Toward the end of the 19th century, an early LDS convert in Tahiti described the activities of early LDS missionary Benjamin Grouard who "changed the Sabbath to correct time."
Laura Maffly-Kipp, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said this new view of life "is what religion does. It reorients the believer, it reorders one's sense of time and place and redraws the sacred map of one's life and one's surroundings."The author and religion scholar explained how such reorientation impacted LDS converts in the Pacific Islands during the keynote address for the annual Mormon History Association convention Friday at the Ogden Marriott. Conference sessions run through Saturday night.
Maffly-Kipp suggested the Tahitian convert's phrase meant that "his awareness of time and space had been radically altered through his embrace of Mormonism."
In answer to the traditional interpretation of LDS conversion, that all who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in early days "were pulled into a new sense of religious geography and history defined by a westward trek," she argued that for new Mormons in the Pacific, the process of "making saints" was quite different.
"Because of the many constraints of isolation and the 'tyranny of distance,' as well as the unsettled state of the church back home, many of the first converts to Mormonism encountered a religious system that was, in certain respects, relatively unformed and adaptable. But more than this, they brought to their embrace of the faith particular ways of seeing the world based on indigenous customs, beliefs and political needs in the face of an increasingly bewildering colonial situation."
This was a unique expression of Mormonism, in which the island convert was more likely to be less orthodox than those in the desert and to incorporate indigenous customs and beliefs into the daily practice of religion.
LDS missionaries visited every major Polynesian island group between 1843 and the 1890s. By 1852, the LDS Church "had baptized several thousand natives scattered over dozens of islands. In Hawaii, by 1889, the Honolulu branch of the church probably was larger than any other outside of Utah, with 891 members. By 1913, nearly a quarter of the native Hawaiian population claimed membership in the LDS Church. And in New Zealand, in the closing two decades of the last century, nearly 10 percent of the Maori population professed the faith."
LDS missionaries were continually uncomfortable with the strong competition of other Christian faiths, and George Q. Cannon was one who complained about it.
"Paradoxically," said Maffly-Kipp, "Cannon may have been exactly wrong in this regard. I would suggest that it was in large measure the attention brought to LDS missionaries though the constant ridicule of religious rivals that attracted the initial interest of indigenous peoples."
Maffly-Kipp argued that as a persecuted minority in America, Latter-day Saints felt constantly put down, yet "their marginality" actually made them stand out and become more interesting to native peoples. In fact, the LDS missionaries helped create a "spiritual marketplace" in which Protestants had to work much harder to compete.
Another factor that helped LDS missionaries was their willingness "to live among the natives in ways that Protestant ministers did not."
Maffly-Kipp said that the LDS missionary style of teaching worked because "they told stories, testified, prayed and sang utilizing precisely the kind of communicative techniques familiar to members of an oral culture."
LDS missionaries also placed more emphasis than their counterparts on prophecy, visions and spiritual experiences, which often paralleled the native culture. Maffly-Kipp concluded that "Conversion entails a turning of the soul, a change of heart, and one cannot change hearts without first achieving a degree of intimacy. This exactly what LDS missionaries . . . did so well in the Pacific."
A year ago, Maffly-Kipp was commissioned by LDS scholars to study Mormonism and produce this year's Tanner Lecture about some phase of LDS history, which will be published later this year in the Journal of Mormon History.