'Half Christian': Indigenisation and Inculturation in Stevenson's Pacific Fiction

This essay seeks to demonstrate the depth of Robert Louis Stevenson's literary and intellectual engagement with Pacific Islands Christianity. Specifically, it analyses his Pacific fiction with reference to the concepts of indigenisation and inculturation in order to show how these contributed to his literary portrayal of Pacific Islands cultures. A regular churchgoer and lay missionary in the Pacific, Stevenson's growing understanding of the relationship between Western faith traditions and local cultures formed a compelling ground to which he repeatedly returned in his writing. Fiction was a major part of his effort to articulate the ways in which a faith that had long been determined as exclusively European was now being dramatically reimagined in rather different cultural conditions. In effect, Stevenson was heralding the emergence of World Christianity, one of the most important religious developments of the twentieth century.