The Heathen School

by John Demos

  In this magnificently situated and culturally important spot, Opukaha’ia went about his life as an apprentice priest. His particular duties were focused on “a small pen enclosed by a rude stone wall,” adjacent to the main complex. There he would conduct worship ceremonies that might last “the whole or the greater part of the night.” There, too, he is said to have planted “by his own hands” a coconut tree, which, in turn, would grow, and flourish, and be sought out by adoring visitors all through the nineteenth century. Indeed, its fruit “was given to none but us missionaries,” according to one unidentified source. (I pause to reflect on this highly ironic turnabout. A formerly “pagan” temple becomes a virtual pilgrimage site for later generations of Protestant Christians.) After he reached America, Opukaha’ia would occasionally intone parts of his “heathen prayers … to gratify the curiosity of his friends.” Their content—according to his own account—was “the weather, the general prosperity of the Island, its defense from enemies, and especially the life and happiness of the King.”12

  Where did he live—sleep, eat, and otherwise maintain himself—during the years of his apprenticeship? It must have been in the house of his uncle, whom he described as holding “the rank of High Priest of the island.” Typically, such men (for they were invariably men) resided close to the temple in which their work and their authority were centered. I find no visible remains of this on the ground around Napo’opo’o, but once again Captain Cook comes to my rescue. Near a pond just north of the heiau, Cook and his companions observed “the habitations of a society of priests … Their huts … were surrounded by a grove of cocoanut trees, which separated them from the beach … and gave the place an air of religious retirement.” Another early visitor mentioned one house in particular, located “nearest … to the morai [temple]” and belonging to “the priest who was the lord of this beautiful recess.” (This would, at least for some period, have been Opukaha’ia’s uncle.) The same writer described a verdant landscape, including numerous “cocoanut [sic] and other trees … a pond…[and] grass plots intersected by several square holes with water in them, which were private baths.” All were “most delightfully situated.” Farther out stood a substantial village, presumably for the commoners, with farm plots, small clearings, and stone terraces. The village, for its part, was oriented toward the uplands high above the shoreline cliffs, where large walled fields yielded the taro and other foods required for basic sustenance.13

  If I close my eyes, I can picture Opukaha’ia settled in the home of his uncle, directly adjacent to the heiau. He would easily have moved back and forth while attending to his various duties. The setting was “beautiful,” the atmosphere one of “retirement,” the life comfortable by the standards of the time. But the work itself was unpleasant and unrewarding. (Or so he would claim later on. Was its downside perhaps exaggerated in the memories he carried into his life as a newly converted Christian?) Most difficult of all for this youth of still tender years was his sense of isolation, the complete absence of immediate family. As he recalled much later on, “I was now brought away from my home to a stranger place, and I thought of nothing more but want of father or mother, and to cry day and night.” Under these circumstances, “I must go and see the world, and see what I can find.”14

  My search is finished. I lean back on the heiau wall, steadying myself against the heat, and look around yet again. The softly swaying sea, the thin line of the far horizon, the bold promontory with the Cook memorial, the cliffs behind, the brilliant sky on every side, the withering sun directly overhead, the massive presence of the heiau itself: This very place, my final destination, was Opukaha’ia’s starting point. I have reversed his route: Hawaii to New England, then; New England to Hawaii, now.

  What a distance between them! And how much more so for him than for me! Not simply the many thousands of miles. Also the climate and landscape: from tropical to temperate, from maritime to landlocked, from smoldering, sometimes explosive, vulcanism to hard, granite-based terra firma. The culture, too: from lush, life-centered, polyvalent spirituality to spare, otherworldly monotheism, from ritual to metaphor, from collective to individualized. In one way after another, a looming, immeasurable distance.

  PART TWO

  ASCENT

  • CHAPTER THREE •

  American Mission: The World Savers

  The impulse to save the world, and thus to arrive at a perfect “millennium,” has a history that is wide, deep, and (in its later parts) distinctively American. Elements of it are embedded in the three great providential religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In some versions, it includes a search for worlds already perfected—for example, the tradition of the “lost Atlantis,” celebrated from classical times to the late Middle Ages.1

  World saving gained additional strength during the so-called Age of Discovery (the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries). “New-found lands” in Asia and the Americas served Europeans as a virtual fantasy screen on which to project some hugely inflated goals. The myth of gold-rimmed El Dorado, the legendary Seven Cities of Cibolla, Ponce de León’s fabled “fountain of youth”: Such dreams of personal and social excellence lured explorers again and again to the farthest corners of the globe.2

  Meanwhile, too, world saving was present, and prominent, in the Protestant Reformation. Victory over the papal “beast” would (supposedly) propel history toward the long-awaited Second Coming of Christ, and the start of His thousand-year reign on earth. This, in turn, would lead directly into full realization of God’s everlasting kingdom.3

  England was one of the first places to feel the full impact of these forces. English leaders in colonization promoted broad goals of social betterment, embracing both the metropole and its several “plantations.” The economy would be stimulated through the development of new resources and trade lines; excess population would be drained off overseas; vagrancy, crime, and poverty would disappear as a result. English Protestants, dubbed “Puritans” by their opponents, pursued a program of religious reform that included, at its outer edge, fully millennial expectations. An intense focus on Old Testament prophecy drew these groups to the theme of “latter days,” of “last things,” of “end times,” an apocalypse that would usher in the kingdom of God.

