This week, Radio NZ aired an informative interview with Mike Grimshaw (Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury) on the subject of Australian and New Zealand secularism. Among his claims is that ‘Religion in Australia is much stronger, and much more public, and much more of a political force than it is in New Zealand’.

And on cultural diversity: ‘Australia is struggling with a different type of diversity than New Zealand, and I think the residual Christianity in Australia (that is sitting there) and the rise of conservative Christianity in both the Catholic church and the Anglican church in Australia, and then the rising Pentecostal churches in Australia, makes it quite different, makes it more similar in many ways to America, than to New Zealand’.

And on rugby as New Zealand’s religion: ‘… [New Zealanders] get the sense that rugby is all consuming but it actually hasn’t been. What we lack is the balance of culture and tradition – other forms of celebration and identity; … [rugby] is more for Pākehā than anyone else; Maori have a whole culture that balances the role of rugby … But for secular Pākehā in New Zealand there seems to be this sort of thing that rugby is sitting there as an alternative institution; and often the claims of rugby being New Zealand’s religion are often [made] by those who are either celebrating the fact, or those who are opposed to the fact because they feel it is all-consumming. But the trouble is that it is only all-consumming in that there seems to be nothing to balance it …’.