‘The Church Can Wait’

The Myths of Maui luau occurs nightly at the Royal Lahaina beach resort in Maui, Hawaii. On a balmy night in early July, a jovial emcee led a mostly full crowd of tourists on a Polynesian odyssey through the mediums of dance, song, and cuisine. He cracked jokes, men twirled fire torches, and women danced gracefully, silhouetted against the Pacific sunset. “Keep Maui nice and green,” he said at the show’s conclusion. “Spend a lot of money!”

This was more than a joke, though. The Maui Economic Development Board estimates that 70 cents out of every dollar Maui County brings in comes from tourism, either directly or indirectly. But since a wildfire devastated the island of Maui on Aug. 8, 2023, tourism remains depressed. So does spending. I checked into the Royal Lahaina just before the Independence Day weekend, the week after it had reopened to guests. The state of Hawaii’s emergency shelter assistance program for wildfire victims was scheduled to end on July 11. Until just prior to my visit, the hotel served as a major hub for locals affected by the wildfire. Even after opening for business again, nearly a year later, it was still sheltering displaced locals.

The historic whaling town of Lahaina is a onetime royal capital, and before the wildfire, was one of Maui’s most popular tourist destinations. Indeed, a record 3 million visitors came to the island in 2019, just before COVID-19 was to take a toll on Hawaii tourism. By the end of 2022, visitor numbers were rebounding to pre-pandemic levels. A 2024 report from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization details the extent of the human and economic loss as a result of the Maui wildfire on Lahaina, where at least 115 residents were killed and over 2,300 structures were damaged or destroyed. Tax revenue decreases and fears of further learning loss after COVID-era school closures are among the other serious concerns.

Around Lahaina, high fences still obscure entire sections of the town. They restrict entrance only to residents with appropriate passes and identification, to prevent interruptions and prying eyes as rebuilding and recovery take place. The charred remains of Waiola Church—affiliated with the United Church of Christ, and the oldest church on Maui, whose often-turbulent history stretches back two centuries—lie behind one such fence. A royal burial site, Waiola Church persists as a symbol of spiritual and cultural significance for many Native Hawaiians. With this latest crisis, Waiola’s congregation once again contends with the relationship between religion and identity that shaped the church’s past and holds the promise for its future—which is currently on hold.

Waiola was the oldest church on Maui, having been founded by New England Congregationalist missionaries in 1823 as Ebenezer Church (also sometimes called Waine’e Church). The site where its remains stand today is also the site of an earlier church fire from more than a century ago.

Speaking in 2022 for the Hawaii Conference for the United Church of Christ, historian of Hawaii Ron Williams Jr. said he originally assumed the church’s presence was a legacy of settler colonialism. He accepted the conventional wisdom that the 1894 fire that destroyed the original Ebenezer Church was the work of Native Hawaiian supporters of the traditional monarchy, who had burned down the church to protest Hawaii’s proposed annexation by the United States. But at the urging of his academic mentor, Williams went through primary Hawaiian language sources and discovered a more mundane reality: Hawaiian language newspapers from the time contained eyewitness accounts of a trash fire that went awry when the church sextant was clearing the church grounds.

Williams noted in his 2008 master’s thesis that the fire took place on June 28, 1894, six days before the declaration of the Republic of Hawaii, a provisional government established in the wake of the overthrow of Hawaii’s last monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani. This was a convenient date for someone trying to construct a narrative that would garner support for annexing Hawaii, and Williams traced the origins of the conventionally accepted account of royalist arson to a single source, Reverend Sereno Edwards Bishop. A white Presbyterian minister and a prominent pro-annexation voice born in Hawaii, Bishop wrote widely for U.S. publications about Hawaiian issues, often with a white supremacist tinge, intent on proving the barbarity of Native Hawaiians and their leadership. Bishop penned a pseudonymous editorial for a mainland paper about the dedication of the new Ebenezer Church in Lahaina in 1897. Bishop wrote that the fire three years earlier was a demonstration against the church’s pro-annexation Native Hawaiian pastor, who had become, Bishop said, “exceedingly disgusted with the increasingly heathenish tendencies of the court.” The pastor’s attitude, he wrote, “led to the burning of the fine old stone church by partisans of the Royalist side, and the people were too weak to rebuild.” This is the narrative that would persist into the 21st century, as many non-Hawaiian speakers repeated his explanation down the decades.

