Melanesia Today?

What Role For

Religion In

AFTERTHOUGHTS with Percy Chatterton in Port Moresby.

By and large Christian missions in Papua New Guinea have done a good job. They have contributed extensively to the development of the country and have been appreciated by its people. ‘Papua New Guinea is a Christian country’ is a phrase frequently heard from the lips of our leaders and of people generally throughout the country. This is probably because in the earlier years of the colonial period missionaries who came here were sent by the major historic churches of mainstream Christianity.

On the whole, relations between the various missions were good, with a minimum of overlapping and rivalry. There was it would be foolish to deny it - a good deal of animosity between Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries, an animosity which it took Vatican II to cure us of.

Relations between the missions and the colonial governments were also reasonably good, especially in Papua, though the mis sionaries did not hesitate to criticise and oppose governmental actions which they thought were wrong.

Missions are frequently criticised nowadays for ‘collaboration’ with colonialism. These critics should pause to consider what the alternative to colonialism would have been. Flad the European colonial powers not come into the Pacific during the nineteenth century, the alternative would have been a free go for all the riff raff of Europe, with the gun-power to terrorise the islands people and to murder, rape and blackbird at will. Pioneer missionaries encouraged and supported the colonial administrations because they knew that the alternative to colonial rule was something much worse.

The early years of the twentieth century saw the arrival of some additional missions, notably the Seventh Day Adventists who, while creating a few problems on the religious front, have made a contribution to Papua New Guinean education worthy of the highest praise. Such, in broad terms, was the situation at the out break of the Pacific War in 1942.

After the war, the picture changed in several ways. In the first place, self-governing churches emerged from the work of the older-established missions. The extent of the autonomy so established varied according to the ecclesiastical structure of the ‘parent’ church. In the case of the United Church of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, with its Methodist/Congrega tionalist background, independence is complete, though the church looks to overseas mission boards to help it in securing such expatriate staff as it still needs, and for some financial assist ance.

In the second place, a number of small missions, in some cases of American origin, began work in Papua New Guinea, par ticularly in the Highlands. Theologically these missions were of the kind usually described as ‘evangelical’, and scripturally most of them would claim to be fundamentalist. A few have, over the years, effected the vital transition from ‘mission’ to ‘church’

Others have not.

The confusion caused by this increase in the number of missions and churches operating in Papua New Guinea has been somewhat re leved by the formation of two ecumenical bodies, the Melanesian Council of Churches and the Evangelical Alliance 1 he former comprises seven of PNG’s larger and older religious bodies, including the Roman Catholic Church. The latter knits together a large number of smaller bodies carrying on religious

work of varying kinds. Relations between these two bodies are cordial and there is some co-operation between them.

Recently, however, something of a furore has been created by the irruption into Papua New Guinea of further new religious groups which differ in important respects both from the major missions of the early colonial period and from the newer missions of the post-war period.

In the main they have been established by expatriates who have secured entry into Papua New Guinea as workers in secular occu pations and who carry on their religious work in their spare time.

Their appeal is generally a highly emotional one of the kind vari ously described as ‘charismatic’ or ‘pentecostal’.

Now while there is an emotional element in religion, as there is in nationalism, dire results can in either case ensue to individuals, communities and nations when the emotions get out of hand.

When I hear of teenage high school girls weeping all night over their sins, I find myself wondering whether they are really all that wicked, and, if they are, whether in between their lachryma tory exercises they are trying as hard as they might to abandon their wickedness and amend their lives.

I do not doubt that some of the phenomena that occur at the meetings of these groups are expressions of genuine religious ex perience. But some of them have an uncomfortable resemblance to the kind of hysteria evoked in their fans by pop singers.

What to do about it? A seminar was recently held at the Univer sity of Papua New Guinea on these issues and some quite horrify

ing suggestions were made.

An administrative secretary wanted the government to ‘stop churches from manipulating the people’. Fair enough if we also stop politicians, and for that matter administrative secretaries too, from being allowed to manipulate the people. In passing it may be explained that administrative secretaries are the successors to the district commissioners who, in their heyday, were champion

people-manipulators.

The same administrative secretary wanted the government ‘to set guidelines for the churches so that they will work in line with policies of the government’.

It has, of course, been the aim of dictators throughout the ages, from the pre-Christian divine emperors down to Hitler and his German Christians’ to make religion subservient to the state. But in a Christian democracy, which Papua New Guinea claims to be, the church should be the conscience of the nation, not the lackey of its government.

But the issue, perhaps, goes deeper. Is religion the expression of the religious life of the community, or is it a matter of the relationship between an individual and his or her god?

Traditionally in Melanesia, as in ancient Israel, religion was an activity of the community, and non-conformists got short shrift. The people of Papua New Guinea have tended to carry over into their Christianity the idea of religion as a community activity, and the historic missions, and the churches which have grown out of them, seem to have, tacitly if not explicitly, gone along with this idea. So we now have a (national) Lutheran bishop complaining of‘harassment by minority religious sects of villagers in Lutheran-dominated areas’, and that freedom of religion as established under the constitution ‘served as a passport for new religious groups into areas already covered by other churches’.

Clearly he is thinking of religion as a community activity rather than as an individual faith.

This view of religion is of course hotly contested not only by the charismatics and the pentecostalists but also by the evan gelicals who constantly exhort people to ‘accept Christ as their personal saviour’.

The present crisis, if it may be called so, in Papua New Guinean Christianity may well be one aspect of the confrontation between communalism and individualism in present-day Melanesian

society.