The passing of guilt along with Christian faith began well before the first missionaries came to Cape York Peninsula and continued after their departure. The period of time examined in this article, however, is uniquely important because it gives particular emphasis to the question of power in the process of spiritual change and because it sheds light on several important areas of the history of missions. The story sheds light on some hitherto understudied ways in which Aboriginal people made Christianity their own. It provides an exception to the general rule that Aboriginal people do not convert to Christianity or take up a European-Christian worldview if there is any semblance of the traditional social structure remaining. This, in turn, points to the psychological function of spirituality for Aboriginal Australians at the time of contact. Finally, it helps explain the remarkable success Moravian missionaries have had in their missions.
The field of Aboriginal studies currently gives great weight to the previously neglected task of identifying how Aboriginal people shaped the frontier. In this context, the question ‘Were Aboriginal people creative actors in becoming Christian?’ must be asked, because despite the earlier comparison, an Aboriginal person using Christianity to meet psychological needs is not exactly the same as using a metal knife to skin a kangaroo. For at least two reasons, the answer has to be ‘yes’.
Much ink has been used by social scientists trying to discover the determinants of religious change and conversion. While little agreement exists, most hypotheses suggest that religion meets (usually unconscious) psychological needs and that spiritual change is an attempt to satisfy these needs.[34] Even among theorists who emphasise social factors as important in religious changes, these alterations in beliefs and practices are seen as meeting individual needs or arising from individual agency,[35] though some have noted conversion is socially defined[36] and that the change in religious designation does not come from the convert.[37] Seen in this light, conversion is at base an individual act, even if it not one over which people have conscious control. So using Christianity to assuage feelings of guilt differs from using a metal knife to skin a kangaroo in that it is not consciously employed, but both are employed by individuals to meet those individuals’ needs.
The adoption of Christian beliefs differs from the use of a metal knife also in that it is far more creative because it requires much more modification of and integration with other beliefs and practices. The amount of integration required in everyday life would have made it impossible for Aboriginal individuals not to be creative in their understanding and expression of these beliefs. The comparison between the use of Christianity and a metal knife is useful in its emphasis that when Aboriginal people adopted Christian beliefs at Mapoon, they were not merely imitating Europeans. They were using all of the spiritual material at their disposal to make emotional sense of their world.
There is a second reason that Aboriginal Christians must be seen as actively shaping their own faith: the Christian perspective the missionaries brought and Aboriginal Christians more or less adopted emphasised that conversion and religious change were primarily individual acts. While no one would deny that the missionaries were a necessary condition for Aboriginal people becoming Christian, people at Mapoon probably would have argued that their presence was not a sufficient condition. This Protestant Christian viewpoint emphasises nothing if not a one-on-one relationship with God, even if it allows one to ask for others’ prayers for strengthening one’s faith. The importance of individual responsibility was the heart of the realisation Nicholas Hey made in Europe when he decided to read ‘his Bible systematically, in the hope that some good might come of it’.[38] This Christianity sees conversion as the quintessential creative act. People are reborn: Saul became Paul. Aboriginal Christians at Mapoon may have felt terribly indebted to the missionaries for bringing them Christianity, but certainly thought that their own beliefs were largely their own responsibility, even if God’s help was required.
The story of Christianity and guilt at Mapoon is especially interesting because it provides an exception to the general rule that Aboriginal people adopt Christianity only when their traditional social structures have been decimated.[39] Resistance to becoming Christian is seen even when Aboriginal people have incorporated Christian stories and personages, such as Noah and Jesus, into their spiritual landscapes.[40] Aram A. Yengoyan argues that Aboriginal people adopted Christian beliefs and practices in a significant way only in conditions of ‘economic need or social deprivation or both. In such examples, the tribal ethic or structure has been destroyed with much of the Aboriginal population’.[41] According to Yengoyan, it is impossible to change directly from traditional spirituality to Christianity because of the ‘prior text’ in traditional spirituality, which does not allow people to make the switch.