Williams began his master’s thesis on the Ebenezer Church fire with a quote from a historian of northeastern Europe: “History, it is often suggested, is written by the winners. Yet losers also write history; they just don’t get translated.” The original Lahaina church-burning narrative served as a synecdoche of a wider phenomenon that Williams observed when he began his studies in Hawaiian history: “When I was studying Hawaiian studies 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” Williams said in his UCC remarks, “the answer was, ‘everything foreign is bad, everything native is good.’” Christianity, as the religion of the English-speaking foreign colonial power, it was widely assumed, “must have been used on Native Hawaiians to control them, to docilize [sic] them, and so forth.”

Indigenous Hawaiian belief was animistic and polytheistic, where deities represented various aspects of nature and the environment, which was itself infused with supernatural power. Ancestral spirits also figured into the pre-Christian Hawaiian cosmology. A more nuanced picture of how Christianity replaced that Indigenous belief system emerged for Williams as he went through the Hawaiian-language primary sources.

It is easy for visitors since the 2023 wildfire to miss that Lahaina was once of prime importance for the Hawaiian monarchy. But buried in the Waiola Church cemetery is Queen Keōpūolani, a convert to Christianity who was introduced to the faith by Tahitian contacts, who had been converted in turn by British missionaries. The wife of Hawaii’s famed King Kamehameha I, and revered by Hawaiian subjects as a sacred person, Keōpūolani was the first Protestant baptism on the island of Maui. She was, in Williams’ words, a “prized conversion,” receiving baptism in 1823.

Together with Kamehameha II, the heir and son of Kamehameha I, and with Kamehameha I’s favorite wife, Keōpūolani helped abolish the Native Hawaiian kapu system. Kapu, a word roughly akin to “prohibition” or “forbidden,” was a combination of caste system and dietary law, which often meant capital punishment for violators. Under the kapu system, men and women could not eat together. Therefore, it sent a powerful message to Native Hawaiians when Kamehameha II sat down for a meal with these two highly influential and revered women. The entire system, already weakened by contact with outside cultures throughout the 18th century, whose members Native Hawaiians saw violating kapu free of divine repercussion, was primed to come tumbling down.

Proponents of kapu fought a last stand against their king to defend the system at the Battle of Kuamo’o, shortly before the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, who arrived in Maui in 1823 at the invitation of Keōpūolani. They established Ebenezer Church that same year, a brick building that could hold 3,000 worshippers. With two services on a Sunday, Williams said, that meant around 6,000 people were attending church on Maui in the 1840s and ’50s. Like Keōpūolani, Kamehameha I’s favorite wife, Kaahumanu, also encouraged and supported the missionaries as they spread the Gospel and taught literacy around the Hawaiian Islands. She was baptized in 1825. It was Kaahumanu who would ban the hula, originally a dance which took place in a sacred context, in 1830. Hula instruction continued in secret, and was brought back in a desacralized context in the 1880s by King David Kalākaua, who reintroduced various aspects of pre-Christian Hawaiian culture as secular markers of Hawaiian identity.

“The [Native Hawaiian] Christians of the 1880s and ’90s were authentically Christian,” Williams said in his UCC talk. “The binary of choosing between being a Christian and being a Hawaiian was something that we came up with in the 1920s and ’30s, and came out of an ignorance of past history.” According to Williams, historians often advance narratives from only a small sliver of the population: the ones they can understand, who wrote in English—around 6% of the population at the time of Hawaii’s annexation. He likens the effect on Hawaiian scholarship to a murder with 10 witnesses, out of which authorities question only one. “You wouldn’t walk away and write the report,” he said.

