Decolonisation in Late Twentieth Century New Zealand

James Belich famously argued that New Zealand history after 1840 can be divided into three great epochs: progressive colonisation to the 1880s; recolonisation to the 1970s; and decolonisation thereafter. Before the 1970s, he argues, New Zealand was a ‘tight society… homogenous, conformist, masculist, egalitarian and monocultural’.Footnote ⁵ Most New Zealanders of European descent identified as ‘Better Britons: a distinctive Kiwi branch of the British tree… whose superiority to the original was demonstrated in war, sport and the climbing of mountains’.Footnote ⁶ Maintaining continuity with its colonial parentage was reinforced by demographic and economic dependence. The population at 1945 was one of the most ethnically homogenous of all European settler societies with 93.57% originated from Great Britain.Footnote ⁷ The country’s ‘protein economy’ exported to the metropole not only the majority of its farming produce but much of its intellectual or artistic talent. Despite the vast geographic separation from Mother England, white New Zealand imagined itself ‘a virtual Scotland’ – racially harmonized, fair and egalitarian, and built on a bedrock of practical, if not muscular, Christianity.

New Zealand Anglican polity prior to 1960s reinforced the transplanted nature of its colonial origins. ‘Anglicanism seemed largely coterminous with the British Empire’, writes Kevin Ward of the period 1880–1960.Footnote ⁸ ‘Its hierarchy, like the colonial service, was overwhelmingly manned by British people rather than locals’. While a smaller indigenous form of Anglicanism prevailed among Māori,Footnote ⁹ white Anglicans continued to pray in the language of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and self-identified as the Church of England in New Zealand. While never formally an established church, Anglicanism retained priviledged status as the nation’s largest denomination and as a symbol of cultural establishment.Footnote ¹⁰ Its ‘English comprehensive mentality’, writes Davidson, made it both an inadvertent agent for progressive colonisation and resistant to any change in status as the church of the colony.Footnote ¹¹ By the late 1960s, however, this establishment, conformist, and colonial sentiment became an object of rebellion for the children come of age in the sixties.

National historians often emphasize the rapid restructuring of New Zealand society following the economic reforms of the mid-1980s – market deregulation, the collapse of the social compact, opening up the country to global markets and the neoliberal thinking of the New Right.Footnote ¹² Yet, as Belich contends, the deeper shift began a decade earlier with the onset of decolonisation.Footnote ¹³ A post-materialist generation, tertiary-educated and influenced by the global counterculture and resurgent indigenous movements, brought about a number of reassessments in the national consciousness. Raised in relative security and affluence, this post-war generation were prepared to end its subordinate status with Britain and assert its independence on a more issues-based platform, specifically on the war in Vietnam, nuclear weapons, environmentalism, gender equality, and racism. Driving these changes was an assertion of nationalistic sentiment, argues Belich. While other countries had anti-war, anti-nuclear, and anti-racism protests, these were all ‘exceptionally early and strong’ in New Zealand, suggesting ‘a confused and confusing nationalism, or at least a response to a vaguely sensed decolonisation’.Footnote ¹⁴

In contemporary usage, decolonisation refers to the reclamation of indigenous systems of knowledge, agency, and soverienty displaced by settler colonialism, especially over land and resources.Footnote ¹⁵ This understanding was apparent from the 1970s through Māori activist groups such as Nga Tamatoa (‘young warriors’), whose leaders, influenced by American Black Power leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, drew national attention to the history of land confiscation and indigenous displacement. Memorable demonstrations included the 1975 hikoi (march) under the slogan ‘not one more acre’ and the 506-day occupation of a proposed subdevelopment at Bastion Pt (Takaparawhā, 1977–78). Yet, scholars like Belich point also to the distinct ways in which decolonisation occurs within settler populations. For example, through rendering a more truthful account of New Zealand history, cultivating a more relational identity grounded in Aotearoa, and rejecting the homogeneity deeply embedded in the settler imaginary.Footnote ¹⁶

