In Translation: Religious Freedom, Democracy, and US Empire from the Perspective of the Postwar Pacific Islands
by Carleigh Beriont
Protestant Church on Kili Island, Republic of the Marshall Islands (2012) (taken by Beriont)
What is American religious history from the perspective of the Pacific Islands and Islanders who became part of the United States’ empire during the post-World War II period, an era that was marked by decolonization globally? How were the interlocking discourses of “religious freedom” and “Judeo-Christianity” interpreted and influenced by the United States’ postwar imperial projects? What is lost, gained, or simply maintained in translating and transplanting categories and experiences of religion, freedom, and democracy across empires and cultures?
Jolyon Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (2019) and Healan Gaston’s Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (2019) invite us to consider the tensions and paradoxes endemic to the projects of democracy, empire, and religious freedom (or, in Thomas’s apt phrasing “freeing religion”) in Japan and the United States. These projects were simultaneously liberatory and oppressive, exclusionary and inclusionary, and exceptionalist and pluralist with political, material, and discursive effects. Together, Thomas’s and Gaston’s narratives demonstrate the complex intermingling of power, political and economic policies, and theologies at work in the construction of democracy as a religio-racial formation during the mid-twentieth century.
Democracy, considered by most Americans during the postwar era to be a product of Christian or Judeo-Christian culture, was one of the United States’ most significant and controversial exports during that century and, as these texts demonstrate, was accompanied by varying degrees of force and violence. My dissertation examines the relationships between Marshallese, American and Marshallese Protestant missionaries, and the US military in the Marshall Islands—a site of Japanese and US empire during the twentieth century—culminating in the Cold War. In that latter period, the US occupied and administered the Marshall Islands as part of the United Nations-sanctioned Trust Territory of the Pacific and conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests on and around the Marshall Islands and their inhabitants. My project explores the ways in which religious and political discourses informed the American occupation and administration of the Marshall Islands and how missionaries, Marshallese, and US military personnel used their shared Christianity to make sense of the political and racial status of the islands and islanders during a period marked simultaneously by occupation and democratization.
In 1944, the United States military invaded and occupied the Marshall Islands, a collection of islands and atolls in the center of the Pacific Ocean and on the eastern edge of the Japanese Empire. After each island victory over the Japanese, the United States military held a flag-raising ceremony. The military intended for these demonstrations to communicate to the Marshallese “that they were now under American protection.” Such actions ritualized and formalized the American occupation of the islands. Although many Marshallese were killed by Japanese and American fighting during the war, in the eyes of American military leaders the “sacrifice of American blood” rendered the Marshall Islands American property (Seabee News, April 10, 1945).
Map of the Pacific, National Geographic 1921. (note: The Marshall Islands formed the eastern boundary of the Japanese South Seas Mandate between 1919-1944. During this period, the strategically located region divided the United States’ eastern Pacific territory in Hawaii from its western colonies in the Philippines.)
In May 1944, TIME described a flag-raising ceremony in the Marshall Islands to an American audience hungry for news about the progress of the Pacific War. In attendance were the Marshallese inhabitants of the atoll, who were described to readers as “pious Christians (dominant variety: Boston Congregationalists),” a reference to the fact that American Board missionaries from Boston had first introduced Christianity to the Marshall Islands in 1857. Not only were the islanders devout and Protestant, but also their Christianity had a distinctly American lineage. In this way, the article pointed to a preexisting relationship between the Marshallese and the Americans and implied that Americans had “saved” or “liberated” the Marshallese twice: first by evangelizing in the nineteenth century and later by defeating the Japanese military in the twentieth century.
The description of the ceremony was brief. Amidst “rustling coconut palms,” a bugler played “To the Colors,” and an enlisted man raised the Stars and Stripes. Then the commanding officer “read a proclamation establishing military government, enjoining the natives to help the US” According to the article, the Marshallese took in the scene without expression until an “old chief” asked “may we pray now?” The officer responded, “The US guarantees freedom of worship.” Upon hearing this news, the Marshallese reportedly “broke into cheers” and began singing a “Christian hymn” in Marshallese. In the same moment that the US established religious freedom in the Marshall Islands, the US also established its political control over the Marshallese and their islands.
Without explicitly stating it, the article also drew a sharp contrast between the new American occupation of the Marshall Islands and the Japanese occupation. Although religious freedom had previously been established by the Japanese in 1919 via the international League of Nations framework that governed the Japanese occupation of the Marshall Islands, clearly the Americans sought to assert that this iteration—their way of freeing religion—was distinct. And as a result, the article suggested, the Marshallese welcomed the American occupation. They cheered it.
The TIME article demonstrates one of the ways in which the US military saw the promotion of religious freedom as helping to facilitate the occupation of the Marshall Islands. The US military used the language of freedom of worship (one of Franklin Roosevelt’s famed Four Freedoms) and shared Christian identity to communicate and naturalize the acquisition of the Marshall Islands to the American public. As such, the article is helpful for reflecting on the relationship between political freedom and religious freedom in the mid-twentieth century. It also raises questions about the categories of religion and freedom, for whom they are useful, and to what ends they have been deployed. In the Marshall Islands, “religious freedom” was translated as the freedom to practice Christianity as long as it didn’t interfere with Japanese, and later, US empire. Meanwhile, the US occupation of the Marshall Islands was translated to the American public as freeing religion.
In light of these histories of freedom, religion, democracy, and empire, Thomas and Gaston invite us to consider the theoretical, theological, and imperial logics that shaped these projects and their competing commitments and lingering legacies for different people and nations. Together, they suggest new ways of understanding what the categories and experiences of freedom, religion, democracy, and empire have to offer scholarship on American religion and what they might offer American, Japanese, and Marshallese people today.
Carleigh Beriont is a PhD candidate in Religion at Harvard University, where she works on the history of religion and politics. Currently, she is writing a dissertation on United States empire, missionaries, and militarism in the 20th-century Pacific, entitled “‘For the Good of Mankind’: Marshallese, Missionaries, Militaries and the Making of American Empire in the Pacific: 1857-1966.” She has taught classes on American religion, politics, race, and peacebuilding at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Kennedy School, and Tufts University. She received an MTS in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School and a BA from Mount Holyoke College. Prior to her studies at Harvard, Carleigh lived and worked in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.