Jennifer Fish Kashay

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Jennifer Fish Kashay | From Kapus to Christianity: The Disestablishment of the Hawaiian Religion and Chiefly Appropriation of Calvinist Christianity | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.1 | The History Cooperative

From Kapus to Christianity: The Disestablishment of the Hawaiian Religion and Chiefly Appropriation of Calvinist Christianity

This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of the factors that led to the disestablishment of the Hawaiian religion in the early-nineteenth century. It argues that Hawai'i's leaders adopted Calvinist Christianity as a strategy to shore up their political hegemony, while reaping the benefits of their association with American missionaries.

IN 1985, MARSHALL SAHLINS DESCRIBED traditional Hawaiian society as a "political economy of love," where "sex was everything." However, the anthropologist's study of Hawaiian culture focused on the late 1770s, when Captain James Cook both "discovered" and met his death at the Sandwich Islands. By the mid-1820s, Ka'ahumanu—Kamehameha II's principal advisor—and a number of Hawai'i's most powerful ali'i nui (high chiefs) embraced Protestant Christianity and moved to establish Calvinist moral laws, including edicts against prostitution, polygamy, and adultery. It is impossible to make sense of the apparent contradiction, and revolution, in values practiced or established by the Sandwich Island elite unless the effects of foreign incursion on the religious and political structure of Hawaiian culture are considered.¹

In 1970, J. L. Fischer wrote an article that assessed previous scholarship on the overthrow of the Hawaiian taboo system, while positing his own theories on the subject. Since that time, no one scholar has focused solely on the factors leading to the disestablishment of the Hawaiian religion, nor has anyone analyzed the many and varied considerations that in all probability led the majority of Hawai'i's leaders to adopt Calvinist Christianity. In their various works, scholars of Hawaiian history such as Marshall Sahlins, Jocelyn Linnekin, and Lilikalå Kame'eleihiwa discussed aspects of these issues. However, in each case, the disestablishment of the Hawaiian religion and chiefly appropriation of Calvinist Christianity was not their focus. Likewise, nineteenth-century native historians such as Samuel Kamakau, John Papa I'i, and David Malo also touched on these issues, but never analyzed them in depth. Consequently, this essay endeavors to correct this shortfall by combining a synthesis of existing scholarship with additional research on these issues. It argues that the majority of Hawaiian chiefs adopted Calvinist Christianity as a strategy to shore up their political hegemony, while reaping the benefits of their association with the missionaries.²

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