As the tightly woven fabric of white New Zealand society began to fray under the strain of increasing diversity and a resurgent indigenous culture, the settler church struggled with how to relate to these changes. Denominational loyalties also gave way in this period as many sought refuge in new expressions of Christian life, particularly the burgeoning charismatic movement, while others joined the chorus of those leaving the church altogether.Footnote ¹⁷ Church leaders sought unity through ecumenical ventures, even embarking on a failed ‘Plan for Union’ to establish a national church,Footnote ¹⁸ yet divisions only intensified between the liberal, ecumenical, and socially progressive Christian leadership and the more staid conservativism of the majority of parishioners. Against this backdrop of ecclesial uncertainty and social transformation, I suggest that one particular figure emerged as an icon of priestly witness uniquely suited to an activist and decolonising age.

The 1981 Springbok Tour: A Case Study of Priestly Activism and Pākehā Identity

The image of George Armstrong – if not the name – became synonymous with the protest movements of the late 1960s to 1980s. The most enduring image shows him, clerical collar visible, being forcibly removed by two police officers for his part in disrupting a 1981 rugby match with the visiting white-only South African team.Footnote ¹⁹ That clerical collar symbolized his priestly service amid one of the nation’s most charged confrontations with white racism. The Springbok Tour, widely condemned as sportswashing Apartheid, drew moral outrage at home. Despite international pressure by agencies like the UN to boycott all sporting contacts with South Africa, the near sacral game of rugby went ahead.Footnote ²⁰ Earlier tours had also incited protest, including the 1960s tour that excluded Māori and the 1970 tour where they were admitted under the pretext of being ‘honorary whites’ or ‘brown Britons’.Footnote ²¹

Coverage of the 1981 Tour is extensive, revealing a deeply divided country.Footnote ²² Lasting 56 days, over 150,000 people had demonstrated in over 200 protests; almost 2000 arrests were made; and the cost to the government of defending the tour reached $7,200,000.Footnote ²³ For the church’s part, mainline denominational leaders were united in their opposition, calling on the government to take a principled stand against the ‘heresy’ of apartheid.Footnote ²⁴ Armstrong, then secretary for the National Association of Clergy, joined Anglican seminarians from St Johns Theological College at anti-tour demonstrations under a large white banner that read, ‘We from St Johns College… say no to the tour’. When the Springboks arrived at Auckland International Airport, they organized a Eucharist service at the terminal using a liturgy that directly challenged the theology of racial apartheid. Other members of the St Johns community contributed through ‘street theatre’ under the group Artists Against Apartheid.

On the morning of the match at Rugby Park, Hamilton, after a 5:30am chapel service, St Johns members travelled down in support of Operation Everest, a campaign organized by HART (Halt All Rugby Tours). As the protest swelled to more than 8000, a break-away group of a few hundred breached the field, including a small handful of Anglican ordinands in full clerical robes brandishing a large wooden cross. A stand-off with police ensued. Another Newspaper image captures Armstrong standing before a wall of police in riot gear, arms outstretched in pleading motion, protesters behind him circled by batton-bearing police and incensed sports fans chanting, ‘off, off, off’, and ‘smash their heads in’.Footnote ²⁵

Sensing the volatility, Armstrong drew on his priestly formation. He appealed directly to the police, reminding them they were neighbours and fellow churchgoers to the protesters. Then, amid the standoff, he celebrated a makeshift Eucharist service for those gathered on the pitch – regardless of who was baptized or not – affirming their shared humanity with each other and their brethren overseas suffering under apartheid. Always visible in clerical collar, Armstrong insisted he was in such moments always as a priest, bearing a unique calling and before a watching world.

