Changing landscape of faith

FAITH

By DYLAN MURRAY
RELIGION is one of the most fundamental aspects of any human’s life. And it does not so much deal with deities and worship than it does with our belief systems and what our faith tells us.
Papua New Guinea before the missionaries was a nation of people who subscribed to animism. That meant that our people worshiped certain animals and believed they birthed us and were responsible for the way our world worked.
Some may recall the stories of the turtle mother who birthed the people of the Pacific. We have other stories that are similar and different cultures may tell a different rendition of the same story. When the animals were angry, we experienced droughts or heavy rain.
Our people also believed in spirits, some of whom were that of ancestors long passed, and others who were protectors of nature and sometimes just straight-up malevolent towards humanity whenever we “invaded” their sacred space.
The missionaries brought a conflicting belief system. In fact, it conflicted with our beliefs so much that it caused the mass extinction of some of our traditional practices. In some areas such as the Gulf Province, practices such as making traditional masks were thought to have been wiped out when the missionaries first got there.
But religion gave Papua New Guineans a hope that traditional beliefs did not: The hope of redemption.

First missions
The Catholic Church, which boasts the largest population of adherents in the country, set up its first mission on Woodlark Island in Milne Bay in 1840. One of their oldest churches still stands on Samarai Island.
The London Missionary Society was the first group of protestant missionaries to land in the island nation, doing a little missionary work in the Duke of York Islands around 1870.
They landed at Redscar Bay near Port Moresby, and in Daru in 1875, then continued to spread until they reached the PNG-Indonesia border.
The LMS would eventually form the Papua Ekelesia – PNG’s first truly national church – in 1962, formally becoming the United Church in 1968.
Most of the country’s settlements on the southern coast of the mainland subscribe predominantly to the United Church. Hanuabada is a good example of this.
Hanuabada is probably the largest Motu-Koita village in the capital city. The Motu-Koita people are said to be the custodians of the land that much of the capital sits on; history even tells of the British flag being raised on their land in 1888. Today the village of Hanuabada is one of the busiest economic zones in the city.
A short drive through the area however will reveal a church on either end of the stretch of the road, and smaller congregations in between. Churches and congregations belonging to the United Church.
The Lutheran Church first set foot in Finschhafen, Morobe in 1886, and are now the second largest church in the country.
The Anglican Church first landed in the country around 1891, “when Rev Maclaren and Rev King landed on the Dogura coast which still acts as the centre for all Anglican missionary work today.”
The Anglican Church has been one that has struggled and tried to bring Christianity to hard-to-reach areas such as Kokoda in the Northern Province.
They are also the first church in PNG to have anointed a native bishop, Bishop George Ambo, in 1961.

Trojan churches
One thing a lot of people need to understand is that denominations were competing for the Pacific at the time just as much as European countries were.
It has long been said that the mission, the spreading of the good news was always just a colonist tool.
Historians will argue this to be a fact; while the LMS was spreading the gospel in the south, German Catholic missionaries were doing the same in the northern part of the mainland.
Kairiru Island, an island located about 35 minutes off the coast of Wewak in East Sepik, had one of the oldest Catholic missions in the country. In fact, the missionaries who went there had at first needed to travel by horse up steep hills and a mountainside to get to the people. One priest reportedly fell off his horse and died, which prompted the missionaries to try to get the locals to move their settlements a little closer to the coast; to land they had never used for anything beyond smoking fish and war.
And then the first World War started, and the German missionaries were recalled. Not because they were needed in the fight, but because they were too close to a British protectorate, a territory for which Britain raised a flag in Port Moresby to warn off any other colonial powers.
Yes, religion may have seemed like a tool. And even as nations fought their territorial war, so did the churches. So much so that treaties were signed to mark out where the missionaries or churches present at the time could expand to, and where they could not.
Today, the largest denomination in the country is the Roman Catholic Church (about 30 per cent), and they get a lot of attention because of it.
It mostly has to do with how their practices differ from that of the protestant churches. A young boy or girl growing up in public school will have had been mocked several times for praying the Hail Mary by the time he or she is in his or her twenties. Even then it does not stop.
The Anglican Church however has often been the go-between between Catholicism and the other protestant churches. Catholics and Anglicans continue to work alongside each other when it comes to celebrations in their yearly church calendars.
Lutherans make up about 20 per cent of all Christian churches in the country, while Baptists and the Salvation Army both make up about 1 per cent.
The rest are in between.

Other religions
Papua New Guinea’s constitution is such that other religions are welcome to find a home here. This is of course, provided that their practices do not threaten the rights of others or the safety of the public. We practice religious freedom.
This, however, does not sit well with many “true Christians” and faith-based groups. People are often quoted ranting on about how “PNG is a Christian country,” and that other religions and certain ethnic groups with clashing beliefs should not be entertained here. All this without remembering the struggle their ancestors must have gone through to safeguard their beliefs against an external force. The bigotry is often ineffable.
The amount of time the average Papua New Guinean puts into thinking over the reasons why they will not accept something because their beliefs tell them they should not, is as limited as the amount of time a goldfish takes to decide not to eat the piece of faeces floating to the bottom of the fish tank from another goldfish.
Some have opinions that one can tell they picked up from watching an American war movie about the middle-east.
And this is only one of the reasons why religions like Islam are looked down on.
It is one of the reasons why a lot of the Jewish males in the country do not wear a yarmulke (pronounced yah-ma-kah) in public. And yes, PNG has a community of Messianic Jews.
The country also has a following for the Baha’i faith. It was actually started in 1916 and was brought here in 1954.
The first Baha’i Local Spiritual Assembly was elected in 1958 with local converts; the first National Spiritual Assembly was elected in 1969. And as of 2000, the faith had about 21,000 members. They currently have a house of faith, a church for all, being built in Waigani, in the nation’s capital.

Everyone else
As mentioned, religion or Christianity – if we are being more specific – brought the people hope for redemption.
But it also brought with it the hope for reward.
Social anthropologists would argue that all religions were a cargo cult in their simplest forms. Cargo cults have a similar definition to that of religion. They are filled with people who believe they benefit from believing.
Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician from the 1600s once said this of God: “Even under the assumption that God’s existence is unlikely, the potential benefits of believing are so vast as to make betting on theism rational.”
Simply put, he was saying that atheists have nothing to lose and everything to gain by believing that there is a God.
PNG also has a good number of people who do not believe or choose not to believe in God, or that good and evil have no consequences beyond the realm of the living. But it is very rare you will bump into these people; having no faith is looked down on by a lot of religious groups, spiritual leaders and the congregations they lead.
It just adds to the narrative: Papua New Guinea is religious but free… and the people are apparently unhappy about that.

Reference:
[1] Embassy of Papua New Guinea to the Americas, Washington DC, 2004