Establishment of christianity
Oral traditions with bearing on a living religion naturally change in response to ongoing events, adding new details to account for new phenomena and concerns, and reinterpreting or changing the meanings of characters or events, as has been dramatically illustrated in Melanesia where ethnographers have been present to witness the upheavals following contact with global European culture (e.g. Jorgensen 2001). Throughout Oceania, this contact usually included the promulgation of Christianity by missionaries, and with it not only revision of pre-existing myths and human-spirit relationships, but also their replacement (Barker 1990). It is to this “great transformation” (Hefner 1993) that we now turn.
The outliers have never been completely cut off from outside influences, as the adoption in some places of magical beliefs and practices from neighboring non-Polynesian peoples demonstrates. From this perspective, the introduction and spread of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is simply another such exogenous influence on local religion, albeit from more distant and organized sources. Christianization has also been more totalizing and profound a change, in the sense of religious conversion, than many of the earlier religious influences and movements. Indeed, by the late twentieth century Christianity had become a cornerstone of social and emotional life in almost every outlier community.
Tikopia and Anuta
Christian churches attempted to establish missions on some of the Polynesian outliers during the mid-nineteenth century; and in one famous incident, Anglican Bishop John Coleridge Patteson was martyred while trying to bring Christianity to Nukapu in the Outer Reefs. But the missions made little headway until the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, a number of Tikopians were recruited to the Melanesian Mission of the Anglican church. In 1916, Bishop John Wood and three Tikopian missionaries landed on Anuta, received permission to establish a church, and the island’s entire population quickly converted. On Tikopia itself, the process took much longer.
There are records of missionaries attempting to visit Tikopia as early as 1858; but they made little headway, and their operation’s fate has vanished from the historic record. Finally, in 1907 an Anglican missionary, Ellison Tergatok, became resident on the island. Father Ellison came from Vanuatu’s Banks Islands and was Melanesian. He married a Tikopian woman, was given the marital name of Pa Pangisi ‘Mr. Banks’, and spent the rest of his life on Tikopia, learning the language and taking part in many of the island’s activities. Nonetheless, he was committed to conversion of the Tikopians and promoted his ideas quite firmly, discouraging young men from growing their hair long and joining the pagan dances. He also insisted on marriage for young people who were in sexual relationships. In this matter his interpretation, through a Christian lens, of sex outside of marriage failed to take into account the Tikopians’ pragmatic thinking about population control on a small island. By mandating marriage and, therefore, procreation, Pa Pangisi contributed to the island’s overpopulation problem and indirectly triggered the final conversion to Christianity.
At the time of Firth’s first fieldwork in 1928-29 Pa Pangisi had only converted one of the four chiefs, the Ariki Tafua, and most of the commoners in Faea, Tafua’s side of the island. With three chiefs still practicing pagans, Firth provides what may be the most detailed description of traditional religion anywhere in Polynesia.
In 1952-53 Firth returned to Tikopia with James Spillius, and they recorded the final years of the traditional religion. At this time, still only one chief had become a Christian. However, many commoners had converted, and the Work of the Gods, for which the chiefs required much material and human support, was becoming difficult to perform. The unity of the people and good of the land lay at the heart of the old religion, and the pagan chiefs, always pragmatists, decided in 1955 that they should convert to Christianity so that the island would no longer be divided by religion. Two serious cyclones, deaths from famine (caused in part by a population that had increased by 50% in thirty years and strained the island’s ability to recuperate quickly), and the deaths of important ritual elders precipitated this decision.
