From Canoes to Airplanes

Nancy Munn’s (Reference Munn1977) article on Gawan space-time and value transformation was a groundbreaking analysis of semiotic (“symbolic” in her terms) anthropology, examining how value is produced through a process of production and exchange in a noncapitalist community. This involves both physical and symbolic transformations of an object, in this case the wood used to make a Gawan dugout canoe, and the concomitant capacity of the Gawan owner of this object to control and expand the space-time in which he (usually he) exists.

A tree is something literally rooted to the ground, a stable, unmoving object on the Gawan landscape. Through the production process of felling, hewing, bespelling, and decorating the wood into a canoe shape, Gawans enact a transformation of something that in their terms is slow, heavy, and dark (a tree in a forest) into something that is fast, light, and shiny (a shimmering canoe rushing across the ocean). The specifics of the kin-based exchanges that allow the canoe to be sent out as a gift to another island in the kula system are too complex to summarize here. The important point is that the shell valuable that is given in return for a canoe is a kitomu, a personally owned valuable that has somewhat different rules of exchange compared with other kula shell valuables. Kitomu valuables are treated in such a way that they can always be used to open new exchange cycles, and largely because of this they can also be exchanged for ever higher quality shell valuables. Kitomu shells ideally stay in inter-island circulation endlessly, generating greater value for their owner with each exchange, a radical transformation of something that began as an immobile tree. Kitomu valuables received in exchange for canoes “therefore model in their conversion structure the power to reproduce for the individual … and for Gawa, the value generated by detaching materials from Gawa and sending away the objects so produced, i.e., the value created by spatiotemporal transformations which translate Gawa into the inter-island order” (Munn Reference Munn1977, 46, emphasis removed).

As the valuable is transformed and up-converted into higher spheres of exchange, the space-time of the canoe-to-kitomu owner expands to coordinate the social worlds of larger and larger groups of people or farther and farther locales. This expansion, in Munn’s argument, depends on the transformation of the material media of these exchanges, their qualia, as Munn (Reference Munn1986) describes it in her later work. Munn emphasizes how physical and symbolic transformations in material objects in exchange transform the space-time of the people involved in the exchange. The “fame” of Gawan kula participants is their capacity to organize the circulation of objects in space-time, obliging other participants to orient toward their circulatory constraints. Space-time is something that contracts or expands. There is an iconism between the objects exchanged and the space-time of the transactors: fast, shiny objects allow for someone to expand their spatiotemporal control better than slow, heavy ones.

How then can this be used to understand the Lutheran missionaries’ turn to aviation for evangelism? I want to focus in particular on the ways in which symbolic and material transformations in the media of circulation create different values and affect the space-time of the participants: the change in modes of transportation for the Lutherans ideally created an endless increase of value in the state of heathen’s souls, and a step-by-step expansion of the space-time in which the mission operates, from the infrastructural to the colonial to the eschatological. Unlike Munn’s example, I am not examining a case of equivalent, interlocking bidirectional exchanges. Initially, missionaries thought of their evangelism as a unidirectional project of linear circulation: a Christian circulation of the Gospel message from one idealized locale (“the West”) to another (“heathen New Guinea”). However, later missionaries came to see their evangelism as part of a delayed reciprocity, as aspects of missionary experiences “on the field” began to affect how Christianity was taught and experienced back home.Footnote ²

Although much of the anthropology of Christianity focuses on convert cultures in the postcolonial global South, there has been relatively little work on the theorization of evangelism itself as a form of communicative circulation. There is an important and considerable body of work that emphasizes the sometimes agonistic forms of comparison that take place when specific missionaries end up engaging with specific local cultures of the colonial and postcolonial worlds (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff1991; Dombrowski Reference Dombrowski2001; Handman Reference Handman2015; Meyer Reference Meyer1999). There are a few pieces that discuss the moment of person-to-person evangelism in various global contexts (Crapanzano Reference Crapanzano2000; Harding Reference Harding2000; Webster Reference Webster2013; Hardin Reference Hardin2017). But few scholars put the evangelistic encounter within a larger spatiotemporal framework of global circulation of Christian discourse, either as imagined by evangelizing Christians themselves or as theorized by anthropologists. One of the most profound examples of direct evangelism is Susan Harding’s (Reference Harding2000) arresting account of being witnessed to by the Reverend Melvin Campbell. Harding analyzes her own reluctant baptism into evangelical ways of speaking as a process of temporal lamination of her event of salvation with the primary Christian event of salvation in the Bible, Jesus’s death. Harding argues that to be addressed by evangelical witnessing speech entails starting to take up that speech in order to convert another. Every act of hearing evangelism is a repetition of the original act of evangelism that compels a further moment of creating an act of evangelism for others. It is a process of endless circulation, an imagined movement forward to more and more people that takes one back in time to Jesus’s death.

