Cowboy Cat :
It sucks you got the Calvinists 😔 lol, I’m joking. But seriously, they often struggled to distinguish the gospel itself from New England cultural preferences. At the same time though, hula originally WAS deeply tied to pagan religion. Pagan Hawaii included rigid caste distinctions, harsh kapu punishments, polygyny, and in earlier periods even human sacrifice. So from the missionaries’ perspective, it probably would’ve been difficult at first to preserve hula purely as cultural art while removing the explicitly religious elements.
In hindsight, it probably would’ve been better if the missionaries had tried to separate and reform hula rather than banning it outright. That’s basically what ended up happening later anyway. Today, hula can be cultural, historical, and artistic rather than religious, and there are even churches in Hawaii that incorporate hula into worship.
It would’ve been nice if Hawaiian Christianity had been allowed to develop more indigenously. Catholic missionaries were often more willing to adapt local cultural forms into Christianity, which usually created less friction. Protestants, especially Calvinists, tended to see cultural practices with pagan roots as spiritually dangerous even after being separated from their original religion. So the reaction to hula was very much shaped by Protestant assumptions.
It disgusts me that people still see it as sexual. Once at a youth leader's conference talent show a Hawaiian girl performed a hula (dressed modestly) and the boys all got up and clapped and cheered raucously, obviously sexualizing her. I was horrified that they would take something cultural and artistic and beautiful and turn it into lust. At some point, the reaction says more about the beholder than the performance itself.
2026-06-05 12:05:15