Book of the Week: The prof who posed as a priest

2026-03-11 - 16:07

Niki Harré, a psychology professor at Auckland University, had long wanted to know what it was like to be a priest, to minister to both God and her fellow man. There was just one little problem. Harré is an Atheist. In her new book The Calling, she describes the experiences and lessons of her year spent as a secular priest. Full disclosure: I was only asked to review this book because I said some nice things about the Devil on X. But I’m all for Harré’s desire to be a priest, to exercise a ritual power even if it is the power of humility and compassion. That this isn’t just an academic exercise, pun intended, soon becomes obvious as colourful illustrations of emotional subjectivity appear in the text, as well as what feel like sincere pop culture references. Any doubts that I would finish the book evaporated when I came across the passage about her first successful attempt to be “present” with the near-strangers she met on her daily walk: “They responded as I would have if I was the recipient of friendliness. Open, animated. I ran off exhilarated. I felt we had created an enchanted cloud that was still faintly present where we had stood. I was Tinker Bell, a fairy so small she could only hold one emotion at a time, shaking off droplets of delight as I ran.” There are further passages of similarly beautiful, clear prose, illustrating a variety of emotional interactions scattered throughout the book, and they kept me going whenever the discussion didn’t seem to concern me. And there’s some local colour, like there is in Dominic Hoey’s books, because Harré’s a Westie too. At one point she attends an online creative writing course (not sure that she needed this, but it worked if she did) and quotes philosophy professor Sean Sturm, who back in the day wrote one of my favourite New Zealand songs, Eye TV’s ‘Worse For Wear’. Harré has a flair for presenting the emotional essence of remembered conversations. Which when you think about it is what a psychologist should do, but she does it with a lightness of touch that keeps theory at bay. Being, as she is, an Atheist, I thought Harré’s best bet would be to join the Anglican church (joke) and as it just so happens she is mostly aligned with that lot. She sets up shop as a secular priest and advertises services at the local community centre with the appealing pitch “to help you live more consistently with your deepest values and explore your contribution to collective life”. She writes, “Sande had told me that the job of a priest was to ‘bring your whole grounded self into an encounter’ and listen while people ‘tell you their sacred story’. She had also been clear that ‘it is not our job to be fixing anything’.” To help her focus, she commits to going without entertainments and fun consumables and learning to “pause”, to pray, to meditate. For me religion and awareness of my fellow creatures, as well as my contributions to collective life, often arrive via entertainment, no doubt aided at times by certain consumables, which is why I enjoy being a critic instead. Harré does well at times to carry me along on reflexive journeys of abnegation, and interest me in her worries about the environment. The only criticism I have of this book centres on the fact that Harré doesn’t discuss why she isn’t using the word priestess. Goddess gets used a bit. I understand the gender-neutral language idea, but the gap between priest and priestess is far larger than the useful distinction between actor and actress; it has a long history, and I’d be interested in Harré’s version of that history. Today, the choice between priest and priestess seems like a class distinction; Harré as a priestess would have been déclassée. Experiencing this might have provided her with a way to see the question of class in academia as non-academics see it. I wanted to be a priest once, though I probably would have used the word minister. My life was in chaos and I was enjoying the experience of going to church because that felt less chaotic, and hopefully, superstitiously protective. At the same time, I was doing periodic detention and the guy in charge of my gang was a minister of some faith or other. I liked him, we got on; I was friends with a few Christians in that period – in sin, it was easy to see their point of view. I didn’t believe per se, but I did believe that taking my family to church was a good idea, and if the experience was humble, the people undistinguished, the music rarely impressive, that really didn’t matter, as Jesus probably said somewhere or other. It’s good to hear stories of forgiveness, humility and sacrifice when one’s own existence consists of hedonistic chaos, and vice versa. Harré lived her experiment through interesting times; the pandemic and the lockdowns, the self-cancellation of the school climate protest movement, and the trans and the Listener letter mātauranga Māori debates that divided her workplace. Her perspective is that of the well-meaning and reasonable person, no doubt a little chiller than she was before becoming a priest, calmly resisting a tide of politicised distortion of motives, and the pressure to save one’s place by denouncing others. “The certainty and apparent hegemony of those who publicly critiqued the letter and its authors bothered me greatly. It snapped shut the possibility of genuine discussion and led to peculiar, stilted exchanges characterised