I went to (a) church

Craig Shearer - 11 September 2023

At the prompting of Mark and Bronwyn during last week’s podcast episode, I attended a church meeting last evening. This was an event called “Lean In: Christianity and Politics - Meet the Candidates”. This was held at the Windsor Park Baptist Church - only a few kilometres away from my home. The venue itself was pretty un-chuchlike, in that it was previously the Windsor Park Tavern.

As we’re only a few weeks away from a New Zealand General Election, the campaigning is in full swing. So I went along to hear a bunch of candidates from some of the more prominent political parties, to hear how they responded to questions from Christians.

Actually, it was pretty-run-of-the-mill stuff. There were six political parties represented by a candidate from the local area (East Coast Bays, but the Green Party candidate was representing Te Tai Tokerau, which covers Auckland and Northland).

Disappointingly, or perhaps luckily, there was no hijacking of the meeting by any of the Freedoms Party candidates, who’ve recently been popping up unexpectedly at political meetings.

The parties represented were ACT, National, NZ First, Labour, TOP, and Greens.

The attendance was about 100 people, I think. And there was a bit of a range of ages, with a few people in their 20s sitting in a row behind me, but a big bunch of older folk sitting in the middle. I figured out by their behaviour and heckling that they were staunch National Party supporters.

The event ran for about two hours, with each of the six candidates being given a chance to introduce themselves and talk about their parties. Predictably, many of them stuck to the party line, as if following a script. I’ll probably reveal my own political leanings, but I did find that the National and ACT candidates seemed to be speaking in slogans rather than giving nuanced views on the questions. But, I guess that’s politics for you. I was certainly quite skeptical about some of the quoted statistics, but I’m not going to fact check everything they said.

The NZ First candidate was intriguing, being a retired GP. She started giving her views on the COVID response, and it bordered on her being a little down the rabbit hole, in my opinion. I know that there have been several NZ First candidates who’ve been identified as being conspiracy theorists, and we and the media had reported on this previously.

Representing Labour was their “baby MP” Naisi Chen. Bronwyn had talked about her on our last podcast episode and her (or her father’s) connections to their own church and possible links of the Chinese Student Association with the CCP. It’s of course difficult to judge, but listening to the talk she gave and answers given, she seemed genuine enough, in my opinion, if a little out of her depth when the obvious National Party hecklers started up!

After each candidate had given a brief introduction, the pastor running the event had a few questions that he’d fielded from the audience in advance. The first of which was around what the candidates considered to be the most pressing social issues. National and ACT naturally harped on about the cost of living crisis, and National, in particular emphasised getting education “back on track”, with their doing basics brilliantly policy, having young offenders go to bootcamps, and also talking about using phonics for teaching reading. Claims about our education system going backwards didn’t feel quite right to me, but again, I think that they were talking in slogans.

From a skeptic’s perspective, Chen, the Labour candidate, brought up issues around AI and its use to promote mis- and dis-information on social media, which I thought was a good point, but probably lost on most of the audience.

The questions continued, moving on to infrastructure. Typically, ACT and National were emphasising building roads, and Labour and the Greens were talking about public transport options.

Then came the chance for questions for the floor. The first up was an older gentleman who asked a climate change question. He was clearly in the denier camp, asking the candidates to define what gases were greenhouse gases, and why we should be doing anything when India and China “weren’t doing anything”. Happily, the candidates didn’t entertain his denialism, but there were differing levels of support for doing anything about climate change. The ACT candidate certainly bordered on agreeing with the questioner, talking about how NZ had only 0.25% of the economic output of the whole world, and he didn’t see why we should be trying to lead the world with our climate policies.

The pastor then specifically invited questions from younger members of the audience. A young woman stepped up and said she was quite concerned about crime. That gave the ACT guy the opportunity to state that everybody in prison is there voluntarily - implying that it was due to the choices they made. They seemed a pretty vast oversimplification of things, in my opinion, and he did get some pushback on this from the more left-leaning candidates.

Once Naisi Chen got up to speak, she was loudly, almost violently interrupted by a man in the audience who stated he used to work as a corrections officer and was assaulted in prison, and laid the blame squarely at the feet of Labour and the Greens. I don’t know the details of his unfortunate occurrence, but it seems a pretty long bow to draw to be able to blame political parties.

I liked that the TOP candidate was a former crown prosecutor, and stood up to correct some of the misinformation about how the government doesn’t have influence on sentencing decisions handed down by judges, and how the three strikes law was introduced without evidence that it would work.

At the end of the evening, I went and talked to the TOP candidate, as her party, in my opinion, seems to be the most evidence based. Unfortunately, they’re polling around the 2% party vote level, well short of the required 5% party vote required to make it into parliament. Their party leader, Raf Manji, is standing in the Ilam electorate in Christchurch, and, were he elected, the list MPs would ride in on his coattails, but alas, he seems to be polling in 3rd place at the moment. A hard ask!

The event had gone well past the allotted two hour time slot, but the pastor had to shut it down, to the apparent dismay of one guy, who thought that the pastor’s joking remark at the beginning of the evening about continuing until 10pm was serious. Nevertheless, the evening ended with a short Karakia. A lot of the audience stuck around afterwards to talk to the candidates.

All in all, it was an interesting evening. I’m not sure that it’s changed my opinion of which party I’m going to vote for - though I’m not yet sure which party that will be.

I was pleasantly surprised at how little it was a Christian event, despite being held in a church. The people seemed nice enough, for the most part - with one guy coming up to me before the event and introducing himself and letting me know about the refreshments available. I guess I was expecting a little more drama, and perhaps more probing into the candidates’ beliefs around God, but it was refreshingly devoid of that!