It's Sunday in Paradise so we're all doing the church thing today. This post talks about an elephant in the room over here. It goes something along the lines of "Samoa basically worships their culture".
One of our Ambassadors said to me yesterday "I'm all cultured out!" meaning that the cultural thing was so strong in Samoa (especially with our intense cultural engagement) that coming up to the end of their allotted amount of time here, they were very ready to go home - back to their own culture of course.
As an aside, our Web Ambassadors here don't just have a holiday in a South Pacific paradise. They work hard and engage with a range of people. They really experience Samoa and are faced with deep social, religious, financial and ethical issues in the process of documenting and sharing this amazing country with the world. This experience really can be deeply draining and even life changing.
I define Samaon culture as the set of values, social expectations and behaviours that are common to the Samoan people. Many Palagi have said to me that we (Palagi) do not have a culture but that the Samoan people do. They are wrong. We all have a culture, it's just that our own culture is invisible to us until we experience another one. Samoan people who have never been outside of their country do not know that they have a culture. The church thing; the Sunday thing; their whole way of living is normal to them and totally invisible as a culture.
I define worship as the act of giving honour, attention or focus. The Western worship is essentially that of worshipping self. The 'me, myself and I' mentality that fosters greed, gluttony, excess and other such ugly things.
As a non-church attending conservative Christian at heart, I view church attendance in many cultures as basically an act, or an activity rather than true faith. Just as putting any cold bubbly liquid into a bottle doesn't mean that you have a beer, so too attending a church doesn't make you a Christian.
Another example of this principle is a village that we've been working with that has an almost zero crime rate. Police do not visit. There is no need to. There is no drinking, no fighting, no theft, no graffiti or vandalism.
You would think that this is the result of their deep Christian faith and that it was an example of a model society but it's not. It's the result of a strong village council that will fine anyone found drinking or fighting 'ten pigs', and an extra 'ten pigs' for the man that brought the beer into the village and caused the fight. This is also the village that prohibits swimming in the sea or river on Sunday, and identifies the cause of the September 2009 Tsunami to be God's wrath because of the Southern Coasts disrepect of the Sabbath.
The reality in this village is that the pride, fighting, jealousies and other less enjoyable aspects of life are moderated and pushed under-ground. They manifest themselves in different ways, but are still there, if you dig deep enough. Sometimes it does become visible, like when a young man shouted extreme profanities at our car with Palagi in it as it passed. He will be dealt to severely in due course, but from a conservative Christian perspective, human nature is the same globally - fallen.
Again, we can legislate and control human behaviour but it doesn't change our underlying human nature. That change can only be achieved from within - the Christian view is that this can only occur as a result of a faith encounter with a living God.
I've talked a little before about some of the issues in a light-hearted post and before that in other posts but the real elephant in the room that I see is the act of worship that Samoa has towards its culture.
From the top down, the idea that Samoa is founded upon God, and is a Godly nation is promoted proudly - to the Samoan people and to the world. Their Sunday church attendance is presented as a good thing, and an example of a model society. The fact that this is enforced behaviour is not spoken of. The fact that many of the people do church things as a result of cultural influence, social expectation, tradition and conditioning rather than voluntarily as a result of a personal relationship with a loving God, is presented publicly as a positive aspect of Samoan society.
I'm not for a minute saying that all within the church in Samoa are pew-sitters but many are. In a discussion with a Pastor on the South Coast confirmed that there are those in the church that "work hard" and those that "work when they have to" and those that "don't do anything". This is no different to many cultures and churches except for two things . . .
- The bulk of society attends church here as opposed to a small percentage of Western Society, and
- His opinion of his parishioners relates to the work they put in, rather than to any aspects of personal faith
So the essence of this post is that Samoa worships its culture. It puts enormous value on the way things are done culturally. Our culture this. Our culture that. It is overt. It is powerful. It is enormously resistant to change with strong protection systems in place that have evolved over centuries. Presented as a strength - e.g. the political stability that Samoa has enjoyed - it is however just one way of living; neither better nor worse than many other cultures, but certainly very different.
The conservative Christian view of a people worshipping anything other than Christ is that it is, or becomes an idol. An idol is something made by man that is a replacement for God.
When mankind establishes an idol, he makes it according to his own wishes and wants. In the Western world it is independence; the freedom to do as we wish without reference to an absolute such as the Bible. In Samoa, their worship of the Samoan culture (the way we do things) allows leaders to benefit. Their dictation of the way things should be - from changing the hours of the golf course - to legislating behaviour is very well micro-managed, one might even say adeptly manipulated, as the Samoan culture is not a fixed universal absolute.
As a non-church-going Palagi, I'm fortunately able to be an independent observer. I have turned down an offer of Matai-ship so I am not associated (or more accurately owned) by any one village and am thus relatively free to conduct business as the Government and powers that be determine from time to time.
In my opinion however, the elephant over here is a biggie.
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