When psychology professor Niki Harré set out to establish a secular religion, the results didn’t quite go to plan

Harré cites her academic focuses as community psychology and the psychology of sustainability. In these polarised times, perhaps anything that might achieve those is worth a try – even becoming a priest.

This is not her first high-concept crack at walking the walk. After the 2014 election, she and her sister, former MP Leila, decided to hitchhike around the North Island in a project called Rethink the System. Their aim was to talk to people along the way to find out how politics could be made to work better. There was an underlying metaphor about direction and knowing where you were going. Which, of course, are also aspects of priestly behaviour. Quo vadis? and all that.

“There were similarities,” says Harré. “In the book, a colleague says everybody has only one major idea, and [my] idea, according to him, is that people be nice to each other. So, to put it a little more eloquently, everything I do is about how do we live well together? And Rethink the System was absolutely about that as well.”

The new experiment had a clear kaupapa. “I didn’t want to do an abstract project about what Christianity is or can offer. I really wanted to see if it could be put into practice through taking on this particular religious minister-like role, I didn’t really succeed because of the context, but I still think we need people like this, who are responsible for helping us find our contribution.”

Without a god to believe in, a hierarchy to lay down the law or a congregation to listen to her sermons, how exactly was Harré planning to do her priesting? In the beginning were a trinity of principles that connected her practice with her long-held interest in sustainability and community. Instead of the traditional faith, hope and charity, or poverty, chastity and obedience, she chose simplicity, hospitality and pause.

Simplicity meant choosing not to spend (much), “temporarily extracting myself from consumerism and its distractions”. Crucially for family harmony, perhaps, husband Keith was not banned from such indulgences as birthday or Christmas presents for the kids and grandchildren.

Hospitality meant she would “try to notice others more actively and give them my time”. If she met people in public she would greet them – which sounds simple, but next time you’re out, notice the lengths to which average people go to avoid acknowledging each other.

Pause may have been the most traditionally spiritual of the three principles. It meant “some form of reflective practice and time away from everyday life”.

Harré set up secularpriest.org, at which virtual parishioners could learn more and subscribe to email updates. She planned to hold services, conduct ceremonies – for example, naming ceremonies or life transition rituals – and offer personal conversations as a version of pastoral care.

And she would do it wherever – from online spaces to park benches to her local community centre, which she chose as the location for her services.

But what if you started a religion and nobody came? Traditional priests don’t have to worry about their market share. Harré’s first experiment in outreach involved emailing 29 acquaintances and inviting them to her first service.

She didn’t get a single refusal. In fact, she didn’t get a single reply: not so much as a “Sorry, I’m planning to have something else to do that day”. It’s as though no one knew what to say to this outlandish suggestion, so they didn’t say anything at all.

The lack of response “really threw me, but I had to plough on because I was committed to the project, and bit by bit, other people got involved”.

Obviously, she had a lot to learn, but she knew that. The whole year would be a journey of spiritual discovery of which Project Priest was one of several components.

“One is that I set myself up as a secular priest. [Another] is that I tried to learn what I could about Christianity by attending a Christian church for a year, and by reading and listening to podcasts and so on. Attending church and listening to podcasts was to inform myself and then to immediately try and put this into practice through my own services and personal conversations.”

Traditional priests are having enough trouble getting bums on pews these days without some atheist with a year off muscling in on their sacred ground. Surely there were grumbles along the lines of, “I had to go to a seminary for seven years to get my job and you just waltz in and set up shop.”

On the contrary, Harré found “the most hospitable, open and generous people have actually been Christians. They have been intrigued by what it is. I think they like that I am interested in their religion. As with all people, we like it when people are genuinely wanting to know what we’re about.”

There was more resistance from non-believers, who tended to be people with the baggage of negative religious experiences. Fortunately for Harré, she didn’t have a religious upbringing. The closest she came was exposure to Muslim and Hindu religions during a period living in Fiji as a child, when her anthropologist father got a job there. She thinks this helped the project.

“What my childhood allowed me to do was approach Christianity afresh. I really did come at it with this very open-ended inquiring as to what it was all about. And because my father was an anthropologist, there was always that little bit of distance.”

So why Christianity as the furrow for her plough, rather than Hindu or Islamic practice? “Christianity was the obvious one, because I didn’t want to get distracted by culture. I wanted to be in a context where the only thing that clearly differentiated me from the people and the reading I was doing was the religious element.”

