1842: The Bishop of New Zealand

May 30, 2022

By AHNZ

Today in New Zealand history, 30 May, 1842, a new religious invasion force came to this country led by George Selwyn. With his 22 missionary apostles the Bishop of New Zealand set out with equipment and biotechnolgoy with which to stamp their Anglican authority on the colonies and tribes. Selwyn even took along a Maori youth on the voyage and learned to speak Maori by the time of arrival. (It’s amazing what shopping opportunities there were in London even back then!)

The William Hobson Gang had, in January 1840, begun a secular hostile take-over of New Zealand’s colonies. It was a little early for extracting revinue but a great time to get in before someone else did and create a State. There were productive and free people going untaxed and unbossed around! Selwyn’s Anglican Gang were the religious equivalent to what Hobson was up to and these two branches of The State worked in concert.

By 1841 word had reached Britain that Hobson had pulled off his take-over, of which a minor part was the Treaty of Waitangi and a large part was his making Proclamations. Hobson, now Governor Hobson, had been issued the powerful disc of office: The Great Seal of New Zealand (image, right.) It was now time for the next phase of the plan where an Anglican Bishop would be choosen and deployed. This was quickly achieved within about 2 months and George was shipped off one day after Christmas 1841.

He had been doing nothing more with his life than “waiting to be presented with a comfortable living¹” befitting an athletic religious zealot. When the bishopric opportunity knocked on George’s elder brother’s door and was turned away it didn’t have far to look for the next High Church and Conservative man in the same family.

After arriving at Hobson’s new capital, Auckland, Bishop Selwyn quickly became a member of Executive Government in his own right. Separation between Church and State really wasn’t valued back then and Selwyn, after all, had been appointed to his role by government just as Hobson had. Anglicanism was the de facto national religion. Until  20 May, 1869, Selwyn kept on being a religious pillar of The State and sided with successive Governors even if against Maoris or his own Anglican Missionaries.

Selwyn was the very poster boy for what was called ‘Muscular Christianity’ and used his vast physical energy to dart about the country and the Pacific like Sonic the Hedghog. He knew what he wanted to do and had an immense influence over New Zealand as one of the Founding Fathers, for better or worse.

Just as Hobson had come to overpower, amalgamate, and rule existing colonies in New Zealand so too had Selwyn come to make sure the existing Missionary colonies towed the line. The Church Missionary Society had been labouring away for 28 years but along came Selwyn to take over and tell them how things should be done. They came to resent his micromanaging authority just as the young colonies resented Hobson and his goons doing the same thing in secular space. In particular, Selwyn sided with the politicians against Henry Williams, after all he had done for Christian New Zealand, and expelled him from the CMS!

“As a matter of interest, The Charter of 1840 specified the equivalent coordinates for New Zealand in the northern hemisphere of the world. This was a cut’n paste of Hobson’s own hasty Hobson’s Proclamation of Sovereignty (21 May 1840) over all New Zealand¹. It was later moved but for a time the Colony of New Zealand was, legally speaking, located in North Pacific empty water about 3000km off the east coast of Japan.” – 1841: The Colony of New Zealand, AHNZ

“The CMS had funded half of his role on the condition that he ordain as many people as possible, but Selwyn slowed this down by insisting those in training learn Greek and Latin first.” – Wiki

“As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of mankind’s societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason.

“The essential characteristics of these two remain the same in all ages: Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem—and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.” – For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand (1961)

Along with building the many Selwyn Churches around Auckland an error Hobson’s gazetted domain was siezed upon to allow Selwyn to also expand his New Zealand opperation into the Pacific as well. This requested jurisdiction had been explicitly refused in 1841 in Letters Patent. Selwyn got it anyway because, apparently accidentally, New Zealand’s northern boundary had been set down as being a little to the east of Japan in the Northern Hemisphere.

To a sceptical historian of the non-statist variety it’s really starting to look as if the “error” of describing New Zealand as a duel-hemispheric territory was no mistake at all but rather a deliberate trick all along.

George controlled the churches and pulled the strings they had fitted to settlers and Maoris alike. He even participated in the Waikato War as chaplin to the troops. Maori Anglicanism he deliberatly held back at a time it was ready to go by insisting on a standard suited to his own civilisation rather than theirs. If Jesus Christ had insisted that his early church hold Victorian standards 2000 years into the future then how far would he have gotten? The CMS helped fund Selwyn on the understanding he would bring Maori ministers into the church and then he said he was helpless unless these stone age folk learn Greek and Latin on top of English! I bet they wanted their money back.

Hobson and the following governors had an essential helper in Selwyn. He was the witchdoctor to their Attila. The Merlin to their King Arthur. Lysenko to Stalin. Dr. Ashley Bloomfield to Jacinda Ardern.

—
1 Ref. p411, New Zealand’s Heritage (1971)

Image ref. Selwyn portrait, British Museum

Image ref. Melanesian Mission building; Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections (1986)

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