This is important context, because the missionaries who came to Hawaii from New England beginning in the 1820s were Congregationalists, the literal and spiritual descendants of the Protestant reformers who had rejected bishops and church hierarchies in favor of a more synodal, democratic form of church governance. By the late 1800s, a board for the churches resided in Honolulu and was presided over by white men, but the churches themselves were run and attended by Native Hawaiians—in the Hawaiian language. That legacy remains in Waiola Church’s denominational affiliation with the United Church of Christ, which formed in 1957 when two descendants of the English Puritan tradition in America formed with two other Congregationalist churches that originated in the Swiss and German Reformation traditions.

Williams’ research into Hawaiian language primary sources from the 19th century led him to refute certain popular narratives in his work. He contends that the conventional wisdom—that the ultimate overthrow of Hawaii’s queen and its road to statehood were an outgrowth of the establishment of Protestant Christian missions, and that Christian Native Hawaiians at that time were somehow less than authentically Hawaiian—obscures a more complicated truth. The history of fire-ravaged Lahaina is key to refuting that understanding.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was founded in Boston in 1810. They dispatched missionaries to the Hawaiian Islands, then called the Sandwich Islands, in 1819. The ABCFM issued the missionaries a theological prime directive not to involve themselves in Indigenous politics. “His Kingdom to which it is your felicity to belong,” they instructed their missionaries, “and the interests of which you only are to seek is not of this world.” The ABCFM would double down on this prohibition again in 1838, telling missionaries, “You will withhold yourselves entirely from all interference and intermeddling with the political affairs and party concerns of the nation or people among whom you reside: paying proper respect to the powers that be ... Among the common people avoid assuming airs of authority, as if you were chiefs. Remember the meekness and gentleness of Christ.”

The missionaries brought printing presses and began teaching literacy in the Hawaiian Islands. Many of the materials were in Hawaiian language, and Hawaiian natives conducted much of the instruction on behalf of the New England missionaries. In Lahaina, just a few miles from the present-day site of Waiola Church, the New England missionaries established a seminary that exists today as Lahainaluna High School, now a public boarding school that still offers a Hawaiian-language immersion program.

By the 1850s, the ABCFM proclaimed Hawaii a fully Christian nation in terms of its laws, society, and established churches. Although in Lahaina the Native Hawaiian congregations exercised local authority over their church, the white mission board in Honolulu retained ownership and ultimate decision-making authority over the land on which the church itself was located. By the 1860s, together with Native Hawaiians themselves, the ABCFM was urging the second-generation missionaries who made up the board in Honolulu to decrease their presence—the so-called “Sons of the Mission”—so that the Native Hawaiians’ autonomy over their own churches could increase. But as the Civil War raged on the mainland and its farmers went to war, Hawaii was becoming profitable. The next generation of original ABCFM missionaries from Boston had made personal investments in the resulting agricultural and mercantile schemes, and they were starting to butt heads with local native authorities over issues relating to their economic interests.

In 1871, the native congregation at Lahaina’s Ebenezer Church took initiative, and incorporated under Hawaiian law as the Eklesia Hoole Pope o Waine’e (the word for Protestant in Hawaiian translates to “church without a pope”). The existing legal document from this time states that the trustees were allowed to buy and sell church land with the approval, of course, of their congregation.

Native Hawaiian congregations making moves like this, together with the growing international prestige of the Hawaiian government—their constitution was now recognized by European monarchies—began to make the Honolulu mission board nervous for their own interests, Williams said. Many of these next-gen missionaries, some of them literally sons of the original ABCFM missionaries, had received educations back on the mainland, said Williams, where eugenics and social Darwinism were beginning to influence curricula. He cited a statement by the white principal of a school responsible for training Native Hawaiian clergy: “Hawaiians, only three generations removed from barbarism, are not fit for self-government. They cannot reason logically.”

