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Janet Moses, makatu, Maori, official religion, Pastor Luke Lee, popular religion, Racism, Trevor Mallard
There is no depression in New Zealand;
there are no sheep on our farms…
we have no racism…
The sentencing of five Maori for killing a 22-year old woman during a makatu (a curse-lifting ceremony, or “exorcism”) has brought out the closet (and not-so-closet) racists. MP Trevor Mallard entitled his post on the Labour Party blog, “It would have been prison if they weren’t Maori”. Mallard opines, “I am certain that a Pakeha exorcism that resulted in torture and death would result in a prison term – albeit not necessarily a long one. The fact that they weren’t sent to prison because they are Maori just doesn’t seem right to me.” With lame-duck comments like that, it makes me wonder when Mallard is going to give up politics altogether and switch to that talkback radio job that so suits his painfully shallow opinions. Kiwiblog‘s David Farrar (accompanied, unsurprisingly, by a good deal many other knee–jerk reactionists) agrees with Trevor Mallard and points out that the Korean Christian exorcist “Pastor Luke Lee got six years jail for an exorcism manslaughter in 2001.” Farrar adds, “While the cases are somewhat different it is hard to reconcile six years jail with zero years jail.”
What David Farrar has completely missed is the fact that the Court of Appeal later overturned Pastor Luke’s manslaughter conviction. Yet a manslaughter sentence was in fact imposed in the current case (although the facts are different, in that Pastor Luke’s exorcisee seems to have agreed to the procedure). And what should not be overlooked is that the court’s position on death-by-exorcism in the Pastor Luke case was never finally determined – because Pastor Luke was deported to Korea.
But more significant is the racist indignation that Maori exorcists might possibly be getting a better deal than Pakeha exorcists. All of the outcry and concern should be given a little context: the protests concern the very rare occurrence of death-by-exorcism! This is a very strange pissing contest: between claimants to Maori and Pakeha exorcists… “Oh – how dare ‘your’ exorcists get off light when ‘our’ exorcists might not!”
Another level of prejudice occurs in the attempt to distinguish between a proper makatu and an improper makatu. The sentencing required the five convicted exorcists to learn more about their culture, by taking a course in officially recognised Maori culture and religion:
“Justice Simon France today told the siblings that their understanding and knowledge of their culture was not complete.”
What? Who does have a “complete” understanding and knowledge of their (wider) culture? And which culture are we talking about? What makes the makatu-practising culture of the five convicted exorcists less legitimate that that of the ‘proper’ and ‘recognized’ authorities? At the base of this sentencing is the presupposition that ‘official religion’ is legitimate and valid and excuses actions done within it, while those of ‘popular’ and ‘unofficial’ religion are automatically illegitimate and invalid. The same prejudice was evident in the Pastor Luke case. As Pastor Luke was a member of a popular pentecostal church, not a manstream denomination, his actions were dismissed as those of a “cult” (as used in its pejorative popular sense). In the present case, the judge went so far as to deny that the practice was ‘religious’, let alone an official religious act:
“[Justice Simon France] rejected the notion that they had been acting out a religious or cultural ritual.”
Well, that’s funny: the five exorcists certainly thought they were carrying out a religious ritual (a makatu). But according to the Official Word of the New Zealand Judiciary, apparently in the absence of official backing, people cannot possibly be acting religiously. All this type of misguided prejudice in favour of ‘official religion’ comes to grief in the face of the fact that the major practitioners of Christian exorcism today come from Christianity’s very largest denomination: Roman Catholicism.
But what, if anything is the driver, the underlying power-interest that makes one aspect of culture defensible and another indefensible? Possibly only the fact that ‘mainstream’ Maori and churches may be coerced into acting in accordance with the hegemonic interests of the State and of the power-interests within tribal iwi. The State only puts up with rival power to the extent that it can be safely assimilated. That’s the crucial difference here. But an exorcism undertaken by a Catholic Bishop or a recognised tohunga has no greater intrinsic worth (or lack of worth) than one carried out by a Pentecostal or local Wainuiomata Maori family.