by tense politeness. As a friend to people ousted from the fold, I was still shocked by the disregard for their hurt or bewilderment. It was as if there was a malice in the air that normally compassionate people had been persuaded to ignore.” Ever the quiet voice of reason, Harré remains self-aware, looking for the origins of the weaknesses of others in herself. “As a young woman I sometimes heard, and even made myself, claims about sexism that I knew weren’t quite right. The feeling was of leaning over a cliff and being amazed I didn’t topple over. Something was buoying me up, and I knew it wasn’t reality. It was an unhappy time for me, but I’m not sure if a man pointing out the errors in my reasoning would have pulled me back.” I didn’t get caught up in the mātauranga Māori shemozzle, thank the Goddess, but I did have a similar bad experience of academia on X some months earlier. The Ministry of Health, surely a Pākehā-dominated institution, had published new dietary guidelines (then, my research field) and I tweeted out my disappointment at their ignorant dismissal of coconut, taro, and kumara, traditional food staples of the Pacific, in favour of multiple recommendations of the colonial import and processed bread ingredient “wholegrains”. This seemed, and still seems, one of the few examples of structural racism that’s a testable hypothesis in modern Aotearoa – that Eurocentric assumptions embedded within a governing institution contribute to a relative lack of, and the misrepresentation of, scientific evidence concerning the traditional foods of indigenous populations and the products made from them, and that these precede, and materially relate to, negative outcomes disproportionately experienced by said populations. I was flabbergasted to find my insight quote-tweeted by a Māori academic, someone I respect, in an abusive way. Other health researchers joined in to back me up, all in a reasoned, respectful way, and were abused for looking pale in their profile pictures. Another senior, and, I was warned, highly respected Māori academic, from outside the nutrition field, joined the abuse incoherently in ALL CAPS. Other academics, none interested in the nutritional aspects of the controversy and most, I suspect, very white and very tenured Americans falling over themselves to be seen as allies of the oppressed, joined in with plenty of acrimony and the usual irrelevant acronyms. There was even talk of violence in there. I was glad that my allies kept cool, and that I knew just enough Frankfurt School gibberish to present as a misguided cultural Marxist in any future cancel-culture audit of the thread. Why were all these ‘woke’ academics virulently denying structural racism? Because they identified with the institutions and the experts being criticised. I wasn’t credentialed, and my colleagues either didn’t have the right credentials, or they worked outside the right institutions. We couldn’t be allowed to have a say, we hadn’t earned the right like they had. In Harré’s terms, we had no place in their finite game. Harré, in this period (and it’s so great to finally read a partial history of that era from the perspective of a sane person), also talked to feminist academics marginalised and ostracised for thought crimes related to the trans debate. I fear to go where even angels fear to tread, but it’s another place where the accredited, and I do very much include the mainstream media, have let everybody down. As far as I understand sex and gender, ie by the light of evolution, the extreme gender-critical position (the outdated academic orthodoxy) is wrong – sexually dimorphic behaviour is found in rats, so is exceedingly unlikely to be solely a social construct (but there’s a germ of truth in the ‘nurture’ hypothesis – the more superficial ways that gender is expressed in specific human populations, its styles, its fashions, are cultural artefacts. And, you can make gregarious female rats behave more in the anxious, paranoid style of male rats if you feed them soy isoflavones in childhood). The extreme opposite position (the new academic orthodoxy) is also wrong – sex is still binary (the germ of truth here is that, in very rare cases, that binary can get quite complicated). A third view, the Christian fundamentalist theory of Tamaki et al, that sex and gender are and should be identical, is also wrong, because our evolution as social beings has favoured diversity in their alignment (the germ of truth being that, for most people, they pretty much are aligned). In the past, strange new theories would undergo a ‘naturalisation’ process as the emergent proof for and against them was discussed freely and publicly, in the course of which their less-mistaken proponents and versions could be identified and accepted as explanatory enough for the time being. By the period covered by Harré’s story, fresh claims that were controversial for scientific and social reasons, not just because some people are bigoted, got a free pass within middle-class life as the academies and mainstream media caved in to what was, for a democratic country, a novel style of intellectual and moral bullying. But the dialectic, now super-heated by repression, and impossible to control among the online masses, carried on in the comments section, and was eventually weaponised and monetised by right wing populists and the new ‘alternative’ media (in New Zealand public life, this dates from the period