The Lutheran missionary model of evangelistic circulation can be understood in somewhat similar terms. The Lutheran missionaries were, at least at an institutional level, less concerned with repeating the original moment of salvation than they were with the process of how one moves toward the next listener of the Christian message. While Christian circulation is ultimately imagined as circular—from heaven to earth and back again—much of the missionary emphasis in the twentieth century at least was on the expansion of the biblical message across the globe. In this circulatory imaginary, the message and the means of its circulation could sometimes be conflated.

The Great Commission, as described in Matthew 28:16–20, refers to Jesus’s commandment to his disciples “to go and make disciples of all nations.” Printed signs with this passage are a common sight on missionary compounds in Papua New Guinea, and the Great Commission is usually referred to as the foundation for mission work. Lutherans seem to have read the Great Commission at times in quite material terms, seeing in the movement of personnel and reading material a sacred project in itself. Being able to place an outpost of Lutheranism in the highlands of New Guinea, an area considered by Europeans and some contemporary Papua New Guineans to be the “last place” to be in touch with modernity, became part of an eschatological narrative that could usher in the end. And an airplane would help them do it that much faster.

Money sent by Christians from Germany, Australia, or the United States was converted into modes of transportation through which missionaries encountered heathens and through which some subset of those converts went on to become evangelists themselves. They made iconic linkages between the technologies of circulation and the people reached through them—the quick and light filled planes made for quick and light souls destined for a celestial eternity. In their most grandiose rhetorical moments, appeals for money from home churches for things like radios and airplanes could be directly linked up with the end of days, the fulfillment of Jesus’s commandment to go out to all the nations of the world (I will discuss one such example toward the end of the article). It was a radical transformation of money to media of circulation to Christians, and likewise a radical expansion of the space-time of the Lutheran mission to eventually encompass what they would consider God’s creation as a whole.

As much as the Lutherans and other missions of New Guinea treated the translation and propagation of the Bible as a core task, they also spent considerable time developing technologies for sending books and speakers out. Material circulation itself was a sign of Christianity. In that sense, while they were deeply concerned with the capacity to recontextualize the biblical message for the New Guinea communities they encountered, the capacity to get people and their recontextualized text artifacts into position around New Guinea seemed to be of almost equal concern. The concern with creating properly recontextualized tokens of biblical message typesFootnote ³ was sometimes overshadowed by the problem of simply moving such tokens around, whether artifactualized in printed material or spoken by the missionaries and evangelists walking, riding, and flying across New Guinea.

Munn’s theorization of Gawan exchange pivots on qualitative transformations of the objects transacted across different exchange spheres that create quantitative transformations of the space-time of the objects’ owners. Moving from canoe to kitomu, one moves from lesser to greater fame, smaller to more expansive spatiotemporal control. But the conversion of the value of souls linked iconically through similar transformations in the modes of circulation ultimately depends upon something beyond just a quantitative increase in space-time. The final transformation of souls as saved and eventually circulating into heaven depends in Christian eschatology on an obliteration of, or transcendence of, human space-time. The challenge for the Lutherans was how—semiotically speaking—to get their airplanes all the way up to heaven, sacralizing what had been up to that point a very nonsacred vehicle.

While Gawan participants in the kula were often in competition with others to secure access to particularly prized shell valuables and the fame that came with them, Gawans could nevertheless be somewhat secure in the sense that their exchange partners were also interested in the continued circulation of kula objects. That is, Munn did not theorize the problem of contested temporalities (outside of a culture-internal figure of the witch capable of contracting one’s space-time). However, the Lutherans had to engage with a number of other colonial actors whom they considered antagonistic to, or at the very least obstacles to, forms of Protestant Christian circulation, whether these were the neighboring Roman Catholic missionaries, colonial businessmen, or administrators. Because of this, Lutherans always faced the problem of other actors who refused to recognize the kinds of Christian circulation they were trying to create and who worked against an expansion of the Lutheran mission’s space-time into its final, heavenly form. In these contestations over the forms of Christian circulation and Lutheran mission space-time, Lutherans had to face the possibility that the biblical and heavenward aviation paths that they were creating would collapse, reduced down to a very earthly domain of pecuniary or nationalist desires—a human sense of fame at odds with the ultimate Christian conversion of the world into the space-time of heaven. In the following sections I trace out how the Lutherans defined their evangelism in terms of movement, how transformations in modes of movement created multiple overlapping space-times oriented toward the heavenly transcendence of space-time, and how these space-times sometimes fell to earthly pieces.