Armstrong reminisced often about the symbolism of that day, particularly the wooden cross carried by the students. Constructed the previous day at one of the St Johns residences and blessed by then Auckland Bishop, Paul Reeves, the Anglican activists had consciously entered into the protest in clerical robes under the ‘discipline and authority of the cross’.Footnote ²⁶ For Armstrong, this exemplified Christian discipleship. As Christ had carried his cross before a crowd baying for his sacrifice, so the church would drag this cross into the nation’s own moment of trial. The cross also became contested ground as pro-tour supporters tried to seize it. According to Armstrong, this struggle reflected the fight to ‘bring the New Zealand population and its churches to new perceptions of the issues of racism and other inhumanities’ being perpetuated.Footnote ²⁷ When the police advanced on the protestors, all other demonstrators rallied behind the cross such that the priests and their cross became the frontline in one of New Zealand’s starkest confrontations with white racism. Presciently, the same cross would later reappear in demonstrations highlighting Māori grievances and Pākehā shame over breaches of Treaty obligations – issues that still shape national debate.Footnote ²⁸

The Hamilton protest succeeded – the match was cancelled – but the 81 Tour as a whole is remembered for the civil unrest it unleashed. As Armstrong was escorted from the field, an outraged bystander ripped his clerical collar from him. This paled in comparison to the violence metted out on other protestors. Spectators turned on demonstrators with crowbars, bottles, and boots, even attacking demonstrators homes well into the night.Footnote ²⁹ Vicarages and church halls became barricaded first-aid stations, which made them a target of raiding mobs. Buildings associated with anti-tour protests were routinely firebombed, including the St Johns campus dormitories. Escalating tensions was the country’s foremost populist Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, who referred to the ‘idealistic people and clergymen’ as ‘fascists of the extreme left’ and declaring, ‘They are not on our side and we do not want them’.Footnote ³⁰

Reactions within the church mirrored the nation’s divisions. Parishioners penned furious letters to bishops against clergy who mixed faith and politics, many singling out Armstrong to be removed from the teaching of clergy. The College’s Board of Governors – composed of all diocesan bishops – issued a series of ‘questions and condemnations’ to the faculty.Footnote ³¹ The strength of feeling on both sides can be heard in an exchange between an elderly parishioner expressing deep embarrassment at seeing her church marching on television and a Māori priest, Wally Te Ua, who was part of the St Johns group at Rugby Park. He wrote that while their group acted out of solidarity with ‘the oppression of Black people in South Africa’, more pressing to him was the ‘repugnant odour of white racism within the church in NZ’. The ‘time has arrived’ continued Te Ua, ‘to show the world, country, the church, that some of us are committed as Christians to the overthrow of racist elements within society. If that offends you, then perhaps it means that you yourself have never really accepted Maoris and Islanders, and non-whites as equals’.Footnote ³²

For Armstrong, the tour’s violence stripped away any illusion of New Zealand’s racial innocence. Speaking months later at the WCC Consultation of Churches in Manila, he declared that the Pākehā church had awoken to the ‘awesome scale and problem of our current moral and spiritual crisis as white people’, that is, ‘the unmovable stance of white privilege’.Footnote ³³ That large segments of the nation’s public were shamefully prepared to ignore the racialized and colonized oppression in South Africa in defense of their right to watch rugby, painfully exposed the racialized attitudes within New Zealand society. Against this, ‘rebelling pakehas have distanced themselves from their own kind’, he writes, entering into a ‘civil war of the spirit’.Footnote ³⁴ Echoing Māori and indigenous Pacific delegates at the conference, Armstrong argued that a genuine commitment to racial justice in South Africa required a parallel commitment to decolonize Aotearoa and for Pākehā to embrace a ‘South Pacific’ identity. ‘White New Zealand’, he concluded, ‘has a long road to tread before forging a truly South Pacific identity’.Footnote ³⁵

Many commentators have since noted that the passions stirred up by the tour were not solely, or even principally, about racism in South Africa, much less was it about sporting contracts, but rather over varying ideas about New Zealand and the values it would embrace in shaping a national identity. By extension, varying ideas about the church’s public role were at issue. Rugby in particular, introduced to New Zealand in 1870, had long served as ‘a vehicle for colonial cockiness’ and a source of preserving the ties between male crew culture and its rural, colonial roots.Footnote ³⁶ Those who defended the tour represented this older, semi-colonial side of New Zealand; those who protested embodied a younger, post-colonial generation seeking a different future. Muldoon’s biographer summarized the clash as:

