Solomon Islands

The religions of the Solomons were religions of place and the dead: ancestral skulls kept in shrine houses, sharks and other creatures honoured as vessels of ancestors, especially in Malaita's lagoons where the shark callers' traditions are still remembered, and mana sought through sacrifice at the tabu places of each lineage.

Alvaro de Mendana gave the islands their biblical name in 1568, but Christianity arrived in earnest three centuries later with the Anglican Melanesian Mission, whose method of training islander teachers at distant schools produced both native evangelists and the mission's most famous martyr, Bishop John Coleridge Patteson, killed at Nukapu in 1871 in the shadow of the labour trade's abuses.

Catholic Marists, Methodists, the South Seas Evangelical Mission and the Adventists divided the archipelago into spheres whose denominational geography still shapes provincial identity. Conversion was overwhelmingly thorough, and the churches became the islands' most trusted institutions, a standing proved during the ethnic tension of 1998 to 2003, when clergy, the Melanesian Brotherhood foremost, walked between armed camps. Today the census counts nearly everyone Christian, yet kastom remains a living force: land descends through lines the shrines remember, chiefly and church authority interlock in the villages, and revival movements periodically sweep the islands, folding old spiritual power into new Pentecostal fire.

The Melanesian Brotherhood was founded in 1925 by Ini Kopuria, a Solomon Islander policeman from Guadalcanal who gave his land and his career to create an indigenous Anglican order of men vowed, for renewable periods rather than for life, to poverty, celibacy and obedience, and tasked with taking the gospel where no clergy went. Barefoot, black and white sashed, travelling in pairs, the brothers, the Tasiu, became the most trusted religious figures in the islands, credited in popular belief with spiritual power over the old forces of custom, their staffs treated with the respect once given to shrine relics. That trust was tested in the ethnic tension of 1998 to 2003, when militias from Guadalcanal and Malaita burned villages and the state collapsed. The Brotherhood walked between the guns, escorting the displaced, collecting weapons and camping between front lines as unarmed peacekeepers.

In 2003 the militia leader Harold Keke detained brother Nathaniel Sado, and six brothers who went to seek him were taken; all seven were killed on the Weather Coast. The Brotherhood confirmed the deaths only after months of anguish, and the shock helped clear the way for the regional intervention force that ended the conflict. The Seven Martyrs are commemorated in the Anglican calendar and at Tabalia, the order's mother house, and the Brotherhood, now spread through Melanesia and beyond, remains the largest religious community in the Anglican Communion.