Resounding the Gospel: Examining the Influence of the Missionary Encounter in the Marshall Islands

In 1946, King Juda ceded Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands) to the United States for purposes of nuclear testing with the equivocal words: “Men otemjej rej ilo bein Anij” (“Everything is in God’s hands”). Resounded in songs and speeches, these words have become the motto of the Bikinians, whose traumatic removal and continued displacement from their homeland was justified by the United States military in linking the nuclear phenomenon to a powerful religious discourse of world salvation and freedom, a discourse embedded into Bikinian life through American Protestant missionary work beginning in 1857. This paper explores the importance of this mid-19th century American Protestant work in establishing Christian ethics as the first human link between the two countries. I examine primers, hymnals, and letters and share how missionaries utilized musical education as both ideological dissemination and cultural prohibition. I investigate how missionaries imposed silence on the Marshallese: God’s silence in the face of prayer, banning of traditional music, drumming, and dancing (cultural silencing), and the translation of an oral culture to a written culture (a type of literal silence, even though the Marshallese are still predominantly an oral culture today). I then explore the anachronistic incorporation of elements from the nuclear encounter in “Gospel Day,” a Marshallese holiday filled with celebratory reenactments of the mission encounter. Finally, I return to a focus on the Bikinians and analyze the ways in which songs that incorporate the motto “Men otemjej rej ilo bein Anij” function to both reify Protestant teachings and also maintain ethico-political links with the United States.