Armstrong’s activism stood at the intersection of theology, protest, and decolonisation. Presenting at the Joint Working Group of New Zealand theologians a year after the Springbok Tour, he urged the churches to undertake a project of ‘white consciousness-raising’ in response to pervasive racism in society and within the churches themselves.Footnote ³⁸ Armstrong had already laid the groundwork for such a project, having been involved since the early 1970s in anti-racism workshops as part of the National Council of Churches (NCC).Footnote ³⁹ He proposed that the Pākehā church embark on developing a ‘white liberation theology’ that could cultivate a Christian identity to deal with its historical guilt through a ‘theology of repentance’.Footnote ⁴⁰ A more particularly Anglican contribution to this project can be witnessed in Armstrong’s own activism whereby his priestly presence reimagined Anglican ministry as ‘public liturgy’. He envisioned the transformation of Pākehā New Zealand society in liturgical terms as a kind of ‘sociodrama’ or ‘public liturgy’ being played out on the national stage.

Public Liturgy and National Renewal

When appointed to the Faculty of St Johns in 1964, Armstrong was an ardent supporter of the trends in ‘secular theology’: a movement that endorsed sweeping reassessments in theology and church practice informed by society’s acceptance of non-religious modes of interpretation.Footnote ⁴¹ Influenced by thinkers like Harvey Cox, Colin Williams, and John Robinson, Armstrong believed that the steady march towards disenchantment and desacralisation of church and state would result in a liberation from tired dogmas and parochial attachments. The church, he argued, should be the ‘avant garde’ of the secular process, exemplifying a ‘holy worldliness’ by throwing off the ‘relics of semi-sacral authoritarian hierarchies’.Footnote ⁴²

Yet after a decade of protest activity, Armstrong’s optimism in renewing the church through secular engagement had given way to critique. He confessed to a profound ‘ambiguity’ with secularity on account of its ‘demonic’ potential for cultivating a culture of death and alienation.Footnote ⁴³ Armstrong’s earlier confidence in the interpretive frameworks of Western Enlightenment thought – central to secular theology – gave way to a growing commitment to liberation theology, which foregrounded the structural injustices and imperial legacies embedded within Western traditions. From the early 1970s he advocated for a ‘resistance community’ engaged in forms of ‘public christian liturgy’ – acts of worship and witness performed in open defiance to the powers of death.Footnote ⁴⁴

Armstrong’s first experience of protest emerged during the Vietnam War. On Good Friday, 1968, rather than attend Easter preparations, he and a group of eight St Johns students decided to join the Anglican Procession of Witness to the Cathedral carrying placards reading ‘Christ Died for Viet Cong’, ‘Christ Died for Anzacs’, and ‘Make Love Not War’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Bishop Eric Gowing later instructed police to remove the protest faction, explaining to reporters that the church had gathered for ‘silent contemplation of the cross’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Armstrong’s group, however, were not intending to cause disruption but rather to make visible the Christ who died for all, including the so-called communist enemy. The incident became a theological epiphany for Armstrong – his ‘coming out of the sanctuary closet as an activist street priest’Footnote ⁴⁷ – and it prompted sustained reflection on how public worship could embody prophetic critique in solidarity with a generation’s own cry for justice.Footnote ⁴⁸

Anglican worship describes itself as ‘public’ worship, notes Armstrong, a feature that once conferred a ‘privileged if questionable role’ within the nation.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such worship can propogate a civil religion and a sanitized gospel by cloaking it in decorum and patriotic sentiment. ANZAC commemorations, for example, can fall into this trap.Footnote ⁵⁰ The problem is not in the public character of worship however, but in making the nation rather than the gospel central to the story being told through the liturgy. By contrast, Armstrong recalls how liturgies formed in protests press its participants towards the concrete realities the gospel names. Rather than preserving or sanctifying the status quo, they perform a counter-politics by pointing to a ‘liberative Christianity’ where the body politic proleptically realise ‘institutional renewal throughout its political, economic and cultural forms’.Footnote ⁵¹ In other words, public liturgies are acts of theological truth-telling within public space, displaying the full political and liberational implications of the gospel.