Christian Movements

When the first German Lutheran mission started operating in colonial New Guinea in 1886,Footnote ⁴ the missionaries encountered a landscape that seemed impenetrable for a number of reasons. Not only was colonial New Guinea the most linguistically diverse place on the earth, but it was also a mountainous, densely forested tropical island. Immediately, problems of communication and circulation—in both the linguistic and transport senses—became overriding concerns. Lutheran missionary texts depict non-Christians as immobile, stuck to defensive positions on the earth, in contrast to the missionaries’ own urge for movement and evangelistic expansion.

Not only was movement equated with Christian salvation, but the speed and quality of movement mattered too. In a short history of transportation networks in the mission, one Lutheran missionary wrote about the quickening pulse of Christian life that went with an expanded road network:

In colonial Lutheran thinking, “heathen” bodies that had been rooted to one small section of a vast mountain forest are transformed through Christian kinds of movement along the roads that the Lutherans were themselves constructing with their axes, knives, and shovels. The loss of fear (of the devil, of one’s neighbors) that Lutherans believed would grow with conversion was visible in the greater range of movement of the Christian inhabitants of the convert villages. While the state of one’s soul can be difficult to gauge, the capacity for movement seemed to be a sure footing on which to judge the mission’s work. Regardless of the kinds of precolonial walking that New Guinean people engaged in (e.g., men hunting in far-off, uninhabited mountain areas), Lutherans thought of movement across the territory as the sign of newfound Christian faith.

The most valuable kind of Christian movement of local people from the Lutheran perspective was the training and sending of “native evangelists.” These native evangelists were New Guineans who, after their own conversions, would become missionaries to other communities in which the Lutheran mission was just starting to work. With a constant shortage of European missionaries to staff all the different areas that Lutherans hoped to enter, native evangelists did much of the pioneering work of contacting and establishing mission buildings in newly approached communities. The native evangelists ran and taught Lutheran primary schools, led weekly church services, and identified and prepared candidates for baptism. They were also responsible for teaching local people the church lingua franca used in that area (one of several coastal languages from either the Papuan or Austronesian language families). On their twice-yearly visits the European missionaries would check on schools, baptize and give communion to those who were official church members, and try to solve any church-related problems the native evangelists were having. But unless one lived near the mission station at which the European missionary lived, a local New Guinean church member would rarely see that man.

The structure of the Lutheran mission thus depended on finding a few candidates from each newly engaged area to become evangelists for further incursions into more remote parts of the colony. Native evangelists would first have to travel to the evangelist schools at the coast, and then head inland into territory that they themselves would often be completely unfamiliar with. The mission could not operate if these young men (and sometimes their wives) could not move around the country.

“Aviation in Search of Souls”

In addition to focusing on the presence or absence of movement, missionary attention to the qualities of movement increased when the mission started to use airplanes in 1935. A number of different qualities of travel, and the subsequent conversions that were attributed to this travel, became overt topics of discussion for missionaries and other colonial actors. Of greatest importance was the fact that airplanes were obviously quicker than horses, canoes, boats, or humans walking on foot. The radical change in travel times that the airplanes afforded made it possible for the mission to expand into the recently opened New Guinea highlands. Without the use of airplanes, a missionary and dozens of local people working as carriers would need three weeks to walk from the coast to the highlands. With the use of an airplane, they could make the same trip—bringing even more cargo—in just over an hour.Footnote ⁷

As the Lutherans themselves often noted, they were learning about aviation from men working in the nearby Wau and Bulolo gold fields, where much of the early global history of civil aviation was made (Sinclair Reference Sinclair1978). In fact, the statistics about transport times from the larger airplanes working out of Wau and Bulolo are even more astounding. According to one gold miner, when parts for a wireless station were transported from the coast to Wau, “we started with 300 native boys carrying the gear over trackless country on a journey which occupied six weeks. Recently a large dredge weighing 4000 tonsFootnote ⁸ was carried in sections over the same country by air. The trip occupied 35 minutes” (The ‘Reach’ of Teleradio 1938, 13). Air travel seemed to erase the mountains and forests that had been until this point one of the most consequential features of working in New Guinea, whether as a missionary or a gold miner.

A second characteristic of airplane travel in addition to speed was the sense of lightness, both as the opposite of heaviness and as the opposite of darkness. Airplanes used in Lutheran evangelism flew above the steep mountain walls and rainforests. Not only were the planes associated with the sun-filled heavens, but also they were importantly above the heat of the valleys (Bergmann, Reference Bergmannn.d., 55) or the muck of the rainforest roads that had been so painstakingly built over the years. “The time was ripe to leave the muddy and leech infested mountain paths and to use wings.”Footnote ⁹ Slow, muddy paths to the unconverted were transformed into fast, sunlit airplanes capable of creating more and better Christians.

