messiah’s most vivid impression could only have been one of empty space. Where were they? The tens-of-thousands of angry Auckland citizens he had felt quite certain would answer his call? Where was the great sea of human-beings whose roars of support he’d imagined washing over him like the love of God? What had gone wrong?

It is important to remember when dealing with Tamaki that his political instincts are, like his Destiny Church, strong, few and poor. This is, after all, the same man who, in the run-up to the 2005 General Election, was absolutely convinced that his newly-founded Destiny NZ Party would receive hundreds-of-thousands of votes. In vain did more seasoned observers of politics warn him that anything over 1 percent of the Party Vote would be a small miracle. He was having none of it. God was on his side. What God gave him, however, was 0.62 of the Party Vote.

Most people would have drawn the obvious lesson from such a debacle – and quit while they were behind. But Brian Tamaki is not most people. After fifteen years, he and his wife, Hannah, were ready to try again. Predictably, to everyone except Mr and Mrs Tamaki, Vision NZ fared even worse than Destiny NZ at the ballot box. Its share of the Party Vote was just 0.15 percent. Across the entire country fewer than 5,000 people were willing to give Hannah and her visionaries the tick. God’s messages are nothing if not clear!

And still “Bishop” Tamaki perseveres. Still, the visions come of the masses answering his clarion call to rise in rebellion against the manifest sins of this fallen, godless world. (Of course, if the world truly is fallen and godless, then expecting a big turnout against its sinfulness is straining Christian hopefulness to its limits!)

It has yet to dawn on Tamaki that his eschatology is all wrong. If the gospels make anything at all clear, it is that, on the highway to Hell, the traffic is always bumper-to-bumper. In Christian theology, however, the off-road track to salvation has always required a spiritual four-wheel-drive – “and few there be that find it”. Rather than inspiring him, Tamaki’s dreams of huge crowds shouting his name should terrify him. Theologically, they are likely to hail (heil?) from a location well to the south of the Pearly Gates!

Ironically, it is precisely this Christian conviction that “many are called, but few are chosen” that salves the consciences of religiously-inspired anti-vaxxers.

As anyone familiar with the Book of Revelation knows, the imminence of Christ’s second coming is attested to by the rise and rise of an all-powerful totalitarian regime presided over by the Antichrist. More and more will be demanded of the Antichrist’s hapless victims – until they are wholly corrupted and damned. Only a tiny handful of believers will find the moral courage to resist Satan’s lies. Persecuted and martyred for their faith, they will be God’s chosen few. His soul survivors.

So, you see, it really isn’t that big a jump from the Book of Revelation to Facebook. From defying the Antichrist, to refusing to submit to Jacinda’s jabs. Especially when being a member of a tiny, irksome minority is not seen as proof of ethical imbecility, but of moral superiority. If only more people would “do their own research” then they, too, could be saved.

For those who prefer to stay out of rabbit-holes, however, Tamaki and his ilk pose some particularly thorny problems.

A great many Aucklanders watched their television screens with mounting fury on Saturday evening (2/10/21). Why were these people being allowed to break the Covid regulations with seeming impunity? What was the point of following the rules, and being a decent, conscientious citizen, when these fools were flouting the law under the very noses of the Police – and getting away with it? Why were people being allowed to protest in a time of Covid?

The simple answer to that question may well be that, in a time of Covid, the Police are too thinly-stretched to shut down a large protest. Faced with the prospect of mass illegality, the usual Police practice is to bolster local numbers with officers drawn from other parts of the country. In a time of Covid, however, moving large numbers of people around the country is fraught with considerable epidemiological risk. With regional borders closed, the call on Police resources is further amplified by the need to maintain effective check-points. The Auckland Police were also required to maintain their presence at the city’s MIQ facilities.

Police Commissioner Andy Coster may have had no choice except to “negotiate” with Tamaki. Rather than open confrontation, he may have opted for shrewd calculation. If he could extract promises from Tamaki (such as maintaining social distancing and wearing face-masks) which his ill-disciplined followers subsequently failed to honour, it would play out much better for the Police than supplying protest organisers with disturbing images of Police officers forcibly detaining Tamaki, and others, which the “Bishop” and his backers could later exploit for propaganda purposes. After all, the public’s initial shock and dismay at Police inaction could easily be assuaged if, as soon as Tamaki’s followers were safely dispersed, the man himself was very publicly arrested and charged.

That barely 24 hours after his first, Tamaki was publicly promising to hold more rallies, strongly suggests that he and his advisers were, indeed, thoroughly disappointed with the outcome of Saturday’s effort. The low turnout (remove Tamaki’s loyal congregation, and the number of non-Destiny protesters plummets to around the 200 mark) indicates a population which, in spite of his own, and the Right’s, best efforts to stir-up mass dissatisfaction with the Government’s handling of the pandemic, remains steadfast in its determination to keep the Covid faith.

Bruised and battered by events though Aucklanders (and now the people of the Waikato) may be. Frightened by the Delta variant’s stubborn refusal to lie down and die, though the rest of the country has become, there is much more evidence of Christian faith, hope and charity in Jacinda’s “Team of Five Million”, than there is in any number of false prophets, “Gotcha!” journalists, and “Let the Devil take the hindmost!” business leaders.

In the end, Tamaki’s disappointing rally was, curiously reassuring. Let’s not forget that the last time the Auckland Domain hosted a mass political gathering, it saw 20,000 Aucklanders turn out to reaffirm their Prime Minister’s “They Are Us” defence of New Zealand’s devastated Muslim community. While the latest Census figures confirm that New Zealand is no longer a Christian nation, its citizens’ refusal to be moved by sly political sophistry and cheap religious theatrics proves that they have not forgotten its founder’s redemptive message.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 4 October 2021.

