Coming to a Head: Digital Contestations over Sacred Sites in Aotearoa New Zealand

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Institutional Innovation and Tradition: Understanding Changes and Continuities in Religious Leadership, Communication, and Technology Ethics) Abstract The religious landscape of Aotearoa New Zealandis a dynamic and shifting field. One of the most riveting dimensions of religion is blooming via an indigenous Māori renaissance, which is displayed in a struggle over narratives, language, and tikanga (protocol) around sacred sites. In the digital age, social media platforms have become sites of negotiation, contestation, and the clarification of Māori religious authority in relation to sacred places. One of the hallmarks of digital culture is the flattening of traditional modes of hierarchical authority. In this article, we explore the discourse in an online news article’s comment section debating tikanga around nudity on the summit of Taranaki Mountain, a place widely regarded as sacred to Māori. This project follows the work of Neumaier and Klinkhammer in tracing the contours of what we identify as a form of mediatised interreligious contact between settler secularity and Indigenous Māori. Using this frame, we argue that this case study affords a deeper understanding of Māori perspectives, settler appeals to secularity, and the digital environment shaping and forming these points of contact.