Māori atheists say Christian colonization helped push them away from the faith

New research dives into why Māori people are ditching Christianity in record numbers

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In New Zealand, more than half (53.5%) of the Māori population have no religious affiliation, according to the 2018 census. That was a huge leap from the 36.5% of Māori who said the same thing in 2006, and those numbers came at the expense of Christianity (regardless of denomination), which dropped from 46.2% to 29.9% in the same time frame.

(Some researchers have said this data should be taken with a giant grain of salt because “up to 30% of Maori were missed by the Census 2018 enumeration.”)

But even if the numbers are off, something’s clearly happening. What’s causing that shift away from organized religion?

In the United States, we have a sense of the answers. A recent PRRI survey found the the biggest justifications Secular Americans gave for leaving their childhood religions included, in descending order:

• No longer believing in the religious teachings (67%)

• Anti-LGBTQ bigotry (47%)

• Their families not taking religion all that seriously (41%)

• Their belief that religion harmed their mental health (32%)

• Clergy sex abuse scandals (31%)

• Their congregations becoming too political (20%)

Obviously, people can have more than one reason for ditching organized religion, which is why those numbers don’t add up to 100%.

But are those the same reasons Māori are leaving religion, too? We never really had a strong answer for that… until now.

Māori people (screenshot via YouTube)

Researchers Masoumeh (Sara) Rahmani, Peter Adds, and Rebekah Senanayakea just published a paper investigating this in Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online. What they found is that Māori have very different reasons—dark reasons—for walking away from religion.

To gather their information, the researchers spoke with 16 secular Māori to dip a toe into an understanding of the culture when it comes to how they see religion. In many cases, religious is embedded in the culture, which means walking away from religion can be interpreted as walking away from Māori identity. At the same time, however, there are people who believe that ditching the religion of their Christian colonizers will give them a better opportunity to explore their ancestral heritage.

Before European contact, the researchers say, Māori were polytheistic. As outsiders began to invade Aotearoa (New Zealand), they brought their Christianity with them. Some reports say that, in the 1850s, “between 60% and 90% of Māori identified as Christian.” (Those numbers may be exaggerated.) All the more reason to figure out why Māori are abandoning the faith and what implications that might have.

In the case of these subjects, some thoughts about religion sprang up more than others. The idea that Christianity was the religion of the colonizers—and why should they have a continuing allegiance to it?—was a running theme. It emerged, the researchers say, “in reference to the Christian mission in Aotearoa [New Zealand], assimilation projects and the systematic oppression of Māori people and culture.”

As one participant explained:

… if I didn’t have any other reasons, that would be the reason that I would never sit in the room with Christianity… it was a tool of decimation ... when I see my own family bowing down to that tool, I just want to run around and shake everybody. ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’

Christianity was also seen by some as a “foreign” religion and therefore not as welcoming.

They brought up religious hypocrisy, faith-based bigotry, and the patriarchal nature of Christianity. They also mentioned having general religious doubts. But they also called out how Christianity’s claim to exclusivity (no different from other religions) usually involved demeaning their culture. Christians view indigenous beliefs as not merely incorrect, but “evil” or “Satanic.” For them, being pro-Christian implies being anti-Māori.

But even when they considered Christianity on its own terms, and rejected it for the same reasons many other people do (because it’s not true) it led to rising tensions in their Māori community. That’s partly because when they cast aside belief in the supernatural, it meant rejecting many traditional Māori beliefs as well.

One thing remains the same: There’s stigma associated with being secular.

Nearly half of the participants in this research experienced some form of discrimination and/or felt marginalised and burdened by societal expectations stemming largely from stereotypes.

To put it another way, some participants were accused by other Māori of not being True Māori™ because they said they didn’t believe in a god. Atheism, to many people, was seen as a “white thing.” It didn’t help that New Zealand’s government, in an effort to rectify past wrongs, are now paying more homage to Māori… which means recognizing a certain brand of spirituality that these non-religious Māori also reject. One older participant complained about how universities and government agencies seemed to have an unwritten rule about this: “To demonstrate your true adherence of being Māori,” he said, “you must be able to do these things and behave in these ways.”

Because of comments like that, the researchers conclude that “Māori atheism is, to an extent, politically motivated.” It’s a rejection of colonialism and cultural Christian values that go against their own traditional ways. The religion has illegitimate authority, they explain, which is why many Māori are now pushing back.

This research isn’t comprehensive. It can’t be. There are limitations to what you can learn from 16 people. Māori atheists (who were interviewed for this paper) are going to hold different views from Māori “Nones,” for example. But Sara Rahmani, one of the researchers, told me in an email that she hopes this creates a foundation for further research, like doing a “larger collaborative study of Indigenous religious change.”

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Rahmani, M., Adds, P., & Senanayake, R. (2024). Māori atheism: a decolonising project? Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1177083X.2024.2333544

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Note: This research was conducted in part with a grant awarded by Queen’s University Belfast as part of the Explaining Atheism program. I serve as a media advisor on that program.

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