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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
Some scholars, like the New Zealand church historian Peter Lineham, have argued that “church and state have been bound to each other in an unequal co-dependency” throughout New Zealand's history. In this partnership the state has always been the stronger partner, with the church having an increasingly smaller role as time goes on. In other words, the state has become more secular. Such a thesis must, however, be qualified. The church does continue to have an important role in relationship to the state in contemporary New Zealand, especially in the provision of social services. This, in fact, becomes a particularly significant difference from the relationship the church had with the state in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. State aid for education and even for social services was a sectarian minefield and any support was eschewed by the state. However, while more state support for the church in the second half of the century became a significant qualification to ”secularization theory,” neo-liberalism, rationalist economics and the consequent changes to the New Zealand state since 1984 have now raised questions even about this aspect of state support of churches. This paper explores the various types of government support for the Church in New Zealand this century, how that support has waxed and waned, and how now the future holds for the Church as a new century approaches.
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