In other words, to go non-Christian, she would have had to learn a lot about the cultures behind Islam or Hinduism.

“If you’re of a certain age and raised in New Zealand, you can’t not know quite a bit about Christianity.”

That is changing, however. “I think there will now be 10- or 20-year-olds who don’t know who Jesus is, who have no idea what Easter means and little idea what Christmas means. [For now, however], I still think there’s a lot of Christian influence, even in secular communities.”

It is hard to keep God out of religion. But why did Harré choose to call herself a secular priest, not an atheist priest? “I didn’t ever consider ‘atheist priest’. I don’t especially like the word atheist. It’s one of those words you’re forced to use because there is no better one. Secular is a word that refers to the nature of society, as opposed to atheist, which doesn’t describe society as a whole, and I wanted to be a priest of the people.”

How did it work out? “It didn’t go so well. I know lots of people in environmental community movements of various kinds, and I know that the people in those movements are trying to position the social good as caring for the planet and caring for each other, without good metaphors to hang this on.”

Religious beliefs are an example of just those useful metaphors. “So I thought people in those movements would be keen for the kind of reflective activities I was offering. But this was not the case.”

It turned out people were most interested when it was all about them. “My personal conversations were more popular. They were designed as a one-on-one conversation about how to contribute to life and the times we’re in.” People didn’t want to be talked at; they had things they needed to talk about.

Secular sermons were part of Harré’s clerical toolkit, although “sermon” can be an off-putting word.

“I moved over to calling them ‘provocations’. What’s interesting about a provocation is that it literally is open ended … it’s a very different kind of talk, which doesn’t exist really in secular settings. I was keen on that open-ended invitation, ‘Here’s some ideas. Let’s think about that together.’”

This priest had no pre-set canon but was keen on an exploration in search of the truth.

“One of the things I’m super wary of is telling people to do anything I don’t do. So that rules out an awful lot of stuff. I want to challenge people, to shift them a bit from where they are, particularly if, in my view, they’re stuck in a behaviour pattern that’s not useful to themselves or others.”

Which sounds an awful lot like the sort of things that go on in personal counselling sessions at $200 an hour.

“I think a priest and a counsellor are super similar. Some conversations could look almost identical, but I think the slight difference is that a counsellor is meant to be focused on the person in front of them, whereas a priest always has that bigger perspective: there’s God sitting there, there’s a community sitting there.”

And when she talks about the year of gatherings and communicating within a group, Harré could almost be describing what goes on at AA meetings, with their emphasis on sharing.

“The AA model is a really interesting one – the whole thing is admitting your frailty, and that you cannot pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. I think that would be a very good practice for secular people to engage in on a regular basis.”

The higher power that AA invokes could be you know who, or in Harré’s case, you don’t know who.

Despite the groaning shelves in book shops, life is not a DIY project, she says. “Most self-help books say this is on you and with this tweak and that tweak you can rise above. Whereas Christianity is saying you cannot rise above, you need community and you need God, which you could interpret as a kind of letting go into your own vulnerability.”

The book is candid about what went wrong and Harré admits her own mistakes and the number of times her reach exceeded her grasp. There is a sense that from her radical starting point she gradually became more traditionally religious as the year went by.

She’s not so sure about that. “I could perhaps start to say the word spirituality but still could not speak of God as anything other than ‘God’.”

At the end of the experiment were husband Keith and their three children glad to have her back, or were they, perhaps, just glad to be able to tell her what they really thought and have normal Christmas presents resumed?

“My family always had a distance from this, because they were obviously raised atheist. I think they admired my audacity in carrying on this project, and in terms of the not buying anything, I told my children I wouldn’t be buying them any Christmas presents, but they knew their father would come to the party [on presents], so they weren’t worried about that. I think they saw it as just another one of the adventures that I go on.”

Whatever their feelings, at least they won’t have trouble finding material for Harré’s eulogy when the time comes. Speaking of that dread day, to employ a perhaps not inappropriate reincarnation metaphor, if she had her time over, would she do it again?

“It was one of those things that you start only because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I still think there’s a place for gatherings in which people, whatever their beliefs, recommit to being in a community, to holding each other in mind, to work, to contribute to the common good, acknowledge our failings and our strengths in a package together.

“I am still looking for a way to try to do that, and I do try and bring that into my current role, but I wouldn’t do this particular project again.”

The Calling: A year exploring what the secular world can learn from religion by Niki Harré (Auckland University Press, $35) is available now.