between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the razing of Parliament’s playground). Instead of the usual search for workable solutions, which academia and legacy media used to facilitate, these issues and others were allowed to become more toxic, more divisive, more polarising, and more dangerous than ever they needed to be. The inability of some academics to hold civil and useful conversations with non-believers contrasts with the way the religious people Harré encountered over her year, including people to whom God is clearly dearer than anything, were, without exception prepared to discuss religion at length with its openly non-believing author, without ever needing to insult her. I don’t remember going to church before I left Scotland. My parents never expressed faith in the Authorised version, and gently pointed out its inconsistencies, but they did want us to assimilate successfully in New Zealand, and my mum liked ritual and needed a break on weekends, so I attended a Presbyterian service, and later Sunday School, Bible study and so on. The benefits of this were, that I had a sort of social life, that I still occasionally got to be around girls, and that I had an intellectual and artistic challenge—to show that I could understand the Bible better than anyone. Which of course, once I read the book, easily led me into blasphemy and heresy and thinking I knew better. I still do. Yet the Christian world created social structures that were important to me growing up – all-ages cafes where the young could drift in (how I found my school friends again after leaving school), the YMCA that put on all-ages gigs that inspired me to keep learning music, the Salvation Army that fed me when I was homeless. We all know the Salvation Army, or its then-leadership, opposed the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986. But they’re not still banging on about it . They accepted the result of a democratic decision and got on with being charitable. How many people can do that today? It’s painfully obvious that there are forces inside ourselves that are not being properly controlled by scientific approaches—’the drugs don’t work’—but are amenable to spiritual ones, by the magic in music, sexuality, nature, and so on. Scientific advances sometimes come in visionary states, as to August Kekulé or Kary Mullis, or from visionary individuals like Nikola Tesla or Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist who also had a good go at being a priest. Mātauranga Māori, obviously, has solved plenty of problems that the scientific method either wasn’t there for or wasn’t interested in. Your astrological birth chart can help you make sense of your life, and so can a raft of psychoanalytical theories, including many that have been debunked. Perhaps science is making inroads, perhaps it can explain and even augment what is now occult, but increasingly it does so at a level that might as well be occult to the vast majority of people, indeed the vast majority of scientists, and which must be taken on faith. On the other hand, magic affects sentient beings, living souls, and there seems no reason for the non-sentient universe to get involved. Least of all some force, nay, intelligence existing apart from the world of atoms and stuff which it created and controls. From my understanding, the universe is quite capable of running itself in the way it does. If it has Gods, Goddesses, and deities that include both in it, and anything’s possible, they’re very laid back (given the facts of life, it’s surprisingly hard to imagine a sexless deity). But perhaps the divine needn’t be omnipresent and omnipotent. Homer said that Circe was a Goddess as well as a witch, and if Odysseus and his crew hadn’t landed on her island they wouldn’t have noticed her existence. And then there’s the problem of evil, the design flaw; no one’s God in our culture wants to put their hand up for that. Abraxas, and the Gods and Goddesses of pantheistic cultures, represent the universe as it is, and the Gods of monotheistic cultures only (or so they want us to believe) represent the good in it. Religious sanity involves accepting this design flaw, just as personal sanity involves accepting our own design flaws, as something other than a libel against us, to be always denied or blamed on some Other. At one point Harré explains the problem of evil with this bit of heresy, from a lay Methodist – an all-loving God can’t have favourites. To an all-loving God, a serial killer and a spirochete are as deserving as you. This gets us closer to the truth. Love is the Law, as Aleister Crowley said, and he added, Love under Will, and, like Harré, designed rituals to help his followers catch and use its indiscriminate power. A man so bad as to free you from any obligation to imitate him (reacting against a Plymouth Brethren upbringing), Crowley, at the dawn of the 20th century, initiated the world into the knowledge that religions, and religious traditions, could be constructed within modernity, that legitimacy and heraldry can be faked, like those fragments of the true cross that obsessed the rulers of the early established Church. Love to Harré, as it’s sought and counselled in her priestly practice, doesn’t seem to be therapeutic self-love, but an attitude of seeing the subjectivity of other individuals and promoting human connectedness. I’ve long thought that this is a strength of religions to whom all