‘The New Zealand islands’, wrote Robert Elwood in his 1993 study of alternative spirituality here, ‘are islands of the dawn in more ways than one’. As well as being among the first islands to see the sun rise, ‘They were also the last separate terrain to receive, subsequently, large-scale European settlement. Thus there is something dawnlike about life and culture in New Zealand. However old the cultures from which its various waves of settlers derived, in that land humanity is barely past sunrise.’
New Zealand was also among the most secular parts of the English-speaking world. This does not necessarily mean that religion was unimportant. John Stenhouse in particular has advocated a greater role than it normally played, as a locus for social activism and prestige. The older generation of Lovell-Smiths were devout Methodists who ploughed efforts into their church, with its cultural pursuits, temperance campaigns and feminism, and exemplified an avant-garde, following the Stenhouse argument. It is obvious however, that New Zealand remained among the most secular of English-speaking societies in the early twentieth century: settled in an era of advancing secularism, and without an established church, it had lower rates of church attendance, possibly allowing a greater opportunity to indulge in Spiritualist practice. At the same time, it led to an existential gap which could be filled by resorting to Spiritualism, Theosophy, or Rosicrucianism.