Central to Armstrong’s theology is his interpretation of public liturgies in contexts beyond the organized church. While the liturgies of the church are concerned with how bodies are ordered in space and time to reflect God’s creative and redemptive purposes, they are also in Armstrong’s understanding an attempt to convey ‘a divine interpretation of the meaning of the public direction of the nation’.Footnote ⁵² That is, they are not contextually neutral but are always drawing on the language, struggle, and hope of a particular politico-historical community to speak to their moment. ‘We were engaged’, Armstrong writes, in ‘a kind of large-scale staged performance… a very public liturgy spelled out not in an ecclesial book of common prayer but in the life of a whole national society wrestling with its own most deep seated demons and surrounded by its most remarkable angels’.Footnote ⁵³ Public liturgies – whether in cathedrals or street protests – are hybrid events, merging political context with divine address. This makes liturgies more politically loaded than commonly believed while also inscribing questions of national identity within the very practices by which the church participates in God’s reconciliation of the world.Footnote ⁵⁴ In a decolonising New Zealand, this meant confronting white settler attachments to imperial power and racial supremacy and reimagining the nation anew.

Throughout the 1970s, Armstrong experimented with various forms of protest liturgies, most notably through his leadership of the Peace Squadron. Inspired by a Quaker flotilla that blockaded U.S. shipment of arms during the East Bengalese liberation war, Armstrong organized for a similar flotilla of peace boats in 1973 to blockade New Zealand ports from nuclear ships seeking entry. The stated aim was to so ‘fill the harbour with life that there would no room for death’. The flotillas – comprized of yachts, kayaks, and fishing boats – formed living barricades against visiting nuclear ships, which he termed ‘Death Ships’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Before one such action in 1976, opposing the visit of the USS Long Beach, Armstrong celebrated Eucharist at Takaparawhā Reserve, overlooking the harbour. Afterwards, children led a procession down to the water’s edge where a Māori priest blessed the harbour. These rituals, conceived as ‘public liturgy’, fused ecological, Indigenous, and theological imagination into a single act of resistance. They also formed part of what Armstrong called the ‘hidden curriculum’ of St Johns College, where students learned theology through participation in the nation’s moral struggles.Footnote ⁵⁶ Practicing local forms of resistance, the College declared itself a nuclear-free zone, an action that was taken up by churches, local councils, and residents associations around the country.

By the late 1970s, the anti-nuclear movement became more organized. In 1978, non-governmental and religious groups met in Suva to draft the ‘People’s Charter for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific. Armstrong attended as a theological advisor and later helped compose a nuclear-free constitution for Vanuatu. His advocacy earned him the title of ‘nuclear-free ambassador’ and secured a rare convergence between faith-based protest and emerging Pacific independence movements.Footnote ⁵⁷

By 1984, when New Zealand formally adopted a nuclear-free policy, 65% of its citizens lived in self-declared nuclear-free zones, and nearly 60% opposed visits by nuclear-armed ships.Footnote ⁵⁸ Armstrong’s contribution to the anti-nuclear movement was just one of many, yet his enduring witness over two decades showed how public liturgy could influence the direction of the nation. His acts of liturgical witness reminded New Zealanders that nuclear apocalypse could never belong within salvation history.

In December 1980, Armstrong attended a gathering on Block Island with theologians William Stringfellow, Walter Wink, and Dan Berrigan to reflect on faith amid the ascendant ‘moral majority’ associated with Reagan’s America.Footnote ⁵⁹ In his notes from the gathering, Armstrong described the church as ‘a parody of itself’, seduced by false messiahs of success and violence. Stringfellow spoke of a ‘resistance ministry’ grounded in confession and repentance for the church’s complicity with death-dealing powers. He recounted his own trial for harbouring Berrigan, during which his bishop held a public communion service outside the courthouse and then dined openly with him before his accusers – an act of subversive pastoral care. For Armstrong, such gestures exemplified the radical vocation of public liturgy: to enact ordinary sacramental life in ways that expose and redeem the world’s violence.