souls might one day become equally important to God as your own, such as Catholicism and Mormonism. As Crowley said, every Man and every Woman is a Star, and when it’s your will to see the light in as many of the people you interact with as possible, the world does become a better place (you’ll be less likely to snap at officials and service workers and they’ll be less likely to frustrate or talk down to you, for example). When enough of us will this, be they Christian or some other species of occultist, we come to feel less alienated. And perhaps have less need of the refuges of mass identification, or at least be able to defend them without attacking anyone who questions them. This is a skill most of the Christians I’ve known have possessed. Harré describes it like this: “Mary and Eleanor’s descriptions of a god/Jesus that cared for them personally were not strident, and nor did they come across as in any way attempts to convert me. This is true for me, they seemed to be saying, and it can neither be undone by any clever challenges you care to put or become your reality by simply listening to what I have to say.” The author, impressed by such Jesus-love, designs a necromantic ritual to invoke his spirit, which manifests sufficiently to upset one of her followers. It’s rather a pity she doesn’t make the episode as spookily dramatic as my precis. Some Christians seem to be in a parasocial relationship with Jesus that is indistinguishable from the way Swifties feel about Taylor Swift. This isn’t a put-down; they’ve lucked into a version of happiness I’d wish on anyone. Yet even this benign religiosity has its downside. If I tell a Swiftie that “Taylor Swift’s release schedules are maximised for sales and chart position to an extent that isn’t required for her art and diminishes the chances of other female artists breaking through” they are unlikely to see this as a problem; to accept the possibility of falling out of love, of losing faith, would be to throw away everything. Similarly, if a religious leader says that Salman Rushdie must die, or that homosexuality is an abomination, or that abortion is murder, the “religion of love” types will serenely avoid or blandly defend any accusation of hate. And why not; theirs are not the insecure souls that can hear such messages and form violent intentions. But to outsiders, this love can look like indifference to evil, or tacit encouragement of it, as when Yusuf Islam, a man surely more loving and benevolent than most of us, calmly explained that he saw the death sentence on Rushdie as in accordance with his faith. Once, I had a neighbour who was a born-again Christian. Not one of those terrifying evangelists I’d met in Christchurch, hopped up on temperance and as boring and relentless as your former friend that’s now a conspiracy theorist, but someone sincerely in possession of an insight that had given him, and his family, a better life. We’d discuss what the Bible’s authors really meant, and he’d handle my heresies gently, by adding some additional knowledge, or acknowledging a mystery. I noted that he only considered the New Testament gospel, and that the more controversial bits in the Epistles read better in the plain-speak translation he used, where it was easier to understand the historical context and purpose of those letters. I couldn’t believe, per se, but I liked his message of calm, ordered, trusting activity, and felt the ballasted inspiration of goodness myself. Near the end of The Calling the secular priest, educated by her experience, amasses a satisfying secular response to the problem of identity politics, including its damaging effect on climate action. I won’t try to sum this up; the object of my reviews, old-fashioned as I am, is to get you to listen to the album, read the book, watch the movie, not to make you feel smart about it already and primed to opine. Harré ends The Calling with what she calls “provocations”, gentle suggestions for improving the world one person at a time. I’ve been thinking, as I read and write, about her idea of the Enchanted World. Maybe we can see identity politics, and a great deal else that divides people, as a set of enchantments. Maybe we can learn to see the sacred in this. Everyone and their crew is on their version of Circe’s island, bewitched by their Ideology, their Goddess who looks a lot like a witch to people from other islands, bewitched by other ideologies. What’s sacred about this vision to a materialist? Well, if you’ve become enchanted by science, you believe in an explanation that’s still incomplete. You have faith that the rest of the explanation will also be science. Anxiety that Elon Musk is going to find the Elder Gods in deep space and awaken them from aeons of slumber has never crossed your mind. Your enchantment by science took root in your genes, your childhood injuries, your lived experience, your unfulfilled desires, your awareness of death. You angrily think others should agree with you because, at such times, you mistakenly assume that deep down they are, or could be, and definitely should be, just like you. But they’ve never walked in your shoes, they’ve had to trudge or float forever in shoes that wouldn’t fit you. And that’s what’s sacred about us. That’s why we’re all worth loving. The Calling: A year exploring what the secular world can learn from religion by Nikki Harré (Auckland University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.