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Anthropology and Religion

Summary

Summary

The Christian missionaries introduced a religion that had been evolved in a different cultural setting. This religion carried with it its own cultural values, page 94and the Polynesian values that centuries of practice had established in a different geographical setting were condemned as "heathen practices." The old taboos were replaced by new restrictions. The death of the Polynesian gods was followed by profound changes that, commencing with religion, extended to the disorganization of society and the wrecking of the native arts and crafts. The changes at first were tyrannical and but dimly understood. In the course of time, however, further adaptation took place, and the church and the government assumed their respective values in an adjusted culture. The Mangaians, as well as the rest of the Polynesians, have readjusted themselves to the Christian religion. If Christianity is any criterion of Western culture, the island communities of Polynesia are more civilized today than the masses in the great cities of Europe and America.

As an anthropologist, I see religion as an essential part of the culture of any people. Probably a psychologist or a theologian could phrase things better than I can, but I have attempted to avoid what has been termed "the verbal bondage of a sterile and paralyzing metaphysics." I have a firm conviction that the things man has created with his mind and worshiped in the spirit are as real to him as the material things he has made with his hands. A system of ethics may be sufficient for the intellectual minority, but it is devoid page 95of the feeling and emotion that appeals to the masses of the people. The belief in the supernatural and in the immortality of the soul must be accepted as real facts that have led to action and results. I am not concerned as to whether the supernatural and immortality can be proved or disproved scientifically. As a student of the manners, customs, and thoughts of peoples, I am concerned with their beliefs. The belief in immortality is a living, vital fact that has brought and still brings comfort and happiness to large masses of people. But, though religion seems to be a necessary part of every culture, its value in Western civilization has been depreciating. Professor John Dewey, in his Terry Lectures, held that the center of gravity in our civilization had shifted more and more from religion to economics. With many people money has become not a means to an end but the end itself.

Our present civilization is sick and fast losing its right to be called "civilization." The discoveries of science, which should be utilized entirely for the benefit of man, are being prostituted for the wholesale killing of people. The pity of it is that those nations which desire peace are being forced to arm in a hitherto unparalleled manner by those who desire to rule the world by force. Truth has again sought cover in a well from which she may never emerge. The Christian ideals that religion has taught us seem to have been page 96cast aside by millions of people. Instead of brotherly love, we have racial intolerance and merciless persecution. Our civilization stands on the verge of a relapse, not into barbarism, but into sheer savagery. I believe that the Christian religion is an integral part of Western civilization or culture and that it is one of the few restraining forces that may yet guide us back to faith in goodness, truth, and justice. The death of the Christian gods would mean the collapse of the culture to which they belong just as surely as the death of the Polynesian gods led to the end of Polynesian culture.

Religion needs no scientific proof, for it is based on faith. Faith to those who have it is a vivid reality. Could we but restore that faith, we might be able to say to a sick world in the words of the Great Master, "Arise, go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole."

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Map of the Islands of Polynesia