Because our modern world system emerged within world-wide contexts, we must consider how founding relationships that established it reflect global interconnectedness of their own era. Douglas Sturm has written, “History is a process of new formations. What we are and what we shall become are not givens. They are results of many relations in which we are engaged and whose character we affect, in however small a degree, by the manner of our participation.” Too often this relational perspective has been ignored in propounding origins and fundamental relationships of our modern world. For over five hundred years, for example, Eurocentrism has betrayed indebtedness to Renaissance hubris. Further, contemporary memories of our relational past are laced with policies and perspectives of forebears who constituted nation states. These processes entailed “inventing traditions” post facto, while also vesting collective memories with [hi]stories on behalf of national dignity and imperial stature. Even as false memories have been used for socializing children into citizens, and for motivating troops and voters, they also render indispensable historical understandings problematical. Sometimes there are hints of such fabrications in paradoxical impressions. Edward Lucie-Smith muses: “Granted that piracy is really no more than robbery at sea, how did the crime come to acquire the aura of sinister glamour that still clings to it, an aura which sets the pirate apart from other and more commonplace malefactors?” Piracy's “aura of sinister glamour” is not confined to tropes like Blackbeard, the Jolly Roger, or Long John Silver. “Piracy” has clouded Asian history and rationalized European incursions, at least since the Portuguese captured the fabulous port city of Melaka in 1511.

The Bible is generally recognized as the foundation and point of departure for later Jewish and Christian religious and moral understandings. Nevertheless, both conservative and liberal schools within these traditions have tended to assume that biblical religion has to do only with humankind. Much of Western secular philosophy likewise has been pre-occupied exclusively with the human situation. In recent years, many theologians and ethicists have begun to trace the roots of emerging environmental concerns back to biblical sources. Several excellent studies have resulted from this movement. None, however, has focused on biblical laws and covenants.

Commonly, biblical laws are thought to refer solely to Israel's relation with God (or Yahweh) and the structuring of relationships within the Israelite community. The term “covenant” generally refers to those reported occasions in biblical times when God designated Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their descendants, as his particular people, and laid upon them certain obligations, typically in the form of laws. Yet a great many biblical laws refer to treatment of animals, the land, trees, and vegetation. And two major biblical covenants embrace not only the people of Israel, but all human beings and all living creatures.

Somewhere near the heart of much recent liberal political theory is the claim that if the state restricts an agent's liberty, its restrictions should have some rationale that is defensible to each of those whose liberty is constrained. Liberals are committed to “the requirement that all aspects of the social should either be made acceptable or be capable of being made acceptable to every last individual.” In a pluralistic culture, there are many claims which are particularly controversial, many about which we expect “reasonable disagreement.” If we are to enjoy consensus regarding state restrictions, citizens should not support coercive policies on such controversial grounds. If, for example, some coercive policy is passed by popular referendum, and if its supporters have no reason to vote for the policy other than their religious convictions, then, given that reasonable, informed people reject religious belief, the policy in question lacks public justification. Given the liberal view that coercive policies should be defensible to all those affected by them, conscientious citizens should restrain themselves from supporting (or rejecting) policies on the basis of excessively controversial grounds. Principles of restraint specify both the types of grounds on the basis of which citizens may appropriately support a given policy and the types of grounds on which citizens may not properly rely.

A Christian state or mundus Christianus is not easy to define. It is perhaps one where the public, legal and constitutional institutions are “Christian”. (I shall leave to one side for a moment the problem of defining precisely what I mean by Christian.) T. S. Eliot believed that the Christian state was “the Christian Society under the aspect of legislation, public administration, legal tradition and form.” The “state” can refer to the country, nation, society or culture as a whole or, only to the set of governmental institutions within a country. The latter, narrower meaning is the one I wish to adopt here. I shall define the state as “the set of distinctive institutions whose authority is recognised as legally binding within the territory.”

A theocracy is undoubtedly a Christian state, indeed one par excellence. I shall refer to theocracy as a “type 1” Christian state, for here both form and substance coincide. By theocracy I mean the situation where there is ecclesiastical supremacy and the state machinery is used to further particular religious interests. The early Jewish nation, Geneva under Calvin and various Islamic states around to the world today are examples of type 1 states. In this monistic polity, membership of the church (using that as a generic term for a religious organisation) and membership of the state are coterminous. Full rights as a citizen turn upon whether one is member of the church; those outside the church are second-class citizens. But a Christian state need not necessarily be a theocracy.

Ever since the Enlightenment, scholars in a variety of disciplines have depicted the Western world as growing inexorably more secular. Modern, secular, and scientific modes of thought, they insist, have steadily driven religion out of the public square. Many have portrayed the secularization of the public sphere as not only inevitable but desirable—a Good Thing. In this article, a case study of the New Zealand wars of the 1860s, I question these assumptions. In Victorian New Zealand during this period, settlers and politicians ejected Christianity from the public square for dark and murky reasons. The Enlightenment grand narrative of secular light banishing religious darkness must be seen for what it is: a powerful modern myth whose historical inadequacies ought carefully to be exposed.

Some context for this case study is essential. Up until the 1860s race relations in New Zealand, Britain's southernmost colony, had been mostly peaceful. The indigenous Maori people had generally welcomed Westerners—explorers, whalers, traders, missionaries, and settlers—into New Zealand. These incoming Pakeha (that is, whites in Maori) lived in a Maori world largely on Maori terms. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between many Maori chiefs and the British Crown, guaranteed the tribes full, exclusive, and undisturbed possession of their lands, forests, and fisheries, and all the rights and priveleges of British subjects. In return Maori ceded sovereignty of New Zealand to the Crown. The Treaty required Maori to sell land to the Crown, not private parties.

Dr. George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, told a congregation in Melbourne's St. Paul's Cathedral that he had recently received a letter addressed to “Jesus Christ, care of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Heavenly Kingdom.” It had been posted in the United States, but found its way to London. There, a postman, understandably a little unsure as to where the letter should go, had marked the envelope, “Try Lambeth Palace!” Under the public law of England, his was actually a most reasonable course for a civil servant to take. The Church of England is established by law, so if any official question relating to God must be decided, the law presumes that the Church of England is best placed to answer it. The law in New Zealand and Australia is different. Even if the inherited public law in both countries requires the Head of State to be an Anglican, that is where the religious establishment ends. The public law is otherwise agnostic: it makes no judgment about the orthodox and heterodox, and it does not recognize an established church. In these countries, the envelope would lie in a dead letter office, and the correspondent would have been wiser to pray.

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.

When asked who she is, an individual may identify herself as Hispanic, a born-again Christian, Canadian, an accountant, a sister, a daughter, a friend. The various communities to which she belongs create a web of membership, strands of her individual identity. Her membership in a public legal community, her citizenship, stands out as a dominant strand, affecting her ability to maintain and enjoy other strands of membership and identity, be they religious, professional, familial or otherwise.

Stewart Macaulay's observation regarding public and private governments applies similarly to an individual's membership in her communities; rather than sharp distinctions there is “interpenetration, overlapping jurisdictions and opportunities for both harmony and conflict.… An individual's membership in various communities creates a web of reciprocal relationships, opportunities for harmony and conflict. The individual may influence the institutions of her various communities which in turn help define who she is. In some ways, this is a question of legal pluralism, the simultaneous operation of multiple legal systems.