The original pioneer Lutheran missionary to New Guinea, Johannes Flierl, first brought up the possibility of using airplanes in evangelism with his assembled missionaries during their annual conference in early 1928 (Theile). In his original pitch, Flierl emphasized the speed and smoothness of air travel. According to Lutheran accounts, the very idea of air travel seemed to play with time, turning an old man young again.

Flierl was making an argument for aviation being a mode of transportation that had already transcended the human world and was free of any kind of restriction, whether geological (the spoon-drains and water tables), governmental (the traffic police), or social (the dogs and pedestrians). Flierl’s image of aviation was deeply mistaken, of course. Managing and understanding geology, civil administration, and social relations are all required for regular air traffic. Once the mission started depending on its plane in the mid-1930s, new stations were built only in areas adjacent to government airstrips or on level enough sections of land on which airstrips could be constructed.Footnote ¹¹ They had to constantly maintain, and the Department of Civil Aviation had to constantly inspect, the airstrips in order to ensure proper drainage for their continuing “aerodrome” licenses. Missionaries had to ask their New Guinea congregations to help clear and level ground for airstrips.

Nevertheless, it is clear from this account that Flierl spoke of aviation as a space of great freedom of movement, almost entirely untethered from the ground and the earthly concerns that one has to take notice of while moving upon it. Flierl described an idealized form of aviation that has been sacralized. He described not just a form of circulation free from the muck and mud of the roads on which they had been walking up until that point. He described a form of circulation that was divorced from secular or earthly relations entirely, a space-time organized by the eventual heavenward movement all Christians are supposed to take at the end of history. It took seven years from this initial inspiration from Senior Flierl to get to the first “aeroplane” delivered on February 19, 1935: an all-metal Junkers F/13 christened the Papua and flown by a German ace from the First World War, Fritz Loose.Footnote ¹²

As Munn anticipates, this transformation in the qualities of movement also produced a transformation in the space and time in which that movement occurred. Airplanes transformed the space-time of evangelism in ways that seem not to have been true of canoes, boats, axes, knives, or shovels. Even in a place that was derided for not being in the Iron Age, it was air travel more than steel axes that seem to have created a set of questions about the temporality of Christian evangelism in a colonial context. Some of this has to do with the fact that it was a novel form of transportation for the European missionaries as well as for the local people. Although airplanes had been used in the First World War as a military technology, civil aviation was still in its infancy when Flierl first proposed using an airplane for evangelism. Lutherans were able to change their concept of what the mission could be when they started to use airplanes in their work.Footnote ¹³

This became particularly salient as the Lutherans in the early 1930s were starting a fierce competition with the Roman Catholic and Seventh Day Adventist missions for souls in the highlands of New Guinea, an area which European colonizers had only recently encountered and which seemed to have a population of perhaps half a million. Sometimes referred to as the “gold rush for souls,” the competition among different missions in the 1930s for access to the highlands populations was intense. In the earlier-missionized coastal areas of Papua and New Guinea, colonial administrators had helped to define missionary spheres of influence—rough boundaries dividing up colonial spaces among various missions. While there were always accusations of “flock stealing” at the edges of these denominational zones, these gentlemen’s agreements about mission regions had largely kept such complaints and fights to a minimum.

However, the colonial administration had decided to change tactics when they opened up the highlands for missionaries. They refused to create spheres of influence and in fact hoped to spark missionary competition. The goal was to pacify and civilize the highlanders as quickly as possible. Using a kind of market logic, the colonial administration hoped that close competition rather than regional monopolies would spur the missions to work at a more rapid pace. Since the missions provided many of the services that are usually associated with states—schools, medical outposts, economic opportunities—the pace of mission work was considered especially important to the colonial administration’s plans for “civilization.”

Although administrators, planters, and mineral prospectors at the time laughed at the technological one-upsmanship and literal sprints to new territories involved in the Lutheran-Catholic competition for the highlands, the missions were playing by the administration’s rules when they engaged in this heated race for congregants. And both missions took the challenge seriously.Footnote ¹⁴ For the Lutherans, the race to the highlands was a crucial part of their capacity to reimagine their mission on a vast scale: not just a regional mission, the Lutherans could envision extending across the colony as a whole and keeping pace with the Catholics. And while Flierl pitched the aviation program to his fellow missionaries in terms of light, fast freedom of movement, former missionaries then in Germany were also encouraging Flierl to start using airplanes because of the rumor that Catholics would soon start doing so. The future of Protestantism in New Guinea seemed to be on the line. In an annual report for 1927, Flierl writes:

