Generation X Catholic Identities in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This thesis explores the links between religion and nationality in Aotearoa New Zealand, insofar as these aspects of individual identities are constructed and negotiated in a largely secular and globalised twenty-first century context. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with twenty-four self-identifying Catholic New Zealanders from the age cohort known as Generation X. They are significant as a New Zealand generation in that they follow the post-World War II baby boom generation. They are significant as a Catholic generation in that they were born at the end of the Second Vatican Council, an event which universally redefined Catholic identity. The generational characteristics shared by the research participants have produced commonalities in their identity narratives, as these reflect local and global patterns of religious identity-thinking and national identity discourses. The aim of the interviews was to explore how Catholic identity in particular was being constructed by the participants in a New Zealand context and whether, as constructs, these reflected elements of the collective identity that is supposedly emerging for this relatively young nation-state. Drawing on feminist, interpretive and social constructionist perspectives, the research analysis reveals how the religious fragments recognisable in each individual's storytelling are embedded in their contextual and communal origins. It also sheds light on how their identities are continuously and reflexively constructed within these group relations. Accordingly, for the Catholic New Zealanders participating in this study, the autonomy that they expect to have to become an authentic religious self, at the start of a new millennium, requires their participation in different, conflicting and sometimes incompatible communities. As the study shows, the tensions arise for them out of differences such as ethnicity, class, gender and sexual orientation, all of which must be managed and negotiated within multiple, overlapping communities. There are also tensions for them in reconciling their individually achieved constructions of Catholic Christianity within the framework of an ascribed communal Catholic identity. Persisting alongside the multiple and fluid aspects of their generational identities, however, are the attractions of sacred continuities. These Generation X voices speak of traditions, ritual, sacrament, celebration, culture, community, landscape and place as they are drawn into yet shape for themselves old and new forms of belonging, believing and becoming.