The Dunedin School 
Awesome. Russell McCutcheon argues, rightly in my opinion, that throwing around distinctions between “religion” and “cult,” and similar sorts of pejorative distinctions, tells us more about ourselves than about the people we’re pretending to talk about.
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan argues in The Impossibility of Religious Freedom that when the state determines what is religious or not, there is often an implicit test for orthodoxy functioning; I thought of this because you mentioned the way something is rendered indefensible because it didn’t have “official backing.” Of course, if that test for orthodoxy were brought out into the light of day and shown to be what it is, it probably wouldn’t pass muster. It only works when it stays hidden behind a normative vocabulary.
Miss, thanks for telling me about both of those. They each look very worthwhile to follow up.
Tyrone,
You’ve hit on something important here. There is a long tradition in both the popular press (though it is debatable if there is such a thing anymore) and in legal circles to summarily judge the actions of anyone involved with any non-mainstream religious practice as both deluded and irrational. If someone – John Walker Lindh for example – joins with a radical Islamist group, or if someone joins a religious movement like Heaven’s Gate, or if someone commits an act of ritual self-harm or ritual suicide, these people are by default acting either under false pretences or are in other ways not responsible for their actions. Certainly, and more importantly, such actions are not considered to be ‘authentically’ religious. This judgement often comes from people who would in most other circumstances be appalled at the idea of passing judgement on someone else’s religion.
This came very clearly to light in the 1970s and 1980s when there was a rush of new religious movements that drew young followers from the upper middle classes. Such was the dismissal of the idea that the decision to join the Moonies (for example) could be rational that some of these young people were kidnapped and sent for ‘deprogramming’ – at times in a very violent manner. All of this is all the more chilling when we consider that there has never been any convincing evidence that brainwashing of any sort has ever been practised successfully in the real world. The same sort of outright dismissal is evident today in regards to those who commit acts of sacrificial violence that are so easily labelled as ‘terrorism’.
Such are the negative connotations of words like ‘cult’ that, within the academic study of religion, we’ve been forced to adopt terms like ‘new religious tradition’ when discussing newer forms of religion that exist outside the normative institutional framework of the more established religions.
Oddly enough, as missivesfrommarx hints at, it is still perfectly acceptable to believe in the most patent nonsense – transubstantiation, Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’, that American president Barack Obama (who used federal money to bail out privately-owned banks and financial institutions) is a socialist – if they fall within an officially-recognised framework. Without the backing of the Catholic Church, the global structure of consumer capitalism, or the Republican Party and the American mass media, such things would be open to outright criticism or condemnation in a way that they are not in practice. It is not perhaps too much of stretch to say that the older an idea or practice is, the more likely it is to be accepted as authentically religious. This is true even amongst people who would regard themselves as secular, or even in the case of outright secularism. In a very real sense, this is conformism at its worst.
There is a decision to be made here, legally as well as culturally: if there is to religious tolerance, it needs to be actual religious tolerance and not the acceptance of those religious ideas, acts, and ritual practices that happen to conform with what the dominant culture understands as authentically religious.
Well of course people can worship whatever ghosts they want and practice whatever rituals they want regarding their ghosts, goblins, demons, fairies, gods, goddesses or supernatural concepts they believe in. That isn’t the issue.
The issue is whether in practising this, in good faith and belief (even if mistaken, which by a reasonable objective measure, all religion is) it can mitigate a grotesquely violent and prolonged assault. I couldn’t care less if it was Maori animism, Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism or belief in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus – what matters are two points:
– The act committed;
– Whether the act committed was undertaken intentionally.
The act was torture, it was grievous assault causing death. It was done intentionally, the people who committed it were not insane, nor under any duress.
That a group of adults can essentially get away with inflicting such violence upon a distressed woman, with minimal punishment, is a sad precedent. It more seriously risks claims by others who are violent, that the act was religious and for the good of the person.