Chapter 8 explains why the most powerful chiefs in Hawaii decided to be baptised a few years after dispensing with their old cult. The most important of these factors revolved around immanent power: The ability of the new god to deliver victory in battle in the immediate aftermath of the abolition, and to Christian forces at the battle of Waimea in 1824, made a great impression, while healing was, as always, also a matter of concern. The impotence of the old gods was confirmed by deliberate challenges to the volcano goddess Pele and the female prophets who spoke for her and by the iconoclastic tours of Ka‘ahumanu, who was now taking centre stage. Meanwhile, the high chiefs also felt the need to repair the sacral basis to their authority, if now in a more righteous mode, while the strict form of Protestantism provided a way of ‘restoring the tabus’, disciplining both their subjects and the Euro-American inhabitants of Honolulu.

The case of Hawaii is unusual insofar as the collapse of the state religion in 1819 may be distinguished from the conversion of ruling figures in 1825. It therefore offers a striking illumination of certain vulnerabilities of immanentism. Chapter 7 shows how contact with the wider world following the arrival of Captain Cook had generated various internal tensions that were finally expressed in Liholiho’s order to sweep away the old cult. His father Kamehameha had brought the Hawaiian archipelago under central authority for the first time but also promoted the rise of a group of ali‘i (nobles) around his wife Ka‘ahumanu. Female chiefs in Hawaii could acquire great status and power but were denied participation in the rites of sacrifice that preserved male paramountcy This system was destroyed when Liholiho ate with Ka‘ahumanu in 1819, thereby breaking the eating tabu. This was enabled by the way in which contact with outsiders had eroded the credibility of the tabu (kapu) system and the deities who enforced it. In particular, they seemed powerless against the new diseases. The role of local priests in facilitating rather than obstructing the conversion of chiefs and problems afflicting the manipulation of heroic and cosmic forms of divinised kingship, especially as a warrior society found peace, are also analysed.