The Board of Foreign Missions of the American Lutheran Church that supported some of the New Guinea work also considered the Catholic competition as the crucial reason for supporting the purchase of a plane: “From various sources, we are told that the Catholics are going to missionize with planes in [New Guinea]. That would give them a big lead over us.”Footnote ¹⁶

Yet the development of the aviation program required a massive extension of the Lutherans’ work: raising the money for the plane and pilot, building and maintaining airstrips across the colony, and developing a radio communication network that linked planes and people. While the aviation program created a novel formation and extension of space-time, the mission also had to regiment the secular and sacred aspects of the space-time in which an aviation-supported mission worked. Three different forms of time came into relation with one another through the use of airplanes: infrastructural time, colonial time, and Christian time. The program could proceed as long as sacred time dominated, but at the start of World War II this framing could not be maintained. It was a continual struggle to try to maintain Flierl’s sacred image of heavenly aviation against the accusations that Lutherans used airplanes in a ridiculous contest for souls, an avaricious claim to native land and labor, or a nationalist drive for German supremacy. When these different forms of space-time did collapse into one another, the aviation program ran into immediate problems. In the next sections I outline these different spatiotemporal formations and their eventual collapse as the Second World War broke out.

Infrastructural Space-Time

The use of airplanes in the mission’s work meant that it needed to add another layer to its already vast and complex transportation-communication network. In particular, the advent of “aviation for souls” required the purchase of what were then called tele-radios. These were two-way radios available for both receiving and sending transmissions, something akin to 100-pound walkie-talkies that initially were powered by a “native” pedaling a bicycle-like device.Footnote ¹⁷ Newspaper reports from the time describe the revolution brought on by these radios, reducing the feeling of isolation and increasing a sense of measurable distance from somewhere, at least from somewhere that was within the 400-mile range of the radio. Contemporary accounts emphasize the ways that tele-radios allowed people in remote spaces to be located at a particular spot, rather than just “in the wilds.” Newspaper articles detail the many ways in which people in need were able to be located by ship or by airplane because they had a tele-radio set: injured people could be picked up and patrols in remote New Guinea could radio in for more supplies (“Radio Telephony for Planes” 1938, 5). Tele-radios meant that one was not simply lost.

In the mid-1930s, it was still quite novel to have radios in airplanes, and civil aviation in Australia and New Guinea was just starting to use them regularly. Australian newspapers reported on the great progress made in 1937: almost every major “aerodrome” in the capital cities now had a radio, and all passenger-carrying planes did (“Radio Telephony for Planes” 1938, 5). In 1937, after the Papua started flying regular runs into the highlands, the Lutheran mission was granted licenses for two tele-radio transceiver sets, one at the Lae airstrip where the Papua was housed and one at the original Finschhafen headquarters of the mission.Footnote ¹⁸

Locating oneself—as well as the planes—was an important part of how the radios transformed the space and time in which missionization took place. Missionaries listening in for flight schedules could align their watches and clocks to standard time, since the Lutherans would broadcast from Lae or Finschhafen at specific times of day.Footnote ²⁰ Planes traveling overhead were not just somewhere in space, but locatable relative to the ground through radio transmissions broadcasting their position. Flierl thought of airplanes as allowing one a radical freedom of movement, yet the infrastructural innovation of a radio-enabled airplane was to allow planes to be located in regimentable time and navigable space, rather than just in a vast, unbroken expanse of heavens.

In his memoir, Missionary Wilhelm Bergmann writes about the weeks when the Papua was just starting to be used for mission business. His very business-like account of the novel transportation system is noteworthy for its attention to exactly this sense of locatability. Bergmann seems to have been most impressed by the speed with which mission business could be conducted, since his memories of the plane are largely prose itineraries:

His memories of the plane are of the speedy movement across dates, times, and places. Rather than a strict focus on the phenomenological experience of speed as such (cf. Schivelbusch Reference Schivelbusch1977), Bergmann memorializes his ability to get the mission’s business done at a novel pace.

Bergmann delights in his capacity to locate himself and the plane relative to the ground. This was not always guaranteed. Sinclair (Reference Sinclair1978, 34–35) describes the first planes trying to land at the Wau airfield near the gold mining operations in which miners who had walked the tracks up to Wau many times could not orient themselves when in the air. It took the first pilot several attempts to locate the Wau airfield after it was constructed, since no aerial maps or routes existed yet. But even with heavy cloud cover, Bergmann boasts of his orientation in the plane. During one early, cloudy flight on the Papua he ends up guiding Pilot Loose, then still quite new to New Guinea: “I told the pilot that he could fly down to the valley. He said a few times: Is that certain? I said yes. He was totally dependent on me because he did not know the area” (Bergmann, Reference Bergmannn.d., 56).

