ABSTRACT
In the year 1992 an astounding fact presented itself to the outside world: an estimated 95 per cent of people on 25,000 islands in Oceania acknowledged their involvement with some Christian tradition or another. A century and a half previously, over 95 per cent of the habitable portions of this vast island realm had heard nothing of the Bible or a proclamation of the Gospel. The difference, of course, has everthing to do with the processes we call missionization, evangelization and conversion. These processes were set in train by European churches who sent personnel to ‘save souls’ lost in ‘heathen darkness’. As we shall confirm, though, those who adopted the new faith were not like empty vessels waiting to be filled. It does no justice to island peoples to imagine that they were duped by foreigners, unable to make choices in their best interests and thus suffered under new religious regimens they did not deserve to have foisted upon them. Much modern criticism against missionaries, certainly, can be helpful; the very notion of active missionization has and should come under scrutiny and energetic debate. On the other hand, the historical records no longer justify the conclusion that a scattered, physically vulnerable bunch of isolated ‘dogooders’ were responsible for the Christianization of the Pacific and the demise of the old cultures. In what follows we find that the Christianization involved ‘people movements’—transformations of religious allegiance and commitment by word of mouth at the village level, and by families, clans and tribes and sometimes whole culturolinguistic groups-and most of the action was in the hands of the indigenous peoples.2 They had traditional repertories and criteria for deciding upon religious change; they also had the common sense to discriminate between the types of newcomers they experienced and between what lay behind the new messages and their bearers’ behavioural enactment of it. It is sheer romanticism to expect that they would not attempt some religious adjustment, let alone radical
conversion, moreover, because it was not just the missionary message which called for a response; in fact it is remarkable how Christian preaching was so widely and seriously received when so much else by way of technical wonders and widening geographical horizons affected this previously ‘untouched’ (some might say ‘untainted’) part of the globe. Of course at this point in time there is anxiety for the Pacific churches that many more ‘messages’ from the global village-via radio, television, new supermarkets, etc.—are circulating to capture the islanders’ attention.
