Evangelical missionaries in the South Seas 1797-1860

Abstract

The work of missionaries has an important place in the history of the South Seas. Missions have played a significant role in directing much of the current thinking of the South Sea islanders, and the traditions of Christian teaching have become as fully a part of the ideological background as the traditions of their own culture Although the degree to which Christianity has affected the traditional ways of life varies from group to group, and from island to island, the total effect of Christianity has been to minimise the sanctions of the past, even if at times it has failed to exalt the spiritual authority of Christ. The historian is not necessarily concerned with the moral problem of the" rightness" of missionaries being sent to non-Christian countries. He is more concerned with the success or failure of the missionaries to do what they set out to do, and with their management of the problems arising from their contact with other peoples and other ways of life. He must, before all, record change. The change that had taken place before 1860, in eastern Polynesia, was in most cases only half a change. A new culture had been grafted on to the old, but in other instances it appeared that a reorientation had simply been given to the old ways. It is the purpose of this study to show something of the mentality of the missionaries who sought to change the social systems of the South Seas. The Evangelical missionary emerges as a special type of actor in the account of the relations between Europeans and native peoples. If, in the early years, he seems to fall into more categories, by the 1860s, by virtue of more uniform training, he had become somewhat stereotyped. In relation to the role of the Evangelical missionary two other points might be made. The first is the development of a new mentality in the national scene. We see in the heredity and environment of the mission families, the growth and culture of a similar spirit to that Evangelical zeal which took the missionaries to the field. This spirit, reinjected back into the national life, has served as a powerful stimulus to progress. Out of the mission field came men who knew their own minds. It is surprising the number of distinguished and influential, people, by no means restricted to the religious world, who derive immediately from the mission families, and who have enriched the national life. Secondly, it might be observed that the impact of the Evangelical missionaries often provided the quickest w ay to self-assertion by the native peoples. In the world of culture conflict, which is in a sense, the world of Evangelical religion, the islander was given a beam to support himself against the tide of new concepts. Wherever that beam was grasped, the islander* s potentials for self-assertion were increased.