Modern Australian history began in the late 18th century as Protestant Britain spewed criminals and rebels, including not a few Irish Catholics, thousands of miles south to its Pacific gulag. In the penal colonies of Botany Bay and Van Diemen's Land, representatives of the Anglican Establishment such as the Reverend Samuel Marsden, the "flogging parson," whipped the convicts into line. From the beginning, many white Australians felt deeply ambivalent about a Christian Establishment that had cast them into the outer darkness. In 21st-century Australia, the campaign to cut ties to the British crown and turn the nation into a republic has almost succeeded.

British settlers began trickling into New Zealand during the 1840s, a period in which Quakers and evangelical Christians, having successfully spearheaded the campaign to abolish slavery, sought to protect indigenous peoples from the perils of British colonization. Their Christian humanitarianism found political expression in the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 by the Crown and Maori chiefs, which recognized Maori rights to their lands, forests, and fisheries. In return for ceding sovereignty to Britain, the treaty gave the Maori all the rights and privileges of British subjects. Over the next three decades, however, as missionaries, humanitarian officials, and Maori Christians championed Maori rights and welfare too systematically for many of the colonists to stomach, "enlightened" settler-politicians condemned "political parsons" and missionary "do-gooders" for "interfering" in politics—and elbowed humanitarian Christianity from New Zealand's public square.

Western Christians sent missionaries to the Pacific Islands throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Most island peoples, at different rates in different contexts, made Christianity their own. In the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, Christian activists, many of them women, fought to create godly societies in the great reform movements of the late 19th century: temperance and prohibition, religious education, and votes for women. They achieved considerable success. In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.

In neither country, however, did conservative evangelical Protestantism win the popular following and public profile it enjoyed in the United States. The revivalist Methodists and Baptists whose counterparts transformed North American Christianity in the 19th century were outnumbered in Australasia by moderate and liberal Anglicans and Presbyterians. As a result, Australia and New Zealand, though not the Pacific Islands, rapidly became secular societies in which Christianity played only a minor, inconsequential role. So, at least, many Australasian historians have argued.

Samuel Butler, the New Zealand sheep farmer better known as a Victorian novelist, once observed that God himself cannot change the past—but historians can. Control over the way we remember our past constitutes a crucial form of power in the modern world. Ian Breward's learned, wide-ranging, and insightful A History of the Churches in Australasia quietly challenges secular readings of the Australasian past. The churches, he shows, have significantly shaped the diverse cultures of the region over the last two centuries. By identifying "signs of Christian formation" in the South Pacific, Breward hopes not only to set the historical record straight but also to ensure that the churches retain their "capacity for bearing witness in the public forum and contributing to significant change."

The book, fruit of a lifetime's research, teaching, and experience in the region, begins with the arrival of the first missionaries late in the 18th century. Geographically, it defines Australasia broadly to include all the major islands of the south Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, the two Samoas, French Polynesia, and Vanuatu. Breward manages pretty well the difficult task of doing justice to the region's internal diversity without swamping the reader in excessive detail. In the end, however, diversity overshadows unity; illuminating generalizations about the Christian History of the region as a whole are hard to find in these pages.

In a superb analysis of missions, the author embraces the fundamental insight of recent scholarship that "natives," far from being passive "converts" of all-powerful Western missionaries, played vital, active roles in the complex, gradual, and erratic processes by which local peoples made Christianity their own. In doing so, indigenous Christians actively reshaped Christianity—much as Western Christians had before them—to make it comprehensible and compelling in their own cultural contexts. Often they proved more effective evangelists and teachers of their own people than the Western missionaries on whom scholars have lavished attention.

Indeed, some Polynesian Christians became transnational evangelists, reaching out far beyond their own islands. Breward describes the remarkable career of the Rarotongan evangelist and pastor, Ta'unga, who took the gospel to the Loyalty Islands and New Caledonia in order that "every person may reach heaven and sit at the side of Jesus so that there might be boundless joy." The linguistic ability, intelligence, sensitivity, and warmth of this gifted Polynesian missionary are manifest in Breward's account. Christianity was firmly planted in Melanesian soil.

Breward's narrative thus transcends the limitations of the Eurocentric missions history common among an earlier generation of scholars. Yet while decentering the missionaries, and identifying their faults and failings, Breward does not push them off the stage. He shows that, for all their frailties, missionaries from the North Atlantic world played a significant role in the modern transformation of Christianity from a predominantly northern religion to one rooted increasingly in southern lands. In the South Pacific, missionaries translated the Bible into local tongues, created written vernaculars, sparked the revolutionary transformation of oral cultures into literate ones, pioneered ethnology and anthropology, and brought Western medicine. Furthermore, they defended indigenous rights and welfare, if not as thoroughly as modern historians might like, at least far more often than most other Westerners.

Breward also transcends the limitations of more recent, "native"-centered, nationalist and postcolonial histories of missions. In their desire to emphasize indigenous agency, nationalist and postcolonial historians have sometimes marginalized, dismissed, or even demonized white missionaries while depicting "traditional" cultures as remarkably functional, resilient, harmonious, and egalitarian. Such accounts, inspired by a desire to rescue indigenous cultures from colonialist condescension, ought to be accorded a respectful hearing. Yet too often they distort or efface indigenous motives for embracing Christianity. In a region many of whose indigenous inhabitants became—and remain—more openly and vibrantly Christian than many white Australasians, this constitutes an important issue.