There are two accounts of the conversion process. The first comes from Firth and Spillius (1963; also Firth 1970) who recorded that, once the decision was made, one of the pagan chiefs was baptized by Pa Pangisi, who had married into the chief’s family. The other two chiefs insisted that their reception in the Church of Melanesia should be performed by the bishop, and a message was sent to Honiara requesting his presence. The mission ship, Southern Cross, brought the bishop, and the remaining two chiefs—along with nearly all the members of their kainanga ‘clans’—were baptized. Only one old woman refused, saying that her husband had died a pagan and she would too. The degree to which there was deeply felt doctrinal commitment is unknown, although Firth noted that the Ariki Taumako did not intellectually reject his old gods; he just decided not to worship them any longer. The old temples were left to decay, and new church buildings were constructed in the centers of several villages. The first priest was the Melanesian Pa Pangisi, but the Tikopians quickly arranged for some of their men to attend theological college. Those men became Anglican priests or brothers of the Franciscan order and ministered to the island.
The second story of the island’s final conversion is consistent with a society taking control of its own history and rewriting it to some degree. This version, recorded by Macdonald in 1980, suggested that rather than the historical accident of being missionized by Anglicans, a deliberate choice was made among competing denominations. In this rendition, Tikopians rejected Roman Catholicism on the grounds that the priests did not marry; and they rejected Seventh Day Adventism, which had been successful on Rennell and Bellona, because of its dietary restrictions. Anglicans, they said, were the least trouble and, therefore, they decided to become Anglicans.
In the early twenty-first century, virtually everyone on both Anuta and Tikopia is affiliated with the Anglican church, and islanders are expected to attend services twice every day. Anglicanism continues to be practiced in a fairly usual way, except for the prohibition on menstruating women attending church on the grounds that the blood of women should be kept separate from the blood of Christ. Sometimes people return from Honiara as Jehovah’s Witnesses or believers in some other sects and try to introduce their beliefs, but this is systematically discouraged. Recently, a Tikopian meeting place built by some evangelical Protestants was burned down, apparently with the Anglican priest’s encouragement. Meanwhile, a handful of Anutan Seventh Day Adventists from Tikopia and Anuta operates mostly in the overseas communities in Honiara and on Utupua. These people try to blend quietly into the dominant religious environment when visiting their home islands.
Rennell and Bellona
As on Tikopia, Christianity came relatively late to Rennell and Bellona. Two articles (Monberg 1962, 1967) detail the history of conversion and the influence of one island on the other in this matter. Monberg (1967:566) notes that the old religion of Rennell and Bellona had undergone important transformations even before European contact. At that time, new deities and rites developed, and old ones were abandoned. However, the conversion to Christianity was more dramatic. All the old gods were dismissed and replaced by The God-in-the-Sky (Te ‘Atua i te Ngangi) and his son, Te ‘Aitu.
Rennell had more contact than Bellona with the outside world, and in 1910 the South Seas Evangelical Mission sent a missionary to the island. The missionary was killed, and church activities stalled. Then, in the early 1930s, some young Rennellese men were taken to Seventh Day Adventist mission stations on other islands for training. They eventually returned to their island and paved the way for Christianity’s establishment.
While their training was sketchy and poorly understood, elements of the new religion influenced some Rennellese. In October 1938, an important chief-priest began his harvest rituals according to the old practices. When the people and the crops were assembled, the chief’s adopted son ordered them to pray to the Christian God, and he told them that the next day they would be taken up to Heaven. The people thereupon frantically gathered more crops to take with them, and they crowded into a house which the young man said would be taken with them to the skies. Mass hysteria resulted and intensified when, the next day, they had still not been transported. In the chaos, some people with yaws were beaten to death. The young man who had initiated the disorder committed breaches of Rennell’s most important taboos by committing incest with his classificatory mother and sister. People fled to their villages, and slowly order returned. As the Rennellese later told Monberg (1962:148), they saw the possessed performance of the young man and the disorder and death as symbolic of a fight between the old gods and the new one in which the new god won and the old ones were expelled. By November 1938 the madness on Rennell was over, and Christianity, in the form of Seventh Day Adventism, was accepted.