Being able to locate someone not just “in the wilds” but at a particular place and time at a destination airstrip or supply drop site also meant that one could communicate with those who were so located. That is, airplanes during the early days of New Guinea civil aviation were as much elements in communication networks as they were elements in transportation networks. An early reference to the Lutheran mission’s use of airplanes for their highlands aviation says in fact that the plane was “to be used in maintaining communication between the different Lutheran stations” (“Mission Aeroplane” 1938, 6). The airplanes were extremely expensive postal services linking people across thousands of miles: “Previously it took three months for letters to arrive from home, for in some cases missionaries, their wives and children were thousands of miles apart. Now, however, an aeroplane left the ship [on which the mail was carried from overseas] and mails arrived at their destination two and a half hours later. The missionary was able to reply immediately, as the ‘plane waited for mails” (“Aeroplanes in Mission Work” 1939, 6).Footnote ²¹

Airplanes and radios combined to create an infrastructural space-time, in which particular persons and machines could be located at particular places and moments. Medical emergencies or provisions emergencies could be handled swiftly. Relatives could communicate with one another at a much quicker pace. The business of missionization was able to move smoothly, or at least more smoothly and quickly than it had in the past. The missionaries stationed in the highlands were no longer just “in the wilds” and out of reach, but part of a communications-transportation network linking the disparate corners of the mission as a whole.

Colonial Space-Time

The infrastructural organization of the radio network for the aviation service is interconnected with the colonial framework in which sensibilities of isolation and Pacific wilds could flourish. Not just with pith helmets and native-driven radios, the radios and aviation program exacerbated the feeling of colonial penetration that suffuses the Lutheran mission thinking about roads and communication networks. Yet they encountered these “souls” using the tools that they recognized as the tools of the gold rush in the nearby Wau and Bulolo areas, where in 1932 more commercial air freight was transported between the coast and Wau/Bulolo than all the air freight in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany combined (Sinclair Reference Sinclair1978). “Aviation was introduced [into New Guinea] in search of gold. Should this also be the answer to the problem of Christianizing the mass of people in the highland? Aviation in search of souls? The great old man of the Mission Johann Flierl shortly before he retired wrote a letter to his Home Board: ‘One day we will have to fly like homing pigeons to their cote. The men in search of gold are now trying it out for us.’”Footnote ²²

The men of the mission were going to help make colonial modernity happen by spreading the techniques of colonial resource extraction. But the missionaries were concerned about using such a secular, business-related technology in evangelism. As early as his 1927 report, Flierl wrote that some people in Germany considered the use of airplanes in aviation “absurd” and that at one point he himself had thought it “atrocious.”Footnote ²³

While these qualms were never fully overcome, the drive to get to the highlands was so intense that they could be diminished enough to get the aviation program going. Colonial actors of all kinds were rushing into the highlands, imagining this new territory as one of the last places to be brought under European control and thus the last place in which colonizers can experience that peculiar sublime feeling of perfect superiority. The administrator of New Guinea, Brigadier-General W. R. McNicoll, wrote about an airplane flight from the relatively built-up Wau/Bulolo area at the gold fields into the highlands: “A direct flight westward of two hours transported us from electric light and power, wireless, mammoth dredges, cars and lorries and picture shows, to a primitive people who had seen not more than a dozen white men” (quoted in Sinclair Reference Sinclair1978, 216). The constant refrain was that missionaries, miners, and businessmen had to “push inland” as quickly as they could. And the only way to do that was with the airplane.

Airplanes figure prominently in the first patrols into the highlands, where pilots dropped supplies for the patrol parties, and one of the first things that the prospecting Leahy brothers did on reaching the Mt. Hagen region is clear an airstrip for a plane to land. The sudden interruption of the sound of an airplane’s engine in the lives of local highlands people caused panic the first few times one landed (Connolly and Anderson Reference Connolly1988). For the colonial actors who made their way up from the coast, the airplane’s intervention in the highlands was the perfect visual and aural statement of the abrupt arrival of colonial modernity. By 1934 the Lutherans and Catholics were both chartering planes to scout for potential mission stations and subsequently to bring up building supplies.

The push inland was seemingly a universal obsession among the colonial classes. Missionaries were, by administration design, locked in competition for congregations. Gold prospectors were hoping to find another lode as rich as the discoveries near Wau and Bulolo. Planters were imagining “a second Kenya” in which they could take over vast swaths of land for cash crops and ranching (“New Guinea Patrol Back …” 1939, 4). Not only do the gold prospectors liken the missionaries’ desperate searches for souls to their desperate searches for plots of land, but after the Lutherans get their own plane the planters complain that the missionaries are simply too involved in business all together. Because in addition to using the Papua for communication, the Lutherans used the Papua to supply the small trade stores that they built on each of their European-staffed mission stations, and secular businessmen felt that the missions were getting unfair access to this new crop of potential customers. The question of “missions and trade” came up throughout the 1930s.Footnote ²⁴ While the push inland was a Christian move for the Lutherans and Catholics, it was also framed as a timed race to establish “market share” in one of the last places for European experiences of discovery and colonial “first contact.”