The mission at Mapoon under the co-leadership of the Hey and Ward families, however, is remarkable for the number of people who adopted Christian beliefs. In 1891, when the Moravian missionaries first arrived at what would become Mapoon mission on the western coast of Cape York, most of the Aboriginal people were totally unexposed to the Christian notion of sin. Less than 30 years later, sin occupied a prominent place in the intellectual and emotional life of the Aboriginal people at Mapoon. Yengoyan’s criteria for Aboriginal adoption of Christianity do not seem to have been met at Mapoon. It is difficult to determine how much of the ‘tribal ethic or structure’ had ‘been destroyed’ prior to the missionaries’ arrival, given the lack of recordings of European contact with Aboriginal people there. Nevertheless, with the possible exception of some Aboriginal people who came to the mission from other places, it does not seem to have been the sort of massive devastation Yengoyan has in mind.[42] After the missionaries arrived, devastation does not seem to have occurred at Mapoon on anywhere near the scale as in many other missions which were less successful at promulgating Christianity.[43]
It would not do to give the impression that every Aboriginal person at Mapoon adopted Christianity, nor would it be appropriate to deny that factors other than guilt might have influenced Aboriginal people’s changes toward Christianity. Some Aboriginal people at Mapoon, mostly older ones, did not accept Christianity. This was true for a number of reasons, not least because they were emotionally and socially invested in traditional spirituality. Additionally, they had less contact with missionaries, who actively divided the Aboriginal population into Christians and pagans. After a certain point, the missionaries were reluctant to expend their resources attempting to convert these older Aboriginal people and concentrated their efforts on younger Aboriginal people. It is also reasonable to assume that some younger Aboriginal people simply left the area. Beyond these non-converts, the Aboriginal people who were regarded by themselves and by the missionaries as Christians did not fully accept every aspect of the Christianity the missionaries brought. They modified Christianity and made it their own; all converted populations do. What is remarkable is how much of the missionaries’ Christianity they accepted with so little modification in so short a time.
Other factors guided the population toward Christianity. The dormitory system probably impeded Aboriginal cultural transmission. Immigration of Aboriginal people from other groups may have increased spiritual tensions and threats while the immigrants themselves were probably spiritually homesick, both problems that Christianity may have been able to help alleviate.[44] While each of these factors was important, there were a number of missions in Australia where they were replicated and Aboriginal people have still been much more reluctant to accept the Christian ideas. Since these factors are not unique to Mapoon, they cannot be used to explain why so many people at this Moravian mission adopted Christianity and the Christian view of moral transgression when so few Aboriginal people at many other missions did. In this paper I have argued that the notable degree and rapid pace of the adoption of Christianity was due largely to importance the missionaries placed on the emotion of guilt and the way in which Christianity’s notion of transgression helped make sense of and give meaning to this emotion.
The time period at Mapoon examined in this article also helps explain why the Moravian Church has had such success in its missionary work. The Moravian Church has long placed an emphasis on missionary work. It has devoted a very high proportion of its resources to setting up a number of missions far exceeding that which would be expected of so small a denomination.[45] What is most remarkable, however, is the success these missions have had in Christianising people who have been resistant to spiritual change.[46] One might hypothesise that Yengoyan’s thesis that the ‘prior text’ of a group’s spirituality can inhibit Christianisation if its values and view of the universe are very different from Christianity holds true for groups outside Australia as well, and that Moravian missionaries often find some way to get around this.
As discussed above, guilt played a major role in the emotional and spiritual lives of most Moravians.[47] It is notable that while there is no single blueprint for how Moravian missions should be run, missionaries were instructed not to talk too much about God or the trinity but instead focus on Christ’s suffering and forgiveness.[48] These emphases imply an understanding of, and preoccupation with, sin. Perhaps the Moravians’ success as missionaries is explained by, and therefore supports, the hypothesis that the creation of guilt in a population can dramatically increase its probability of adopting Christian beliefs and practices. This is especially true where the ‘prior text’ of the population’s spirituality makes it resistant to other methods of spreading Christianity by focusing on balance rather than hierarchy, on interrelations and reciprocity rather than debt and guilt.
As an exception to Yengoyan’s rule, Mapoon’s population points to a primary cause of spiritual change during colonisation and, beyond that, to a fundamental role of spirituality in Aboriginal life during colonisation. The population at Mapoon underwent massive changes to its material way of life, but so did many other Aboriginal populations that did not undergo a shift in spirituality toward Christianity. Aboriginal spirituality must not have been a mere reflection of material life or just an intellectual tool used to cope with the major social and ecological changes taking place.
Spirituality gave meaning to and made sense of the emotional landscape of individual Aboriginal people. The violence and dispossession of colonisation mostly did not require Christianisation because traditional spirituality could usually meet the demands this made on Aboriginal people without drastic modifications. Colonisation was a massive disruption to equilibrium, and therefore within the purview of traditional spirituality. The guilt experienced by many Aboriginal people at Mapoon, however, was not. Guilt implies both a degree of hierarchy and a dichotomy between good and evil not found in traditional Aboriginal spirituality. Many Aboriginal people at Mapoon, therefore, adopted much of the missionaries’ Christianity and its understanding of and emphasis on transgression in an effort to locate and give meaning to new feelings of guilt.