The Tamakis Quest For Dominion: More “Handmaid’s Tale”, Less “Modern Family”.

Second Time Lucky? Perhaps it was the abject failure of his Destiny NZ Party (2003-2007) which lay behind Brian’s clumsy attempt to relaunch his “brand” by having "Coalition NZ" reach out to those he had so trenchantly attacked in the past. If so, then his strategy is fatally flawed. A leopard is a leopard: red in tooth and claw; so any attempt to pass it off as a pussy-cat is doomed to fail.

WHAT ARE THE TAMAKIS trying to do? Is the “Coalition Party” a serious political project? Or, is it merely another example of the flim-flam for which religious hucksters the world over are notorious? Certainly, Brian and Hannah Tamaki would not be the first evangelical religious pairing to enlist the aid of politics when too many of the seats in their expensive megachurches remain unoccupied.

Even the new party’s name – The Coalition Party – has a flim-flammy ring to it. Coalition of what? Coalition with whom? Nothing we have heard from Brian or Hannah has been helpful in this respect. All we have been told is that the people of New Zealand have had enough. That the political status quo is no longer to their liking. That they are ready for someone to acknowledge their gutsfullness and offer them a heapin’ helpin’ of politics the way they want it.

But what do they want? That’s the question that the Coalition Party has yet to answer.

For a couple of days it looked as though Hannah Tamaki was preparing to place herself at the head of the movement against abortion law reform. Given the deeply conservative social character of Brian Tamaki’s “Dominionist” theology, opposing the Coalition Government’s moves towards decriminalising and (hopefully) liberalising New Zealand’s abortion laws would make perfect sense. And yet, in spite of Hannah’s early reference to “they” wanting to legalise “late-term” abortions, the issue was allowed to slip quietly off the Coalition Party’s agenda.

What about LGBTQI+ rights? For many years, Brian Tamaki has been an outspoken critic of rainbow politics – even, on one memorable occasion, characterising the Christchurch Earthquake as the earth “groaning” under the weight of the LGBTQI+ community’s unrepentant sinfulness. Here, surely, was a constellation of social issues ripe for the Coalition Party’s political exploitation?

But that was when everything turned decidedly strange. Rather than renew his condemnations of LGBTQI+ sinfulness, Brian reached out to the rainbow community. They were invited to join him and the other members of the Destiny Church in a service of mutual forgiveness and reconciliation.

Understandably, a great many members of the rainbow community were unconvinced. Some, suspecting they were being roped into a political stunt, urged a boycott. Could a preacher as historically hostile to non-cis lifestyles as Brian Tamaki: a veritable leopard in the long grass of social intolerance; really change his spots? Most of those gathered under the rainbow’s arc thought not. Even after the Brylcreemed Bishop delivered what sounded like an apology for his previous anti-LGBTQI+ outbursts, their scepticism remained strong. The handful of rainbow activists who had accepted Tamaki’s invitation were subjected to fierce criticism. The fruits of Brian’s outreach appeared to be rancour and division across the rainbow community.

Perhaps that was its purpose?

Whatever Brian was trying to achieve, his wife, Hannah, as leader pro-tempore of the Coalition Party, was still no nearer to defining its mission. This lack of clarity; absence of purpose; cannot continue for too much longer. To launch a new political party is no easy matter. If it is to have the slightest chance of success, such a party must impress upon the nation’s consciousness a very clear idea of what it stands for, and what it proposes to do. Failure to make this impression can only result in even potentially supportive voters turning away in confusion and disappointment. Hannah should know that time is running out.

Her task is made no easier by the signal failure of the Coalition Party’s predecessor, Destiny NZ. Founded by Brian Tamaki in 2003, the party left nothing more than the tiniest of ripples on the surface of New Zealand’s electoral pond. It received just 14,210 votes (0.62 percent) in the 2005 General Election. This lack of voter interest must have come as a crushing blow to Tamaki who, right up until election day, believed that the Lord would deliver dominion into his hand. He disbanded the party in 2007.

Perhaps it was this experience that lay behind Brian’s clumsy attempt to relaunch his “brand” by reaching out to those he had so trenchantly attacked in the past. If so, then his strategy is fatally flawed. A leopard is a leopard: red in tooth and claw; so any attempt to pass it off as a pussy-cat is doomed to fail.

A much more effective strategy would be for the Tamakis to make a virtue of their leopardness. To declare unequivocally that a leopard, red in tooth and claw, is exactly what this country desperately needs to vanquish the regime of sin that is fast driving New Zealand to destruction.

In other words, Brian and Hannah should go full “Handmaid’s Tale”, and forget all about trying to be “Modern Family”.

Such a stance would at least reflect the Tamakis’ authentic theological convictions. They are believers in Dominionism, which Wikipedia defines as: “[A] group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their personal understandings of biblical law. Extents of rule and ways of achieving governing authority are varied.”

Unvarying, however, is the Dominionists’ utter rejection of the longstanding secular principle that matters of religion and politics should be kept separate. As in Gilead, Brian and Hannah would seek to establish a righteous nation, ruled by the godly, whose first duties must be the extirpation of sin and the redemption of sinners.

Achieving that “governing authority” by means of the ballot-box – which is clearly the Tamakis’ preference – requires a political platform with more to offer than covered heads and modest attire. As Poland’s “Law & Justice Party”, and Hungary’s “Fidesz” (both frighteningly successful electoral vehicles) have demonstrated, social conservatism, garnished with fundamentalist Christianity, is not enough. Populist Christian conservatism only succeeds when it is associated with an unwavering commitment to the institutions of the welfare state and unwavering support for the values and living-standards of a beleaguered working-class.

Are Brian and Hannah Tamaki up for that? If they are, then they’d better get their skates on.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 6 June 2019.