Could aviation be a Christian project if it seemed to only be a tool for gold miners and trade store managers trying to colonize what they thought of as one of the last uncontacted spots in the world? For the missionaries themselves during their deliberations about using aircraft, potential objections to the use of airplanes in evangelism could be partially resolved by moving the conversation into a Christian key, throwing it into God’s lap, so to speak. If it was God’s will, then money would be found and bureaucratic application processes would be successful. If not, then no plane would appear. But even when the Papua did appear in 1935, the missionaries had to constantly justify the great expense of the plane, trying to move the plane from infrastructural or colonial temporalities into an appropriately Christian one. They did so by emphasizing its place in a sacred circulation.

Christian Time

The Australia-based leader of the Lutheran mission, Otto Theile, titled a speech about the quest for a mission airplane “A Miracle before Our Eyes,” placing the work of the aviation program firmly within the sacred work of the mission, particularly given the opening up of the highlands to Christian evangelism.

Echoing the Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations,” geographic spread is a sacred project. Aviation for souls was not just an improvement in the communication network, and not just an increase in the speed with which those many masses of highlands souls could be encountered. The plane filled missionaries (and supposedly New Guinean Christians) with deep emotion and heartfelt offerings that Theile describes in operatic terms: “Missionaries and natives sacrificed of their possession to try and make it possible to acquire a plane. It is deeply touching to see on the list, how missionaries sacrificed a whole year’s salary and it is pathetic to hear how the villagers at home and the Christian laborers on the plantations and on the goldfield brought all the cash they had in order to help along the cause” (Theile, 7–8). The extent to which the airplane was considered a sacred project is also evident from the fact that the archive of the Lutheran Church in Papua New Guinea has retained a file with some of the original receipts noting the individual contributions that the missionaries made to help purchase the plane. Even though the mission had other major donation drives related to raising funds for earlier modes of transportation (e.g., ships), receipts of this sort were not usually archived.Footnote ²⁵

There was thus a sense that the aviation program was able to create a particular kind of converted person—someone who was truly able to move about. Not just across the rainforest landscape of New Guinea, but above it, surpassing it. In other words, there was a sense in which God was all the more present in an evangelistic project that was able to literally transcend the dirt and earth in a world historical event.

The missionaries hoped to resolve the contradictions and conflicts among the different temporalities at issue in the aviation program: a bureaucratic and infrastructural space-time of management, a secular space-time of rushed competition and capitalism, and a Christian space-time of Protestant salvation and freedom. Having an airplane would help create that ultimate movement, the final reconciliation of God and man that is the Christian culmination of time, as the missionary Hanselmann puts it in an extraordinary plea for funds to the Auxiliary Society of the American Lutheran Church’s Board of Foreign Missions.

Hanselmann’s appeal for funds for the aviation program moves from the infrastructural and colonial engagement with New Guinea missionization into a grand salvational narrative that heralds the overcoming of all human-centered space-time. Technology and manpower to create the landing grounds and links among them define the request. A colonial spatiotemporal framework pits New Guinea as the last remote place on earth, after which Western contact will have been achieved everywhere. But then, as if movement itself was the core of the Great Commission, the capacity to reach those last corners in the highlands of New Guinea becomes the catalyst for the obliteration of time and space as humans have known it. It is an operatic appeal for funds that encapsulates the Lutheran sacralization of aviation. The Papua can be sacred if it can transcend the infrastructural and colonial contexts to reach toward heaven.

The successful combination of these different spatiotemporal formations brought about an important event in history that was to foreshadow an ultimate end of history: “The Lutheran mission was, as far as it is known, the first mission in the world to use aviation as a tool in spreading the gospel. The ‘Papua’ had made history.”Footnote ²⁷ The nitty-gritty of geolocation via radio and the accusations of partaking in a gold rush for souls could be handled so long as aviation brought all the freedom from the terrestrial and the erasure of time when “then comes the end.” Here, finally, the comparison with Munn’s concept of space-time extension breaks down, as these Christians do not just expand their reach, but in doing so hope to achieve the radical conversion of human space and time into a promised heavenly form. This requires a shift from the human to the divine. The mission will ideally stop being able to create any kind of space-time at all, as the conversion into a New Heaven and New Earth heralds a space-time fully from the God’s-eye view.