Talk of a separate, Native Hawaiian board of churches began to emerge in the late 1880s. It never came to fruition, but it prompted the Sons of the Mission to clamp down further. Many were instrumental in forming the Hawaiian League, a secret militia intended to protect the white citizens of Hawaii from any potential future threats. One signatory of the league’s original charter was Reverend Sereno Edwards Bishop, who penned what would become the magisterial account of the original Lahaina Church fire. The Hawaiian League’s primary goals were the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the establishment of a republic.

In 1887, the Hawaiian League got the king of Hawaii to accept a draft constitution written by various Sons of the Mission, a document known as the Bayonet Constitution. It effectively neutered the monarch’s executive authority and influence of the hereditary nobility. Crucially, the Bayonet Constitution also raised the income and property requirements for voter eligibility, which disenfranchised many Native Hawaiians, and gave the vote to foreign white residents who could read and write European languages. “The politics of this country are fast arranging themselves along Anglo-Saxon lines,” Bishop, a Christian minister and former principal of Lahainaluna High School, wrote shortly after the constitution was enacted. In his pseudonymous op-eds for American papers, which Williams said could sometimes be more gossipy than polemic in nature. Bishop was at pains to make a case against the Hawaiian monarchy in his writings. “It’s an incredibly different mission than what was sent here in 1820,” Williams said.

If the intentions of the first wave of missionaries were primarily spiritual, their descendants saw less of a conflict of interest in mixing the pursuit of secular power with their religious mission.

The Hawaiian League and Bayonet Constitution set the stage for the 1893 coup, and the final overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy under Queen Lili’uokalani, herself a devout Christian. The U.S. annexed Hawaii as part of the Spanish-American War in 1898, and made Hawaii a territory in 1900. Although the Sons of the Mission were instrumental in those events, “native Christian patriots organized and conducted a broad array of political actions from within the churches,” Williams wrote, mounting a resistance movement that used “claims on Ke Akua (God) and Christianity as a foundation for their vision of continued native rule.”

One hundred years have passed since Keōpūolani’s baptism, death, and burial in the cemetery adjacent to the current site of Wailoa Church. The church changed its name from Waine’e (which translates to “moving water”) to Waiola (“living water,” a New Testament reference), in 1953, when the most recent structure, the one that the 2023 fire destroyed, was rebuilt after a second church fire in 1947. The church website attributes the second conflagration to “an accidental rubbish fire.” The congregation has also transformed, dwindling from 6,000 every Sunday. Members number around 75 today, some of whom now meet for services at a neighboring sister church since the 2023 fire, said Anela Rosa, the minister at Waiola Church.

According to Pew Research, 63% of Hawaii’s population of 1.4 million identify as Christian today. Although the UCC is one of the smallest denominations, it still consists of 117 churches across six islands. Indigenous Hawaiian religious and cultural practices, including chants, dance, and stories, have been maintained down the centuries, and revived in popularity in recent years. This revival has manifested in the establishment of the Aloha Aina Party in Hawaii state politics in 2020, which aimed to amplify traditional Native Hawaiian voices, and in the invocation of Indigenous Hawaiian spiritual practices as part of the 2019 conservation protests against plans to build a 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, the tallest peak in Hawaii and a traditional sacred site.

A Native Hawaiian who was raised Christian, Rosa said that there is pressure in Native Hawaiian communities to practice traditional, pre-Christian Hawaiian religious customs. “‘Don’t you believe in Lono, don’t you believe in Papa, don’t you believe in Wakea?’” she said people have asked her, referring to three pre-Christian Hawaiian deities. “I have to be honest with those people,” she said, “I can’t say that I do, because that’s not how I was raised.”

Rosa said it was almost embarrassing. “But then I felt, why should I be embarrassed to be a Christian, why should I be embarrassed even though I am a Hawaiian?” Rather, she said the historical relationship between Waiola Church’s predecessors and Lahainaluna High School continues to play a key role in preserving Hawaiian language and culture. An annual tradition for the graduating Hawaiian language students includes a visit to the Waiola Church and cemetery, Rosa said. The students pay respects at the graves of the deceased royal family, as well as at those of any relatives buried there. “I always tell the kids,” she said, “their foundation is here. This is the foundation of what your life is about. You look into the graveyard, you have family, every one of them has family in some way, that is buried in the graveyard.” The 2023 bicentennial of the church’s founding was the last year that the students then proceeded into the church to sing Hawaiian language songs, and to receive a benediction from Rosa.

