Sometimes, monsters aren’t so impressive up close. So it was when I interviewed Brian Tamaki on TV a decade ago.
As we sketched out an Easter Weekend episode of Māori Television’s Media Take with a theme of Christianity, society and the media in 2015, a couple of my colleagues expressed the view that Destiny Church’s work in rescuing people mired in lives of substance abuse and violence – and the church’s appearances in news headlines – warranted an invitation to appear alongside other clergy.
Word came back that Tamaki would only appear with his wife, Hannah. As his part of the show unfolded, it soon became clear why. Bishop Brian could not only not meaningfully discuss faith and society, he could barely form a sentence.
I invited him, kindly I thought, to reflect on his past statements, including that gay people were “perverts” who were “warping” the country (after all, he had recently attended a benefit for the transgender former mayor Georgina Beyer); and an awful sermon in which he had railed against immigrants and their “demon religions”.
The latter had seemed a dangerous thing for him to tell his vulnerable flock about their neighbours. There was no response worth quoting.
Hannah weighed in on the questions her husband couldn’t answer (which was effectively all of them), claiming at one point they had staged Destiny’s 2004 “Enough Is Enough” march in Wellington against civil unions because “they wanted to make it legal for an 8-year-old girl to have sex with an adult. That was in the same law.”
Ironically, the Tamakis had been shepherded to the studio by Jevan Goulter, a gay man who some years later would escape prosecution for his role in attempting to pervert the course of justice on behalf of the sexual predator Sir James Wallace by taking a deal to give evidence against the philanthropist.
I have not spoken to the Tamakis since 2015, but I have periodically brushed up against their works. Twice in a former job, I interviewed men who had embraced Destiny’s “Man Up” programme and it did appear it had made their lives more stable and kept them away from drugs and violence for the moment. But it had also been a vector for stupid, hateful ideas that twisted them and had nothing to do with their needs. Their Facebook pages were depressing reading.
In March 2023, I watched Tamaki’s men shove and assault trans-friendly protesters on Auckland’s Queen St. His men were visibly agitated, perhaps because the rhetoric they were hearing from Destiny was more extreme, deeper into the American culture war, since the pandemic – a kind of social long Covid, you could say.
The disgraceful events at Auckland’s Te Atatū Peninsula Library last month indicate the screw has turned further yet. The mob in Te Atatū genuinely believed they were saving children from perversion, even at the cost of traumatising and injuring them.
They will never ask their apostle, however, about his “spiritual father”, the late American evangelist Eddie Long, who visited New Zealand at Tamaki’s invitation in 2003, 2008 and 2016. On the third visit, Tamaki implausibly claimed ignorance of multiple sexual abuse allegations against Long, including from a teenage boy who claimed the abuse began when he accompanied Long on his second visit here. All the lawsuits were settled confidentially.
“I just wanted Brian to say he was wrong” about immigrants and gay people, I told Hannah as the lights went down that night in the TV studio in 2015. They both laughed. “Well, he’s never going to say that!” she replied.
She was right. Her husband has never reflected on the consequences of his words or actions. But perhaps we have reached a point where the accountability should no longer be up to him.