Resisting the fantasies of primitivism, Breward illuminates why Christianity spread rapidly in Australasia by allowing indigenous people to speak for themselves. During the 1970s revival in New Guinea, for example, Pii Nalum, a Papuan, found in the Christian way of life "the alternative I had been looking for, the other path in life, that led to peace, security, and loving one another instead of fighting and killing." Maori in New Zealand had, during the 1830s and '40s, embraced Christianity for similar reasons, to end a decade of bloody and devastating intertribal musket wars and forge a peaceful, prosperous, law-abiding future.

An equally valuable corrective is supplied when Breward examines the ways in which Australasian Christians transplanted and organized churches in the Victorian period. Here he takes issue with the anachronistic narratives of "historians who see secular societies developing early in the settler colonies," downplaying "the influence of religious groups." In fact, church leaders "were important in public life, and had close ties to the élites in their colony." Furthermore, lay Christians lower down the social scale, many of them women, played crucial roles in knitting together otherwise fractious, male-dominated frontier societies. Caroline Chisholm, for example, a Catholic convert from the Church of England, worked tirelessly in New South Wales and Victoria, without a trace of sectarian partisanship, to find homes and jobs for young women and settler families. After a life spent in humanitarian service of the poor and vulnerable she died, impoverished, in London in 1877.

As this example illustrates, Breward shows a keen eye for the significance of the individual. In his telling, vast, impersonal forces and structures never swamp particular lives; individual Christians could, and did, make a difference. Biographical sketches, appearing repeatedly throughout the book, add spice to the narrative and weight to the argument. The accumulation of similar examples from all levels of society and right across the Christian spectrum reinforce Breward's contention that the churches played more important roles in the making of Australasian societies than historians have generally acknowledged.

Nevertheless, Breward's method of systematically identifying active Christians raised a question in my mind. The reader only sometimes acquires a clear idea about how, or even whether, the faith of the individual in question informed his or her public life. A skeptical reader might suggest that a purely private religiosity that had few discernible consequences in the public realm deserves little attention.

Church historians who want to reshape the historical vision of the wider historical community must therefore, it seems to me, identify the many, often subtle and unspectacular ways in which liberal and moderate Protestants, comparatively numerous in Australasia, shaped the wider culture. By doing so, we can challenge the assumption, widespread among Western intellectuals, that the privatization of religion in the modern West rendered Christianity largely irrelevant in the public sphere. The sociologist of religion José Casanova has argued that in many parts of the world, including the West, religion deprivatized during the last third of the 20th century. But Breward contends—rightly in my view—that Christianity never disappeared from the Australasian public sphere, even if historians and sociologists have largely failed to discern its often low-key, unostentatious workings.

The 1960s constituted a critical decade for the mainstream churches in Australasia, as in many other parts of the West. Across the region, and particularly among Australian and New Zealand whites, the decline of the major Protestant churches (Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist), slight in relation to a growing population for most of the century, began to accelerate. By the end of the century almost 30 percent of New Zealanders, and almost as many Australians, professed no religion. To growing numbers of students in burgeoning universities and colleges, secular Australasian academics proclaimed the death of God and the dawning of a new secular age. Some argued that the post-Christian societies emerging in Australasia pointed the way to what the West, and the world, would inevitably become in the third millennium.

At this point, the book's tone, measured, judicious, and dispassionate for the most part, changes noticeably. Breward launches a jeremiad. In particular, he criticizes "liberal and reformist" church leaders for failing to answer, on their left, radicals fighting to "remake society, government, and churches" along individualist and libertarian lines, while also failing to understand and cope with, on their right, ordinary Christians in the pew who held conservative political and theological views. Beneath these conflicts Breward discerns a fundamental theological issue: "what was the nature of Christianity?" Was it "a revelation which demanded a radical obedience," or simply a "human construct in which individuals could tailor the historic faith to their own comfort zone?" Was God so "infinitely loving" as to "love the evil," or "was there an indispensable element of judgment in God's being?" These are big and important questions. They do not wrack Australasian Christians alone.

Signs of hope remain, Breward concludes, not least among high-profile, widely respected Aboriginal, Maori, and Pacific Island Christians. Compassion still flourishes in Australasian societies, indicating the continuing significance of "residual Christianity." Many churches remain important partners of the state in education and social welfare. Christianity has remained influential in local communities and in "folk religion," even if political and intellectual élites have seldom noticed.

This wise, insightful, charitable, and ecumenical book—itself exemplifying many of the distinctive strengths of Australasian Christianity—constitutes an excellent addition to the Oxford History of the Christian Church series. I shall warmly recommend it to my students. It is freer than many of that theological present-centeredness which condemns past Christians for not being contemporary ones.

But perhaps it also exemplifies one of mainstream Australasian Christianity's weaknesses. Apart from the final section, in which Breward's moral and theological passions bubbled up, it struck me as somewhat blander and less critical than it might have been. The author directs most of his well-aimed criticisms at the churches and their leaders. What, though, about the wider culture, and its residual Christianity? How residual? How Christian? The book only occasionally conveys much sense of the sharp and sometimes vicious hostility regularly aimed by ordinary "secular" Australasians at Christians—black, brown, and white—whose convictions set them apart from the mainstream. Furthermore, the dominant secular readings of the Australasian past receive little critical analysis. Why have historians so often marginalized or ignored the churches? Whose interests have secular readings served?

These are questions for the next generation of Australasian church historians to take up. Ian Breward has shown us the way. We are all in his debt.

John Stenhouse is senior lecturer in history at the University of Otago. With Rex Adhar, he is the editor of God and Government: The New Zealand Experience (Univ. of Otago Press); with Ronald Numbers, he is the editor of Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (Cambridge Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.