States & Territories
Hawaii
West
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Native Hawaiian religion, organised around the kapu system and heiau temple platforms many of which still stand, governed the islands until the kapu was formally abolished in 1819, the year before the first Congregationalist missionaries arrived from New England. Those missionaries built the islands' first Protestant churches and reduced the Hawaiian language to writing, with consequences for land and political power that Native Hawaiian sovereignty movements still contest. Japanese immigration in the late nineteenth century brought Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines that remain active across the islands, giving Hawaii the most religiously mixed profile of any state.
Facts
Religion
Leading Religious AffiliationNothing in Particular (Unaffiliated) 2 Hawaii: no named religious tradition is the largest single group. Nothing in particular is 22% of adults, ahead of Evangelical Protestant at 20% and Catholic at 16%. Margin of error plus or minus 8.1 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/hawaii/ Geography
Census Region Law and State
Establishment StatusHawaii has had no established church since statehood in 1959; before annexation, the Kingdom of Hawaii's own nineteenth century constitutions likewise provided for religious liberty rather than an established faith. Identity
Jurisdiction Status Disputed
Origin of the NameMost often connected to Hawaiki, a homeland name shared across Polynesian oral tradition, and to the legendary navigator Hawaii Loa credited in some accounts with discovering the islands, though the exact derivation is not settled. 1 Learn More
The Kapu System's End and the Missionaries Who Arrived a Year Later
Native Hawaiian religion governed the islands for centuries through the kapu system, a comprehensive set of sacred restrictions enforced through the heiau, temple platforms built across the islands, many of which still stand today as protected historic sites. The kapu system regulated nearly every aspect of daily life, from what could be eaten together to who could approach whom, and its violation carried consequences the tradition treated as both social and cosmological. In 1819, before any Christian missionary had yet arrived, King Kamehameha II and the powerful chiefess Kaahumanu formally abolished the kapu system themselves, an internally driven religious rupture that left the islands without their traditional sacred order for roughly a year before anything replaced it.
The first Congregationalist missionaries from New England arrived in 1820, stepping directly into that vacuum, and built the islands' first Protestant churches while also reducing the Hawaiian language to written form for the first time, work that simultaneously preserved the language and became a tool for the political and land dispossession Native Hawaiian sovereignty movements continue to contest today. Japanese immigration in the late nineteenth century then added an entirely separate religious layer, bringing Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines that remain active across the islands. Between a suppressed but not extinguished Native Hawaiian tradition, missionary Protestantism, and transplanted Japanese Buddhism and Shinto, Hawaii carries one of the most religiously layered histories of any state, matching Pew's own finding that no single named tradition claims even a quarter of its adults today.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Hawaii directly: "outside North America, after the Laie Hawaii Temple already dedicated in 1919."
This source names Hawaii directly: "in Hanamaulu on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, and died December 11, 1980 in Keosauqua, Iowa."
This source names Hawaii directly: "published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2004, gathering essays by specialists in Khmer Buddhism and popular religion."
This source names Hawaii directly: "Don Baker's survey of the roles folk religion, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and Korea's indigenous new religions have played in Korean life, part of the University of Hawai'i Press's..."
This source names Hawaii directly: "Hawayo Takata carried the practice to Hawaii and the American mainland after Usui's death."
This source names Hawaii directly: "Published by the University of Hawaii Press, it remains the standard English language ethnographic reference on the subject."
This source names Hawaii directly: "published by the University of Hawaii Press, is a standard modern scholarly translation of the Xiaojing with an extended philosophical introduction arguing for filial reverence as a foundational..."
This source names Hawaii directly: "Published by the University of Hawaii Press, it is the standard English language academic reference on Cao Dai as it moved from a Vietnamese national religion into a transpacific one."
This source names Hawaii directly: "outside North America, after the Laie Hawaii Temple of 1919."
This source names Hawaii directly: "Japanese immigration carried Shinto to Hawaii in 1898, also recorded here, Japan's new constitution fixed the legal position that let the state require shrine worship of every subject while still..."
This source names Hawaii directly: "earlier through Japanese immigrants in Hawaii and had endured wartime suspicion there, both already on this atlas's map, but had never before had a shrine of its own on the continental mainland."
Sources
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