Micronesia

Micronesia is a very large area of ocean with a very small area of land in it, and its religious life reflects that proportion.

Older Micronesian religion centred on ancestors, on spirits of place and sea, and on the ritual authority of particular lineages, with clan and chiefly rank determining who could conduct which observance. Glenn Petersen's comparative study of the region's societies emphasises how much religious authority was bound up with the political organisation of matrilineal clans, and how much variation existed between island groups whose material culture looked similar to outsiders.

Navigational knowledge is the element that most clearly counts as religious property. The systems that allowed voyaging over hundreds of miles of open water, using star paths, swell patterns, bird behaviour and a technique of holding the canoe stationary and moving the islands in the mind, were taught in schools with initiations, restricted to particular lineages, and accompanied by ritual. On the Central Caroline islands the knowledge survived through the colonial period and has since been taught onward to other Pacific societies whose own traditions had lapsed.

Nan Madol, on Pohnpei, is the region's greatest built monument: nearly a hundred artificial islets of stacked basalt columns in a lagoon, built for the Saudeleur rulers and containing tombs and ritual enclosures. Local tradition holds parts of it dangerous to enter, and access is governed by the community rather than by the archaeology.

Micronesia was governed by Spain, then Germany, then Japan, then the United States within a single lifetime, and each administration brought or restricted religion differently.

Catholic missions came with Spanish rule and remain strongest in the Marianas and parts of the Carolines. American Protestant missionaries worked in the Marshalls and eastern Carolines from the 1850s, and German and Japanese administrations tolerated, regulated or suppressed missions according to their own interests. Japanese rule brought Shinto shrines for settler communities and, in its later phase, pressure on Christian churches; the Pacific War then made several islands battlefields, and the Marshall Islands were used for nuclear testing afterwards, displacing whole communities from atolls they understood as ancestral.

Modekngei, which arose in Palau in the early twentieth century, is the region's most significant indigenous new religion. It combined existing Palauan practice with Christian elements, was suppressed by the Japanese administration, whose officials imprisoned its leaders, and survived to become a recognised body with its own school. It is usually described as an assertion of Palauan religious autonomy against successive foreign authorities.

Christianity is now the majority religion across Micronesia, and older practice persists in specific domains: the treatment of particular sites, the handling of death, the knowledge held by navigators and healers, and the customary law that governs land.