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This article discusses Christian politics in New Zealand. Although Anglicanism is required to be the religion of the Monarch of New Zealand, the country itself, unlike the United Kingdom, has no established church, and freedom of religion has been protected since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Religious Diversity in New Zealand - Statement on Religious Diversity )〕 Just under half of New Zealand's population belong, at least nominally, to Christian denominations〔(【引用サイトリンク】title= Table 28, 2013 Census Data – QuickStats About Culture and Identity – Tables )〕 but there are a range of views on the extent to which Christianity affects New Zealand politics. During the nineteenth century, many church-oriented bodies sponsored and fostered several of the original European settlement-ventures in the period 1840–1850, notably the settlements of Otago (1848, Free Church of Scotland) and Canterbury (1850, Church of England) - and many evangelicals, fundamentalists and conservative Catholics see Christianity as underlying New Zealand's entire political system. On the other hand, a notable politician of the late 19th century, Sir Robert Stout, had a considerable reputation as a freethinker and many dismiss the effects of Christianity, saying that New Zealand society has always had a largely secular character. Christianity has never had an explicit role in the major political parties, and the religious elements in these parties have taken varying forms, and cannot easily be classified as a single movement. Māori Christianity, particularly the Ratana movement has often been of importance, with an historic alliance between it and the Labour Party signed in 1936, and many other parties now vying for their support, but this is generally regarded as a political rather than religious matter. In the 1980s a series of Christian political parties such as Christian Heritage, the Christian Democrats, the Christian Coalition and Destiny New Zealand arose out of a Christian conservative strand in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in reaction to a perceived decline of social standards. == Before the 1970s: debates over prohibition and capital punishment == Before the establishment of major specifically Christian parties in the 1970s, evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity had had little specific effect on mainstream New Zealand politics in society. While the Baptist Union endeavoured to get alcohol-prohibition policies passed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Catholic Church urged its members to vote against such laws, concerned that the measures would outlaw wine for the Eucharist. A referendum on prohibition took place in 1919, but the return of demobilised New Zealand soldiers from World War I defeated the measure. Evangelical and Catholic New Zealanders did not respond as corporate institutions to the debates on capital punishment in New Zealand in the thirties, forties and fifties, but individual laypeople and clergy did make their opposition heard. The Anglican Church of New Zealand became more forthright in its opposition to the death penalty, and as the largest Christian denomination in New Zealand, it made its presence felt. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Christian politics in New Zealand」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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