Bellona was more isolated and had minimal contact with the outside world. The Bellonese heard of Rennell’s conversion, but their old gods forbade them, through mediums, to mention the name of the new god, whom they denounced as evil. After Rennell’s conversion, Moa, a powerful lineage elder, decided to take the faith to Bellona. When he arrived, fighting among Bellonese lineages was causing widespread disruption of social life. Moa held many meetings. He argued with the old gods, who spoke through mediums; and Moa won the arguments. Then he demonstrated his power by destroying the stones that represented the “bodies” of the two most important sky gods without being harmed. It was also believed that his prayers cured several people’s sicknesses. Moa’s stories from the Bible were simple; but he told them in their shared language, using understandable metaphors. Within a few weeks of Moa’s arrival the temples were torn down, ritual paraphernalia destroyed, and rituals abandoned. Virtually the whole island converted immediately to Christianity; only five families held out for another couple of months. In discussing why conversion had occurred so quickly and completely, Monberg suggests that the Bellonese recognized a new god, powerful enough to keep the old gods away and, therefore, one that it would be politic to embrace. This completed what Monberg (1967:566) referred to as Phase I—“acceptance.”
A few months later, South Seas Evangelical missionaries arrived. This created some confusion, as the Seventh Day Adventists worshipped on Saturdays while the new arrivals held Sunday to be sacred. Monberg (1967:570) notes that, as the Bellonese had no names for the days of the week, this was not a completely comprehensible difference.
Monberg refers to the period from 1938 to 1949 as the adjustment period. Moa had helped the Bellonese build churches and taught them prayers; but then he left, and the Bellonese were unsure of what rituals they should perform as Christians. They added practices such as handshaking, took European or Melanesian names, and created prayers from meaningless or half-understood words. Not only was there bewilderment, frustration, and uncertainty about how to be Christians; there was also fighting, often physical, between the two sects. In the end they built many churches in the same way that important men had built temples in the old religion. By 1943 there were 23 SDA churches and ten SSEM churches, one for every thirteen people. Social and political considerations influenced the choice of sect; doctrinal differences played almost no part in promoting allegiance to one group or the other.
The third phase of conversion Monberg (1967:583) dates from 1949 and calls “readjustment.” The Bellonese recognized that they needed more guidance on how to be Christian and sent some young men to Guadalcanal for training. This, however, was still inadequate for their needs, and in 1949 the Seventh Day Adventist church sent two missionaries. These missionaries made the people give up their many churches. A few churches in central locations were established, and villages grew around them. All dancing was banned, as was polygyny, tobacco, and foods such as pork and shellfish, which are prohibited in Leviticus. The Bellonese were happy to follow directions and complied. Young men were subsequently sent away and returned with training to allow them to become mission teachers, while the old lineage heads lost their power.
Central Outlier Atolls
According to local experts and administrative reports, Roman Catholic missions operated briefly on Nukumanu, and Ontong Java, while the atolls were under the Forsayth plantations’ control in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the Germans’ departure from New Guinea and the western Solomons, the Catholic missions ceased to operate on the atolls. Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, the Anglicans became established on Ontong Java, but as recently as the 1980s, Christian evangelism was outlawed on Nukumanu and Takū. At that time, three churches—the Anglicans, United Church (an offshoot of the Methodists), and Jehovah’s Witnesses—were operating quietly on Nukumanu, but services were performed unofficially and unobtrusively in the homes of individual members. On Takū an evangelical Protestant was actively proselytizing but had failed to gain many converts. During the 1990s, the Nukumanu had a change of heart and most of the community joined the Anglicans, while one prominent family openly sided with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. On Takū, as of the early twenty-first century, the traditional religion—insofar as it is remembered—continues to predominate.
By the time of Donner’s on Sikaiana in 1980, the community had been Christian for half a century, and the church’s influence on daily life was ubiquitous. Most islanders were members of the Anglican Church. Services were held twice every day; communion occurred every Wednesday and Sunday; and almost everyone attended Sunday communion. Migrants to Guadalcanal who had settled in a community at Tenaru east of Honiara built their own church, which became very active. People remembered very little of the traditional ritual; after conversion in the 1930s, older people did not want to teach it and the younger people did not want to learn it. Many younger people in the 1930s (who were middle aged and elderly when Donner arrived in 1980) attended mission boarding schools, where interest in the old religion was systematically discouraged. At the same time, they met people from other parts of the Solomon Islands and were exposed to many Western practices and values.
