The transformation of local cultures in the Philippines and the Pacific presents a range of historical and theoretical issues. The lasting impact of Spanish rule in the Philippines was a religious transformation which had a vital impact on local cultures as well as on the growth of national culture over the past fifty years. It was only in Mindanao and in the presence of Islam that limitations occurred on the spatial spread of Catholic influence throughout the archipelago. To a certain extent local social institutions were modified, but in the transformation from Spain to the United States and to nationhood, Philippine culture was maintained both in terms of interpersonal relationships and cultural institutions. The American presence left its legacy in a widespread public education system, which had both positive and negative influences.

In the Pacific, the effects of religious changes have had a more lasting influence on Micronesian and Polynesian cultures. If education was the means of enhancing oneself in the Philippines, the religious domain was as important in Polynesia as witnessed by the way that overseas Polynesian community activity is created and perpetuated.

Social engineering was also a by-product of religious transformations in both cases. Whereas much of this type of social utopianism did not materialize in the Philippines due to the limited number of Church personnel and the lack of interest on the part of the Crown, in Micronesia and Polynesia the long-term political influences had a drastic impact on cultural institutions. Civilizing the Pacific under the guise of religious change meant that whole institutions were in jeopardy of disappearance. The contemporary interest and concern for cultural creation in Micronesia is another expression of the cultural quest to establish tradition by small-scale societies which were demographically and culturally altered through Western imperialism, be it political and/or religious.

Theoretically, Christianity in the Philippines and in Oceania is also a system of thought and action which works primarily at the level of the individual. Furthermore it does not render any particular form of a social totality. In the spread of Christianity, one finds the spread of Christian teachings as expressed through the Bible, the tenets based on Christ, the Pentecost, the conception of the Resurrection, and a dedication to certain teachings in the New Testament. Consequently, the negation of encountered social orders takes the form of comprehending sources of indigenous “evil” or “falseness” which are gradually replaced by new sources of “goodness” and “truth”. Although the totality of a new social order need not emerge — as Burridge (1978:19) notes, Christian communities are expressed in and through a wide range of types of social organization — another form of totality must occur within a dynamic Christian context. In this new totality, the individual is expressed as a distinct and responsible unit who bears rights, obligations and responsibilities towards fellow humans as well as to an evolving social order.

However, the evolving social order may take different social forms. Some forms are more compatible with Christianity, others are less so; yet, in each case one finds individuality as one feature which is constant. As Burridge (1978:15) concludes, the concept of individuality, a hallmark of Christianity, is generalized throughout the society in some cases. This in turn may create new social forms in which the cultural logic is based on individualism, thus forming social structures which are, in theory, harmonious with the way in which individualism has re-emerged. New social orders and new moralities would in turn create what Burridge (1978:15) terms the “new man”, a conception of the individual closely linked to Christian visions as expressed through the Resurrection.

All societies depend on the activity of individual agents, mediating social structural, religious and philosophical tenets in the course of dealing with daily contingencies. From this process there also emerge new cultural and moral imperatives. However, cultures differ in terms of the depth of the constraints which are imposed on individuals. The dilemma for Christian conversion is not simply the question of substituting one set of religious tenets for another, rather, it involves the development of new forms of individuality from the complex matrix of social structural rules through which all individuals are intricately related.

Burridge (1978) notes that once Christian conversion has created the individual and individuality is expressed through rights, duties, obligations and responsibility, this form of individuality can only be sustained in and through the emergence of money as the medium of exchange. As Simmel (1978 [1907]), followed by Burridge, stresses, it is money which establishes markers between individuals as well as between groups, statuses, interest groups and eventually classes. In some sense, the individuality which is so vital and essential to Christianity is based on money since “Christianity was founded in a moneyed environment” (Burridge 1978:18). Money is the initial opening to the gradual evolving of new political relationships, for once the value of money is recognized, participation in a foreign political economy inevitably follows, thus embedding the initial adherence of a monetary economy to individualism.

Spanish Catholicism in the Philippines was always premised on the conviction that the teachings of Christ through the Church were the sole basis of conversion to Christianity. Whatever emerged as a by-product in terms of economy and society was another issue, though it was recognized that this byproduct might not be ideal. Direct cultural tampering with the encountered social fabric was only done if the missionaries saw it as a hindrance to the conversion policy. Thus, the civilizing process was present, but only tangential to religious dogma and practice.

American forms of Protestantism were always linked to a coterminous connection between God’s mission and America’s mission. The civilizing role of America at the turn of the nineteenth century was expressed as a necessity and as a virtue, a sense of truth and reason which was manifest in what the American Enlightenment could offer the world. Religion was subsumed under the civilizing process. As a totalizing social experience based on the emergence of the “new man”, American Protestantism in the Philippines and the Pacific was the moral equivalent of imperialism, or to put it in another way, Protestantism was the “happy face” of the new social order. In an ironic and sardonic way this has not changed, for the whole of the Protestant movement since the 1850s is still intact, reconfirming Arnold Rose’s recent comment to an American missionary “Don’t apologize. All Americans are missionaries.”