  Then, in the revolutionary turmoil of the 1630s and 1640s—and especially in the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, followed by the founding of a republican “commonwealth”—some saw the actual start of that moment. Indeed, this period brought a fusing of Christian millennialism with a spirit of civic (and secular) utopianism that would echo in other revolutionary movements for centuries to come.4

  At roughly the same point, the Puritan form of world saving was carried across the Atlantic to (what became known as) New England—first by a little band of “pilgrims” settling at Plymouth, then by a larger group clustered to the north around Massachusetts Bay. In fact, these particular migrants were embarked on an “errand into the wilderness” meant to shape the future everywhere. (This “errand”—both phrasing and theme came directly from Scripture—would be endlessly elaborated in their religious devotions.) Here was nothing less than a root-and-branch experiment in spiritual, and social, regeneration; if successful, it would serve as a compelling model both for their “dear mother” England and, by extension, for other lands, as well. Their sense of divinely inspired purpose infused the opening decades of New England history with a uniquely exalted spirit; hopes were high, feelings were high, people were high (in a spiritual sense). And intimations abounded of things yet more wonderful to come.5

  Of course, it couldn’t—and didn’t—last. By mid-century, New Englanders realized that “the eyes of all people” were not upon them after all, and that “mother” England gave them hardly a glance. So they drew back and began a process of soul-searching in which they increasingly blamed themselves; their own moral “declension” had, apparently, be-trayed them. Yet all was not lost; through prayer, repentance, and redoubled striving, they might yet reclaim thei
r mission. Overtly millennial yearnings receded but by no means vanished. For example, in 1710 the Boston minister Cotton Mather declared that, while only God could know for certain when His kingdom would begin, “I believe … it is at hand.” Mather went on to emphasize America’s special destiny; his masterwork, the Magnalia Christi Americana, extolled “the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand.” This premise helped establish the bedrock historical theme described (nowadays) as American exceptionalism. Succeeding generations would pick it up, and recast it in various ways, but always with an underlying constant: America is different from every other place—is special—is, in fact as well as in self-concept, exceptional. And world saving would become an abiding American goal.6

  Its power was greatly augmented in the mid-eighteenth century by the extraordinary series of religious revivals known thereafter as the Great Awakening. Millennial ambitions sprang once more into open view as preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards spread their message of spiritual renewal throughout the colonies. At one crucial juncture, a document entitled The Testimony and Advice of an Assembly of Pastors (nearly seventy in all) expressly linked the revivals to the efforts “of such as are waiting for the Kingdom of God and the coming on of the … Latter Days.” Individuals might go even further. As early as 1741, a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania published a sermon proving that “the Kingdom of God is come unto us at this day.” Edwards himself viewed the revivals as “the dawning, or at least the prelude” of the millennium; moreover, he found in the Bible specific geographical references suggesting “this work will begin in America.” Significantly, too, Edwards associated the approach of “end times” with the advance of civil and religious freedom. And this connection would open a new track for world saving once the Awakening had run its course. Human history might then be understood as a struggle to overcome “tyrannous authority,” in its political as well as ecclesiastical guises.7

  The 1750s brought a mood of post-revival retrenchment, and even of despair. Yet events furnished at least some ground for continued millennial anticipation. A series of devastating earthquakes, including one in New England, seemed to express God’s intent to “shake up” the destiny of His human creatures. The Anglo-French wars in Europe, with offshoots in North America (the British colonies versus French Canada) served to sharpen the struggle against the Catholic “anti-Christ.” In particular, New England’s triumph over French forces at Louisburg in 1745 encouraged Edwards (among others) to think anew of the approach of God’s kingdom. And when, some years later, the larger conflict concluded with a British-American victory, the future seemed brighter than ever. Ministers and political leaders alike envisioned a coming American “kingdom” that would be a “perennial source of strength and riches” for the empire as a whole. This included a dazzling panorama of rapid expansion across the continent, with “mighty cities … commodious ports … happy towns and villages.” It included, as well, the expectation of dramatic moral and spiritual improvement, amounting finally to “a new heaven and a new earth.”8

  Post-Awakening and postwar attitudes made special place for the conversion to Christianity of “heathen” Indians. This element was not unfamiliar—witness the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, dating to 1629, which showed a scantily clothed native figure uttering a plea to “come over and help us.” In fact, a good many seventeenth-century clergy-men had attempted some form of preaching to native people. And one, Rev. John Eliot of Roxbury, Massachusetts, had become celebrated for his creation of at least a dozen “praying towns” in which Indian converts (and would-be converts) were gathered on an organized basis. Meanwhile, schools for Indians had emerged here and there throughout the colonies, and colleges like Harvard and William and Mary had offered instruction to at least a few native students.9

