Political Issues In a ‘Religious Journal’!

In the June 1924 edition of The New Zealand Methodist Times the editor, Percy Paris, directly faced an issue that could no longer be avoided in those post-WW1 years. He noted the response of his fellow Australian Methodist editor to a letter he had published that claimed that some article was offensive and/or unjustified. Its author was a chaplain at the Singapore Naval base – a somewhat unlikely place from which to receive criticism.

For that reader it was wrong for a religious journal to deal with political issues of ‘national policy’. Percy Paris, on this side of the Tasman, took up the ‘cudgels’ (as they used to say – though a rather incongruous word for all that) and gave expression to the role of a religious journal in “educating the mass of the membership along true Christian lines”. In a short space, he summarised the change in thinking within ‘Church circles’ over the previous decade. “Prior to the Great War there existed a preponderance of opinion in favour of a Christian view that war under certain circumstances was justifiable and right. Today, under educative influences, the pendulum is rapidly swinging in the other direction, and we are approaching a point at which war, with duelling and slavery, will be internationally ostracised.” As an aside, almost, and with the Singapore Naval Base in mind, Paris included the present naval policy of Great Britain.

At this moment, a century later, as Israel sets its sights on Rafah and the Gaza Strip and one hundred thousand refugees with nowhere to go, as Russia increases its military pressure on their borderland with Ukraine, and while the internal rivalries in the Sudan continue to take their toll on ordinary folk, we watch with frustration the inability of the United Nations to take effective action for peace. Our own politicians, and those of a hundred other countries, can declare their commitment to a peaceful outcome in all these places but if they are of a mind, the so-called ‘Great Powers’ take no heed. In my last contribution I spoke of the ‘challenges’ facing the younger generation in this country. Of all these, the need to understand the nature and the demands of peace are at the top of the list.

Percy Paris was editor of The New Zealand Methodist Times for ten years, from 1924, and had been a contributor to it under the pen names of Brother Giles or Brother Juniper. His appointment by Conference to this very responsible and demanding task must have been made with the awareness that he would challenge the readership. He had already made a name for himself. Born in Dunedin, he had been converted to Methodism through the Central Mission in that city. He trained for the ministry in Auckland and was ordained in 1906. He was in circuit work in Levin, Mahurangi, Upper Thames, Auckland Central, Sydenham, Hamilton and back in Dunedin. His experience in the principal cities of the country was extensive, especially when he was appointed to Taranaki St, in Wellington. There he continued his involvement in the sort of social ministry he had begun in the Depression years in his home city. Pacifism was always a part of his way of being, and he was interested in monetary reform and employment - he was a proponent of the ‘welfare state’. He died too soon.

For Percy Paris there was no obvious division between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’. And yet we must be careful with the words we use. Is it not blasphemy, even, when the leader of one side, in its battle to totally extinguish the other, invokes divine aid: “With God’s help,” said one such person this week, “we will achieve victory.” Where is the compassion and justice that Jesus knew to be at the heart of the God whom he called ‘Father’?