Abstract

Between 1852 and 1900, several hundred Native Hawaiians engage in mission work in Micronesia and the Marquesas. Through the postmillennial worldview brought by their New England “makua” (parents), foreign mission work allowed them to support the expansion of Christ’s kingdom while pushing back against the paternalism and racism of American missionaries in Hawai’i and in the field. If the most important measure of a people came from their dedication to expanding Christ’s kingdom, the Hawaiians could claim full equality with the Americans and Europeans through their commitment to mission work. Yet an examination of Hawaiian missionary interactions with and treatment of other islanders provides a stark counterpoint to this somewhat celebratory account of Hawaiian religious agency. The same rigid theological division of the world and eagerness to expand Christ’s kingdom also led to and justified their denunciation and even persecution of the islanders they worked among.

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