Transcript
QUENTIN ATKINSON: One theory is that Christianity has spread by a kind of top down process, where a leader converts and then sort of forces the people to convert - or at least strongly encourages them. This is sometimes argued to be what happened in Europe when Constantine converted to Christianity and then facilitated the spread of Christianity across Europe. But others have argued that actually the appeal of Christianity was from the bottom up. That it appealed to the kind of underclasses, who then forced the elites to themselves convert. So there's these two theories but this played out in Europe a couple of thousand years ago and so we don't have great records of it. But in the Pacific, Christianity spread many different groups, many different islands more recently and we have fairly good historical records of when conversion efforts began and how long they took. And we also know a lot about the features of each island.
JAMIE TAHANA: Pretty much, you conclude that it was mostly top down. How did you come to this?
QA: Well like I said, we have this data on these 70 different cultures across the Pacific and they have different political structures, their cultures are different sizes - so different population sizes - and different levels of inequality. And the test we applied was that if it's a top-down process, then those cultures that have a strong political structure with a clear leader are going to be more likely to convert more quickly. If it's a bottom-up process that appeals to the common person, then we predicted that conversion's going to be faster where there is more inequality. We also thought that population size would play a role, so we put that in the models as well. So we looked at those three different factors and when we ran the analysis, we found that whether or not a society has a heirarchical political structure with a clear leader, does predict how quickly the society converts. They convert more quickly. The level of inequality didn't effect the conversion type. So that supports the top down argument. And then what's interesting is if you go back through some of the records of the early missionaries, a couple of the successful missionaries actually explicitly talk about deliberately targetting the leaders because that's where they see the power and that can make the whole thing go more smoothly.
JT: Austronesian people themselves made better missionaries, you find. Such as the Tahitians on Rarotonga.
QA: That's right, yeah. So we find conversion gets faster throughout the history of Pacific missionisation and one part of the explanation for that might be that while the initial attempts to convert were European foreigners coming in, over the last few decades there's been a lot more contribution from other Pacific people converting their neighbours.
JT: Right so a Polynesian Constantine, if you like.
QA: Well maybe, yeah.
JT: So this explains that it spread quickly, but does it go in any way into about why it spread so quickly? What is it that allowed Christianity to spread so quickly through these cultures? Because it's been enforced, but people of course had to follow it, didn't they?
QA: That's right, so yeah, I mean, first of all just collecting this data gave us an idea of just how quickly things can change and the average conversion time was about 30 years, so about the working life of a missionary. But the conversion times varied from sometimes just a year to a couple of hundred years for the longest conversion times. So quite a lot of variation, but overall I think we were kind of surprised by how rapidly things can change and as for the reason for this speed? Well clearly - well we think - the political strucutre and being able to impose things top down played a role and that can speed things up; also we found smaller populations converted more quickly, which fits with the idea that the ideology's kind of spreading between people.
JT: The missionaries were all going around the Pacific at about the same time as, you know, the trade routes were forming and when European countries were making their way through the region taking over. Can it be seen as an organic spread when at the same time, empire was enforcing itself around here?
QA: Yeah I think that's a really good point. It's difficult in this case to really completely seperate the expansion of Christianity from the broader process of colonisation that was going on, and yeah the two are linked obviously. But I guess when you're looking at a large number of groups all with slightly different conditions you can kind of average out some of the variation in colonial strategy and just look at the differences in conversion times. So it was part of the picture and, I think, probably part of why it was this relentless process. Pretty much every culture we looked at had converted and I'm sure in part due to the appeal of Christianity, but also its link with the colonial powers.
JT: What about its lasting power? Because, you know, about 200 years on its still very strong in the Pacific and in some aspects it's managed to ensconce itself with the culture and tradition that was there before it arrived - Fa'a Samoa, for example. Does this glean any light on its lasting power with the top-down, because this would suggest as well that there might have been a bottom-up aspect, wouldn't it?
QA: Well it's certainly been adopted by, and integrated into the culture of a lot of these groups across the Pacific, and it's very much part of the culture where I work in Vanuatu. It's sort of seamlessly integrated into the culture, including the supernatural beliefs that were there before it kind of merged. The islands have undergone so much change in the past couple of hundred years and the religious change has been an integral part of that, it's kind of become built in to the identity.
