How did Christianity arrive within the Pacific Islands?
Protestant missionaries arrived within the Pacific Islands within the 1700s and 1800s. They had huge success in evangelistic efforts due to the London Missionary Society, which established schools and trained pastors in Samoa and Cook Islands. In Tonga, Methodist missionaries were most successful; in Samoa, the Congregationalists and Presbyterians dominated.
Christianity’s initial success was in Tahiti, which is an element of French Polynesia, though the locals still prefer the unique name of Maohi Nui. There, the missionaries not only converted locals but equipped them to take the gospel to other islands. The local missionaries’ status as Indigenous Pacific Islanders contributed to their success.
Did colonization within the Pacific Islands differ from elsewhere on this planet?
We are small island nations with minimal natural resources. We have beautiful settings, an abundance of fertile soil and food, and materials to construct homes. But we don’t have precious minerals. So the Europeans had no economic interest in Oceania, apart from Australia and New Zealand.
As a result, the Pacific Islands were colonized more for religious than political or economic reasons. I feel that fact explains why we’re still 90 percent Christian today.
What did the Islanders imagine in before Christians showed up, and the way did Christianity and native cultures interact?
The Pacific Islands are classified into three principal groups: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. All these cultures, like other Indigenous communities, had their very own traditional religions before Christianity arrived.
Indigenous beliefs were very much connected to nature, the land, the ocean, and the earth. For example, a notion of the divine as Mother Earth may be very much a part of that spirituality and Indigenous religions across the nations within the Pacific.
Of course, when Christianity got here, there have been clashes in lots of instances. For example, the religion’s give attention to individual sin and salvation was, and still is, at odds with our culture’s collective existence. Ultimately, nevertheless, the success of Christianity in Oceania was unprecedented.
Talk about how the Islanders contextualized Christianity and made it their very own.
Taking my home island of Tonga for example, I see some remnants of our traditional religion in how we understand Christianity, because a few of our myths and legends contained stories of self-sacrifice—giving up your life for your mates, family, and family members. These legends, in effect, were transferred to Jesus Christ. When the story of Jesus was told in those terms, it was easily understood and contextualized.
We still tell the standard stories today, but strictly inside cultural ceremonies. Our spiritual faith is totally rooted within the gospel. But I feel that a number of the values I used to be brought up with, and that we now regard as normatively Christian, like human dignity, justice, compassion, hope, and peace, were also the values that my ancestors lived out in practice.
Did Christianity shake up the region’s social structures in any way?
In the Pacific Islands, there isn’t an enormous demarcation between powerful nobles or chiefs and the common people because we’ve got such a detailed kinship structure. It was far more difficult for the people at the highest to abuse the people at the underside, because they might be abusing people they were related to.
When Christian missionaries got here, it didn’t dispel social division but exacerbated it, partly attributable to the competition between Methodists, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, and other groups. If tribal tensions were present, the missionaries sometimes deliberately played on those underlying conflicts since it gave them leverage with certain groups.
I attribute the success of Christianity to our nobles and our people, who were deeply spiritual and respectful. They found ways to reconcile and unify their people, in order that they may receive Western missionaries while stopping civil wars and unrest from developing because of faith.
What about women’s rights? Did Christians contribute to advancing them here?
I wouldn’t deny that Christianity has contributed toward advancing women’s rights in some ways, but to a big extent, organic change has come from our culture.
The missionaries got here with their Western, Victorian, patriarchal values and influenced the locals with this mindset. But women enjoy a really high regard and position in our kinship structure, and that is seen in a number of the cultural practices that we still proceed to enact in our ceremonies. We had female monarchs and feminine chiefs.
The sacredness of womanhood in my Tongan culture seems to me to have been cheapened through the years due to our openness to Western influences. Those of us who’re aware of that cultural history are having to critique and unlearn Western ideas. If we had been more fully capable of integrate our cultural understandings and worldviews with the Western influences that got here with Christianity, I feel women would have been ordained earlier in lots of Pacific Island contexts.
In terms of present-day concerns, how are migration patterns into and out of the Pacific Islands impacting the church straight away?
Migration to the Pacific Islands is transitional, where people come to do ministry or work on a development issue. They come just for a limited time after which return to the West.
More Pacific Islanders try to get to Western countries. There are more Tongans living overseas than in Tonga. But some older expatriates are experiencing nostalgia for his or her homeland and have come back to retire, or at the very least return for significant periods of time to be with their members of the family.
The church in Tonga, where I’m from, continues to thrive. When I visit, I really like seeing how actively the younger generation is participating within the church. The older generation is proactive about ensuring that young persons are engaged in faith and spirituality.
One of essentially the most controversial events in Oceania, with ramifications that persist today, is when the United States, France, and the UK used Micronesia as goal practice for nuclear testing after the tip of WWII. This forcibly displaced residents within the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and more, and when people moved back to their island homes, many fell sick with radiation exposure. Where was the church during this crisis?
Nuclear armament and proliferation was a part of the political agenda for countries like France and the US. Many of us in other islands weren’t quite aware that these countries had claimed and possessed Micronesia for nuclear testing, until countries like New Zealand drew attention to it in the worldwide arena.
Pacific Island nations began mobilizing themselves during this time. Churches were very much a part of that effort due to the very close link between church and state within the region. Churches were very energetic in trying to search out ways to fight against nuclear testing. They were standing up and fighting to make their voices heard in political debates and other arenas.
But Micronesia wasn’t the one region in Oceania that was impacted. Western countries were also conducting nuclear testing in Tahiti, one in every of the larger island nations in French Polynesia. France was fully funding the Tahitian government and throwing money far and wide to attempt to hide the damage that they were doing and the terrible sickness and disfigurement of unborn babies.
Western countries are so powerful with their resources and military might. They got away with a lot and still do to this present day.
Do you discover that Western privilege also permeates discussion on alleviating the results of climate change in your region?
In recent times, the Oceania-Pacific region has turn out to be loads more visible because the face of climate change in lots of global ecumenical and sociopolitical circles.
While working for the World Council of Churches in Geneva, I used to be very aware that Pacific Islanders were pushing for the visibility of climate change issues in churches and ecumenical circles, in addition to in political settings akin to the United Nations. However, it has turn out to be too easy to make use of a Pacific Islander because the face of climate change and its impacts, reasonably than saying this can be a problem for all of us and we want to step up and confront it together.
To take care of the environmental problems related to our carbon footprint, the Pacific Islands need resources that they don’t necessarily have. They ought to be getting resources to assist manage the impacts of climate change, on condition that they’re mostly the victims of it, not the cause.
When Western resources are accompanied with this sentiment—“We have the answers, and you’ve to only hearken to us”—the locals are disabled from utilizing what they already learn about living sustainably and from offering such knowledge to Westerners as resources.
Pacific Islanders, like all Indigenous communities across the globe, can still draw on their centuries-old knowledge of methods to live with nature, the land, and the ocean in cohesive and harmonious ways. A patronizing and tokenistic emphasis on resources from the West has obscured the locals’ contextual knowledge and best practices for sustainable living, in order that as an alternative of enhancing such contextual gifts and skills to counter the impacts of climate change, a unbroken colonial relationship of dependency is fostered.
