Secularising the city

By Holly Blackler

For years, my hobby has been to walk the streets and collect up religious propaganda – most commonly, multicoloured ‘Free Tickets to Heaven'.

Designed to catch the eye and trick you into picking them up, they come in waves throughout the year. On phone boxes, public seating, shoved under window displays, or in planters – these promises of eternal salvation have been a mainstay of central Wellington for years.

Once you start reading, it swiftly tells you how you're condemned to hell for being imperfect – but, thankfully, now you know the solution! If you read the Bible daily, repent, and go to Church, you're saved – and are offered the chance to ‘understand life and why each of us was created with a purpose to live out this life until eternal life'.

A rarer find imitated American currency with Abraham Lincoln on a $10,000 note and said, ‘Money can buy happiness, but no amount of money can save you from the grave'. How blunt! Both include the same part about Jesus rising from the grave and that ‘God will never let you down', so I imagine they're from the same ‘supplier'.

As someone raised religious, I'm familiar with this kind of guilt and shame. It's the ‘shotgun effect' – spread the message far and wide, and you're more likely to find someone ‘in need'. The euphemism ‘in need' covers up the true intention, which is to catch someone, somewhere, going through a crisis or depression in a state just vulnerable enough to believe that maybe religion is the cure.

Religion presenting itself as the end-all be-all solution to all life's problems is a comforting and simplistic worldview but can lead to awful dissonance. I walked past a Save the Children charity display where, multiple times, these ‘Free Tickets to Heaven' had been shoved under the window. The thought of someone littering this ‘guilt-fluff' and feeling good about ‘doing something positive', while actively distracting from a charity's direct action to lift kids out of poverty, is astounding.

Other religious tracts are less ‘friendly'-seeming – some A5 pages stamped with ‘Ekkaallam Church Wellington' that were left in my apartment hallway condemned yoga and other peace-finding practices by saying, ‘a medical test made recently on those who had been practicing transcendental meditation for over eighteen months revealed that they had twice as many psychological disorders as those who had not' but then reassuringly ended with ‘when you meet Jesus, the Prince of Peace…. Fear, worry and torment will simply vanish away from your heart'. Goodness!

I encourage anyone who sees religious propaganda in the streets to collect it up or throw it out – I don't want its presence normalised. If someone is struggling, the last thing they need is a promise that their problems will disappear if they just believe hard enough, or to read all about how they are condemned to hell.

However, if after all this you're still looking for admission to the pearly gates… I may have a few tickets spare 😊