A smaller version was held this year for the class of 2024. Students and their families still prayed and paid their respects in the cemetery. The church gone, they gathered under a tent, put up by the stepfather of Rosa’s nephew. The young man, whose great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather are all buried at the cemetery, Rosa said, recited his genealogy and the history of the church in Hawaiian language. Rosa said she was not taught much about Hawaii in school growing up, but could understand much, though not all, of her nephew’s speech. Nevertheless, she said, “I was just so proud of him.”

Despite the symbolic and cultural significance of Waiola Church, Rosa remains a pragmatist. She said she rebuffs the many calls from locals and financial offers from nonprofits to kickstart a rebuild. “We’re not building anything until our people, our community, have their homes,” she said.

The hunt for affordable housing was already a challenge in Hawaii, which faces a housing shortage, and is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. Home prices began to rise during the pandemic, and higher interest rates in recent years now mean that around two-thirds of Hawaii residents cannot afford a single-family home, leading to the proliferation of accessorized dwelling units (ADUs), often unpermitted garages or bedrooms that residents convert into additional living spaces. During my stay, the Small Business Administration was still setting up an information table on disaster recovery for residents in the lobby of the Royal Lahaina. At another table, a representative for new affordable condos, where eligibility is capped at certain income levels, accepted applications for an upcoming housing lottery.

“Honestly,” Rosa said, “as odd as it sounds coming from my mouth, the church can wait.”

The recovery is still visibly uneven. My first night at the Royal Lahaina, I was one of only a handful of diners in the restaurant. “Maybe we’ll get some more walk-ins!” I heard a waiter say after I was seated. I had the beach to myself as I walked along the shore in front of the resort. Other hotels’ beaches were busier, but hardly packed. The morning I left, the day before Independence Day, the volume of visitors seemed to pick up slightly. But the elevator still has flyers for the Hui Kane men’s group for fire-impacted fathers and families. A sign in front of the conference room informed Lahaina residents that the FEMA representatives left on June 29, and can now be reached through The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement. In the parking lot, a few cars over from what appear to be families loading up trucks with household goods, temporary writing on a VW Jetta read, “IT’S MY BDAY!” with the honoree’s Cash App and Venmo handles inviting well-wishers to buy her a drink.

On the drive to view the Waiola Church site, protected by high fences, public safety barriers—and a hand-painted sign that says “Respect! No Pictures!”—the brown and black parts of the landscape stand in contrast to the lush greenery, indicating where the wildfire touched down before leaping to another arbitrary location.

Officially, the cause of the 2023 wildfire remains unknown, and as of this writing, Maui County has still not released the findings of a federal investigation into the disaster. Theories range from the tragically minor—a termite-damaged telecommunications pole—to the outlandish: Blue structures were untouched by a laser attack, or were the product of island elites who wanted to rebuild Maui as a “smart city.”

At the Myths of Maui luau, if anyone in the audience or onstage was discomfited by the show’s emphasis on the capricious fire goddess Pele less than a year after the events of Aug. 8, no one gave any indication. It didn’t pay to focus on the negative—there was no mention of the restrictive kapu system in the show’s slick celebration of ancient Polynesian culture, either. Adults willing to swallow the nearly $200 entry fee ($130 for kids) had access to an open bar, an all-you-can-eat buffet, and a short hula lesson. Maui and its culture were presented in a compact, 90-minute package to the tourists who, more likely than not, had driven past wildfire memorials on their way to pick up souvenirs and aloe vera. A refrain I heard commonly from locals, however, was not to feel bad about seeming insensitive. The tourists’ money, they explained, is what they need to get their town and their island back.