In these reflections, Armstrong found confirmation of his lifelong conviction: that the church’s primary task is to perform the gospel publicly, not merely proclaim it. In doing so, the priest becomes both celebrant and activist, making visible a counter-order rooted in repentance, justice, and peace.

Armstrong’s Operative Ecclesiology

George Armstrong’s tenure as the nation’s foremost priestly activist unfolded amid a particularly tumultuous period in New Zealand’s history as the country was navigating its place in the globalized, decolonial era. A post-war generation was responding to the moral failure of society’s major institutions across a range of issues, from an immoral war in Vietnam, to the manufacture of weapons of total annihilation, to racist policies in sport, land acquisition, and education. Underlying these transgressions was a latent sentiment that Pākehā New Zealand had yet to fully reckon with its (re)colonial past. With its orgins in the colonial era, the Anglican Church was deeply implicated in these reassessments of the national identity.

Armstrong’s contribution to a reimagined priesthood as a public ministry of protest and national renewal has a unique place in the New Zealand story. His activism was integrally part of his ecclesial vision, a church that is both agitator and prophetic interpreter of the moment. For his part, he redefined the priestly calling in service of the liberation of Pākehā Christianity. Perhaps what stands out in Armstrong’s example, given the antipathy towards institutional structure, is his vision of a church oriented not to its own institutional self-preservation but to prophetic solidarity and repentance. His example highlights an ecclesiality nimble enough to go where the movement needs it to be and loose enough to identify its own. Anticipating later moves to reconfigure the church in ‘liquid modernity’, Armstrong’s exhibits a mode of doing church beyond the usual boundaries of space, creed, order, or membership in order that it might be a visible sign of divine disruption.Footnote ⁶⁰

Liturgy in particular becomes a form of theatre as something to be enacted in the face of worldly confrontation with the powers of death, like the entrance of nuclear warships into a harbour or a racially-defined sporting match or a nightly procession through the streets at a time of military invasion.Footnote ⁶¹ In each of these politically-charged moments, Armstrong ensured that his priestly orders were fulfilled, although hardly in ways that were orderly or with members who expected to be playing a liturgical role. Armstrong’s operative ecclesiology was to inhabit the protest and so discover who would be enlisted in God’s drama of recreating the world anew. He models a way of being church that is both responsive to and generated by public action. The sacraments hence became tangible embodiments of grace in the midst of contested space.Footnote ⁶²

Responses to Armstrong’s priestly activism galvanized attitudes towards the church from both within and without. Despite the secularising turn in public life, protest movements welcomed his priestly presence, creating generous space for his liturgical and leadership contributions. His liturgical interventions conferred a sense of moral legitimacy to their cause and provided another form of resistance to authorities and officials – forcing police to break-up a Eucharist or seize a cross exposed the moral stakes of power. He also introduced a spiritual and theological framework for interpreting both the structural changes being sought and the smaller signs that helped the movement endure. Even New Zealanders who disagreed with the protest causes found Armstrong’s public priesthood theatrically and spiritually compelling: a church for the people.

Armstrong’s reception within his own church was significantly more mixed. He was loved, admired, and followed by successive generations of priests-in-training at St Johns Theological College, some of whom would emulate his disruptive example in protests of their own or, in the case of those who went on to become Bishops and Archbishops, would embark on an ambitious restructure of the Anglican Church in New Zealand in ways that would consciously embed a decolonising framework.Footnote ⁶³ Other students found his teaching too ‘confrontational’, criticising him of politicising theology, woefully preparing them for ordinary parish duties, and introducing an ‘atmosphere of tension and distrust’.Footnote ⁶⁴

While exercising an outsized influence through St Johns, Armstrong was a divisive figure in the wider Province. He faced frequent opposition over his attempts to remake the church for a decolonial, activist era. His public theology, heavy in the mould of liberal and liberation influences, were criticized for rapidly advancing the demise of Christian traditionalism and conservative morality. Eventually, opposition from conservative quarters led to his departure from St Johns in 1986, despite significant episcopal support.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet dismissal proved only a minor setback for someone who viewed themselves as priest to a congregation increasingly beyond institutional – and colonial – Anglicanism.