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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.
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