“For the Good of Mankind”: Marshallese, Missionaries, Militaries and the Making of American Empire in the Pacific, 1857-1957

Abstract

During the 1940s and 1950s, the United States conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests on the atmosphere, land, waters, and people of the Marshall Islands. The U.S. military told the Marshallese people—and the world—the atomic experiments were “for the good of mankind.” Based on extensive archival research in the United States and the Marshall Islands, I argue that United States nuclear testing marked the culmination of a longer history between Marshallese people and American Christianity that began in 1857, when American Protestant missionaries first arrived in the Marshall Islands. My dissertation demonstrates how the missionaries’ errand—undertaken for what they hoped would be the good of mankind and to advance the kingdom of God on earth—and stories about the nineteenth-century encounter between American missionaries and Marshallese people were deployed in the service of twentieth-century American imperialism in the Pacific and, in particular, United States nuclear testing. American missionaries and Protestant Christianity did not exclusively serve American imperial or American Protestant ends. These encounters and the relationships and faith commitments that resulted from them have also formed the basis of a profound rebuke to American power—religious and political—and underpinned Marshallese nuclear and climate activism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As an examination of the relationships between Marshallese people, American Protestant missionaries, and the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, my project interrogates the theoretical, theological, and the imperial logics that shaped these relationships and the conditions of power that have rendered this history of American religion and imperialism in the Marshall Islands invisible within contemporary American political, religious, and historical discourse.