  However, it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that such activities gained larger—even cosmic—significance. For only then did millennial-minded clergy stress the conversion of Indians, alongside the conversion of Jews, as a necessary precursor to the millennium. The result was a sudden spate of mission organizing and school founding aimed directly at Indians: by Congregationalists in New England, by Quakers in Pennsylvania, by Methodists, Moravians, and Anglicans farther south.10

  To this point, American world saving had remained closely tied to the “mother country” and empire. But during the 1760s, when anti-imperial protest developed in earnest, Britain was recast as the bugbear of the millennial project—the enemy, the “beast.” From then on, the claim of exceptionalism would be America’s alone. At the same time, and as part of the same process, liberty became a key word of millennial hope and destiny. Looking back across the preceding decades, one clergyman could declare that God “has always owned the cause of liberty in North America … and will continue to own it.” Looking forward, another could foresee the coming of a “great and mighty empire … which shall be the principal Seat of that glorious Kingdom which Christ shall erect upon Earth in the latter Days.”11

  Journalists, literati, and political leaders were no less enthused. Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Breckenridge, composers of a fulsome Poem on the Rising Glory of America (1776), invoked the image of “a new Jerusalem sent down from heav’n,” a place where “paradise anew shall flourish.” Future president John Adams, in the days immediately following the patriot victory at Yorktown, wrote to his wife, Abigail, that “the progress of society will be accelerated by centuries by this revolution,” which, in turn, reflected nothing less than “the great designs of Providence.” In another, equally expansive comment, Adams described American history as “the opening of a grand scene … for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” David Ramsay, a patriot leader in South Carolina, reached for the same heights with a series of rhetorical questions: “Is it not to be hoped that Human Nature will here receive her most finished touches?…That religion, learning, and Liberty will be diffused over this continent? And in short, that the American editions of the human mind will be more perfect than any that have yet appeared?” The same sentiments echoed at the level of common folk. Thus “a soldier,” writing in the New Jersey Journal, was moved to “rejoice that the ALMIGHTY Governor of the Universe hath given us a station so honourable, and planted us [as] the guardians of liberty, while the greatest part of mankind rise and fall [as] undistinguished as bubbles on the common stream.”12

  But perhaps the biggest single contributor to this extravagantly sanguine viewpoint was Timothy Dwight—first during his years as a Yale student, tutor, and budding poet, later as Yale’s president and a major Protestant eminence. In 1771, while still an undergraduate, Dwight authored a long work entitled America: or a Poem on the Settlement of the British Colonies, Addressed to the Friends of Freedom and Their Country, in which he showed how the entire course of history pointed toward an America-based millennium. Moreover, the same theme figured prominently in his subsequent “epic” The Conquest of Canaan (1783), in a collection of his poems, The Columbian Muse (1794), and in his best-known writing, Greenfield Hill (1794). “O Land Supremely Blest”; “Here Empires’s brightest throne shall rise”; “Hail, Land of Light and Joy”; “Here truth and virtue shall find their home” (and so on): thus the recurrent strains in Dwight’s rapturous hymn to his country’s future.13

  Such effusions—from many hands, across the entire Revolutionary era—served to energize the American people for protest, for war, for independence. But the “progress” they anticipated would not come easily; and the immediate post-Revolution years brought another sag in morale. Hard economic times (with commerce virtually at a standstill) and political disarray (under the loosely framed Articles of Confederation) made millennial prospects seem a good deal further away. Moreover, their center shifted from the transforming effects of liberty to the imperative need for moral regeneration.14

  Accordingly, the 1790s brought a
renewed interest in scriptural exegesis of “end times.” Ministers debated questions of sequence—would Christ return before or after the inauguration of His earthly kingdom?—and some offered elaborate calculations about His timing. At the same time, the outbreak of the French Revolution helped to reinvigorate the political dimension of all this as (in Thomas Paine’s words) “the beacon of liberty began revolving from West to East.” First America, now France, eventually the world.15

  Then, in the very last years of the century came a new round of religious revivals—what some called “showers of grace”—beginning in New England and spreading rapidly south and west. Within a decade or so, the showers had become a torrent, indeed a “Second Great Awakening.” Few places would remain unaffected, and virtually all Protestant denominations were drawn in as wave after wave of religious excitement spread out across the land. Millennial hopes shot up once again and resumed their earlier, more spiritual emphasis.16

  Still, the principles of “freedom”—American freedom—might remain a valuable adjunct in the march toward millennial change. A Massachusetts preacher, typical of many, asked, “May we not view it, at least, as probable that the expansion of republican forms of government will accompany that spreading of the gospel … which the scripture prophecies represent as constituting the glory of the latter days?” And, in neighboring Connecticut, the eminent Lyman Beecher framed a similar question: “From what nation shall the renovating power go forth? What nation is so blessed with experimental knowledge of free institutions?” What nation indeed! This and similar reflections led Beecher to conclude—echoing Edwards eighty years before—that “the millennium would commence in America.” In some formulations, this idea assumed an openly imperial tone. Thus the president of the Massachusetts Missionary Society could write, “There is great reason to believe that God is about to transfer the empire of the world from Europe to America, where he has planted his peculiar people.… This is probably the last peculiar people which he means to form, and the last great empire which he means to erect, before the kingdoms of this world are absorbed into the kingdom of Christ.”17