Missionaries, Politics and War History Research Paper

Missionaries, Politics, and War
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Missionaries, Politics, and War
In the year the 1820s, the missionaries arrived in the Hawaii Islands. The main mission was to promote Christianity in a culture that was still embedded in traditional practice. Christian missionaries were skeptical of the Hawaiian practices as most of them were contrary to the current day Christian teachings. Religion takes a while to get established in a society. Therefore, it took years of minimal changes to revolutionize the Hawaiian people.
Christian missionaries had already adapted to particular views concerning social aspects of life. According to Woods (2015), there were differing views on sexuality between the Hawaiians and the Missionaries. Before the contact with the westernized people, the Hawaiian society did not view nudity as a vice. Children below the age of six could freely roam in the homesteads nude. Woman's breasts were exposed. Only the private parts of the men and the women's bodies were covered. The Hawaiians spent their nights in one-roomed houses that lacked privacy. Sex was a common activity for pleasure. The Missionaries were tied to the biblical aspect of sexuality after the fall in the Garden of Eden (Woods, 2015). There was the keen emphasis on covering up bodies and not just body parts. The missionaries influenced the making of clothes and eventually transformed the Hawaiian culture.
The story of the Hawaiians practice of sexual relations resonated well with me. The Missionaries had a reason to react negatively. The story relates to the society allowing sex to an extent if one turned down a sexual advance, they were considered rude (Woods 2015). Also, the sex narrative of the Hawaiian people allows incest between brothers and sisters...