The Passionate Pastor: The Cultural Performances of the Reverend Rutherford Waddell

Abstract

This article explores some connections between church worlds and cultures of performance in Victorian New Zealand. My examples are drawn mainly, though not exclusively, from the career of a Dunedin Presbyterian minister, Rutherford Waddell. His performances in the pulpit, on the public platform and with the pen made him perhaps the best-known and most influential Protestant minister in the country between the late 1870s and the 1930s. A sermon he preached to his St Andrew‘s congregation in October 1888, "The Sin of Cheapness", exposed the exploitation of women workers in the clothing industry, galvanizing the emergence of a powerful and broad-based social reform movement on which the Liberal party rode to power in 1890. Passing worker-friendly industrial and labour legislation, and granting the vote to women in 1893, the Liberals won New Zealand an international reputation as the social laboratory of the world. New Zealand Truth, the country‘s most popular weekly newspaper, testified to the breadth of Waddell‘s popularity in 1927 when it praised him as a "scholarly, broad-minded man ...idolized by all" who dedicated his life "to elevate, to live justly and to help the fallen." Coming from a paper that normally ridiculed "wowser" parsons—and Waddell was a prohibitionist—this was high praise indeed.