West Futuna and Taumako
Evangelists from several island communities were placed on West Futuna by the London Missionary Society from as early as 1841; but conversion to Christianity only began in 1889, when the first five islanders were baptized by Reverend William Gunn of the Free Church of Scotland. Today islanders on Futuna are all nominally Christian. The Presbyterian church is firmly established, and a range of evangelical denominations are also currently popular.
Feinberg’s consultants could not offer a specific date for the establishment of Christianity on Taumako, but there was general agreement that conversion dates to the early decades of the twentieth century. The Anglicans had a virtual monopoly on Taumako and Vaeakau religious life in 2007-08. At that time, each of Taumako’s three main villages had its own flourishing church.
Factors Influencing Conversion
The rate of conversion and degree of commitment to Christianity vary considerably from one Polynesian outlier to another. Christianity took over very quickly—within months—on Anuta, Rennell, and Bellona. By contrast, it took half a century on Tikopia, from Father Ellison’s arrival in 1907 to the conversion of the last hold-outs in the mid-1950s. On Nukumanu it took a century, while on Takū it still is not complete and may even be waning. Yet, Tikopia and Anuta are both are classically stratified, centralized Polynesian chiefdoms with similar languages and cultures. Takū and Nukumanu are both relatively egalitarian atolls, and Rennell and Bellona are arguably the least centralized and stratified of any of the Polynesian outliers. How are we to explain this variation?
It has long been noted in the history of Oceania that where there is a strong hierarchy, conversion of a powerful chief can result in very quick reorganization of religious institutions for the entire people. In more egalitarian societies, by contrast, each individual must be converted in earnest before social transformation is possible (Howe 1984:306). Even where chiefs exist, they can be discouraged from accepting a new religion by the fact that their position arises from the pre-existing traditional social order, including the old religion. In small, egalitarian societies, groups may be converted quickly simply because there are few individuals to convince, and because cultural drift tends to be most powerful in small populations (Barth 1987). It has been found in Melanesia that the ideal of consensus, common among small-scale societies, initially is a conservative force; but when a tipping point is reached, the desire for conformity accelerates and encourages virtually universal acceptance of new faiths (e.g., Leavitt 2001; Tuzin 1997). Ultimately, if people are to convert, they must have motives, which often concern perceived political, economic, or ideological advantage. Conversion also requires locally convincing evidence of the truth of the new ideas (Lohmann 2000). Factors generating culturally relevant motivation to convert are many and variable, resulting in the different rates and degrees of conversion that have occurred on different outliers.
Mission, church, and sect are key institutional types and historical points in the conversion of Oceania: the new faith is introduced by a foreign mission, achieves full-fledged local standing as a church, and is complicated when competing sects or versions of “the same” faith arrive and interact (Boutilier, Hughes, and Tiffany 1984 [1978]). Wherever two or more Christian sects appeared, these proved a basis for mutual definition, othering, or conflict, similar to the role that the autochthonous religions had played in relationship to Christianity from the perspective of the missionaries and their early Christian converts (Jebens 2005).
The variety of causes and types of conversion known from other parts of the world (illustrated in Buckser and Glazier 2003) can also be seen in the outliers’ diverse experiences. The examples from the outliers provided above illustrate many of these, including political expediency, maintaining unity, acquiring access to desired possessions or conditions, new cosmological understandings and beliefs, responding to natural disasters such as epidemics and famines, and changing relationships with particular supernatural beings. Yet, no conversion is ever complete, and no religion ever pure and uninfluenced by its predecessors. This is easier to see shortly after two or more religions have come into contact than it is hundreds of years later. Since the Polynesian outliers have seen ethnographic work at the time of, and in the decades following, conversion, this religious hybridization or syncretism has been widely reported for the region.