Spiritual Capacity? Overseas Religious Missions in RAMSI-era Solomon Islands

Abstract

tive” as agents or key stakeholders in the development process due to their strong links to local communities’ (2013:5). Others, however, explain this engagement in the context of potentially negative changes in development practice linked to the rise of neo-liberal ideologies. G. Clarke (2006), for example, points out that secular donors began to engage more intensely with faith-based organisations in the wake of Reagan’s mobilisation of the American Christian Right and as donor aid was increasingly linked to policies of market liberalisation. On the one hand, faith-based institutions moved into the gaps opened by retracting state institutions; on the other, donors increasingly sought alternative institutions that were not states but could be used to help administer programs and distribute development aid. Literature on religion and development within development studies, especially studies that emphasise the positive potential of the religion and development nexus, has tended to focus on those moderate religious organisations with which secular donors are most intensively engaged. Thus, in a book on the theologies of development within world religion, Australian scholar M. Clarke devotes a chapter each to Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism, describing their canonical teachings and texts to understand how they ‘understand and conceptualise development and related issues, such as poverty, quality of life and charity’ (2011a:5). In the chapter on Christianity, Clarke mentions Protestantism in the first paragraph as one of three major branches of Christianity but then focuses entirely on Catholic social teaching, especially the preferential option for the poor. SSGM DISCUSSION PAPER 2013/3 Spiritual Capacity? Overseas Religious Missions in RAMSI-era Solomon Islands