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Gloriavale docuseries Escaping Utopia, like Mr Bates v The Post Office, looks set to generate considerable upheaval. The question raised by both programmes is: “How could this have gone on for so long?”

In the case of the British Post Office’s shonky software, the answer – as banal as it is outrageous – would appear to be straightforward butt-protection at the highest levels. That people’s lives were being ruined in the process, some fatally, was an insufficient incentive for those in high places to own the pain and suffering they had caused. The hugely impactful television drama, however, turned out to be more than enough.

Escaping Utopia, on the other hand, withholds such simple explanations from its viewers. There is something about the Gloriavale religious community’s ability to survive so many attempts to hold it to account that points to a commonality of aspiration binding those living inside Gloriavale to a significant number of people living outside.

Gloriavale’s strongest attraction to those living on the outside is the strength of its members’ faith.

Sixty years ago, a period of history well-remembered by hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders, the strength of the Christian religion was manifest in just about every facet of the nation’s life. On Sunday mornings, all across New Zealand, the metallic voices of church-bells summoned a fair proportion of the population to worship. Children, scratchy in their uncomfortable Sunday clothes, studied their Bibles at the feet of Sunday School teachers (of varying pedagogical quality) while their parents prayed in the church nearby.

Watching Escaping Utopia, it is easy to construe the headscarves of the women and girls as proof that the West Coast’s Gloriavale and Gilead (the theocratic state in which Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is set) have a lot more in common than the letter “G”.

And yet, those old enough to remember when the church pews were full –to bursting, will also remember how many women fastened a protective headscarf over their hair before venturing out into the sinful world. These were, after all, the days when milliners could still make a good living. Certainly, their former stock was on full display every Sunday, as the congregations gathered.

Ten years later, in the 1970s, numbers turning up to the church services of the main Christian denominations had shrunk dramatically. They would go on shrinking until, inevitably, the day came when the Census results confirmed that New Zealand had become a secular society. Christians were now a minority. A large minority, admittedly, but a minority nonetheless.

Rising, as Christian adherence declined, was a new morality. These new, liberal “values” turned the moral certainties of the Christian New Zealand that was fast fading on their heads. Abortion, contraception, homosexuality, divorce, “living in sin” – these religious prohibitions were being subjected to an unrelenting ideological assault. And the godless were winning.

Gloriavale attempted to keep this godless world at bay. Within its boundaries, the social stereotypes that had distinguished the New Zealand of the 1950s and 60s continued to inform the community’s expectations. Women and girls existed to serve the male of the species. Decision-making was reserved for men. Boys would be boys. White was right.

As the feminist revolution rolled on and over the patriarchal expectations of Kiwi blokes living outside Gloriavale, and their sisters learned that “Girls can do anything!”, the unflinching patriarchy of Gloriavale insisted that cooking, cleaning, sewing and childcare were designated, by God Himself, as “women’s work”.

And, if God Himself had ordained that women and girls should serve, while men and boys ate, then surely, all the other “services” women are capable of “offering” to men must, similarly, enjoy God’s sanction. Thus did the Devil enter Gloriavale – almost from the very beginning.

Did the community know what was going on? Yes. Did the authorities know? Of course. Then why wasn’t something done? The answer, sadly, is because too many people who should have intervened were more than half convinced that Gloriavale had got it right.

New Zealand may no longer bow its head in prayer every Sunday. Girls and boys may no longer be sent off, separately, to learn sewing and cooking; woodwork and metalwork. Women may no longer stay at home to look after their families, while the menfolk head off to win bread. Domestic abuse may no longer be kept hidden behind closed doors. But in Gloriavale, tucked-up against bush-clad hills, New Zealand’s fading past, and its dethroned patriarchal and Christian values, enjoyed a stubborn afterlife.

That was why, instead of shutting Gloriavale down and sending the abusers of its women and children to jail, there was never any shortage of people willing to accept its collective promises to do better in future. It was, when all was said and done, a religious community, whose values, although no longer shared by New Zealand society as a whole, nevertheless were worthy of its respect. Citizens must be permitted to exercise their religious freedom.

And, in the minds of far too many, there was the unspoken conviction that in one, isolated and beautiful part of the country, it was right and proper that a living exemplar of the old values that had made New Zealand “God’s Own Country” should continue to thrive and prosper.

It is a bleak and terrible fact: a reality from which nearly all of us turn our faces. That, in places like Gloriavale, of which the world has seen too many, the sexual abuse, commercial exploitation and psychological torture are not regrettable deviations from the utopian religious dreams of these communities’ founders. These communities were founded to provide an environment in which sexual abuse, commercial exploitation and psychological torture could proceed unchecked.

Set up a community far away from prying eyes; deck it out in the colours of religion, or personal growth, or social evolution; keep outsiders at bay; bombard a captive audience of followers with a system of ideas that cannot be questioned; and invest the community’s founder/s with godlike authority – ruthlessly enforced by his “men of might”. Then, sit back, and watch as what was presented to the world as Heaven, turns slowly but surely into Hell.

Manson’s “Family”. Jonestown. Heaven’s Gate. The Branch Davidians. Centrepoint. The list goes on and on. But these communities all share three elements in common. They should have been stopped. They could have been stopped. But they weren’t stopped – until it was too late.