The Menace from the Sky

The Lutherans still had to live in the space-time between their present and the promised end times that Hanselmann alluded to in his funding appeal. Without the final radical conversion of the aviation program into an eschatological conclusion, there remained an ongoing threat that the Papua would never be able to transcend its earthly origins. The connection between God and technological progress is constantly threatening to pull apart these three different modes of time that the missionaries hope can combine into a heavenly haul of souls. What happens to God when he is made accessible by machine? For one thing, other objects connected with those same machines may be conflated with the mission project. This fear is made quite explicit in a 1942 cover image from the Pacific Island Monthly magazine during the Second World War captioned “Menace from the Sky.”

The menace from the sky—bombs being dropped on New Guinea and other Pacific territories—seemed particularly menacing from the European perspective because these Europeans imagined Pacific Islanders to have intimately connected sky, God, and airplane. The text on the cover reads “For 150 years, the native peoples of the Pacific Islands have been taught by Europeans to look into the sky for hope and salvation. Today, their world is crashing around them. The Europeans are fighting for their lives: while out of the sky come only terror, destruction, and death. The outlook is black—but it is the darkness before the dawn” (see fig. 1). Note that airplanes had only been around for a few decades. The 150 years referred to here is the 150-year history of missionary operations in the Pacific. The cover image and text present a direct conflation of the space and time of God with the space and time of the Allied and Axis bombers.

Figure 1.

The March 16, 1942, cover of Pacific Islands Monthly linking God and airplanes. The text on the cover reads: “menace in the sky. For 150 years, the native peoples of the Pacific Islands have been taught by Europeans to look into the sky for hope and salvation. Today, their world is crashing around them. The Europeans are fighting for their lives; while out of the sky come only terror, destruction, and death. The outlook is black—but it is the darkness before the dawn.” (Pacific Islands Monthly, vol. 12, no. 8, National Library of Australia, nla.obj-310385031.)

We can turn a bit farther from the Pacific to see an even more explicit use of aviation technology to make God accessible. At roughly the same time that the Lutherans were making history in the use of aviation to spread the gospel, agitprop air squadrons were criss-crossing the rural Soviet countryside in order to prove to naïve Russian peasants that God did not exist (Palmer Reference Palmer2006). In what were called “aerial baptisms,” peasants were taken up in Soviet planes in order to prove to them that neither God nor angels were visible in the skies as the priests had told them. These baptisms into atheist technological progress both depended upon and subverted the Christian association of skies with God. Peasants were even presented with Stalin-centric Soviet postcards after their atheist baptisms by air in lieu of the miniature icons that Orthodox priests would give to those recently baptized by water (Palmer Reference Palmer2006, 242).

The menace from the skies and the aerial baptisms at once link aviation and Christianity, and sever that link. In the case of the bombs raining down on the Pacific Islands, this is an uninvited consequence of the war; in the Soviet agitprop flights this was the stated goal. The Lutheran mission linked speed, lightness, and heavens together in a way that was immediately recognizable to missionaries and mission supporters long used to stories of muck and mud. Once the Roman Catholic threat in the highlands appears, the mission raised funds for the Papua even though it was roughly equivalent to the entire yearly operating budget of the mission at the time. But the question of speed and lightness—the capacity to fly over the land in an instant—also made aviation for souls suspect. Secular observers at the time thought of the use of airplanes by missions as the height of greed—missionaries flying over the land consuming souls as if in a Christian gold rush.

As the time grew closer and closer to the outbreak of the war in Europe, the Lutheran airplane played a crucial role in a series of accusations against the Lutheran missionaries. Rumors swirled that German Lutherans were not only Nazi party members, but were teaching New Guineans to salute Hitler and, if necessary, defend the Fatherland.Footnote ²⁸ The infrastructure of the aviation program now seemed to be the ingredients of a propaganda machine much speculated on in Australian newspapers: “The Lutherans had a secret radio transmitter, a miniature factory for production of swastika flags and armbands, and always maintained excellent aerodromes” (“Clash Likely …” 1942, 1). The Lutherans’ ability to bring in trade goods by airplane likewise became the basis of rumors: “Among the presents sent out to the natives to win their sympathy were cheap trade mirrors with a picture of Hitler on the back” (Folkard Reference Folkard1942). One Australian brigadier-general was quoted as saying that the Lutherans had 500 airplanes ready for use in the war, not just the lonely Papua (“New Guinea Missions” 1939, 22). New Guinea aviation expert Ian Grabowsky knew that the Lutherans had only one plane, but he nonetheless worried that with the right pilot and payload it might be used to bomb all the Australian planes in New Guinea “in half an hour” (Sinclair Reference Sinclair1978, 222). Well before the war broke out, Lutherans in Australia had to try to refute claims of a German military force being readied under a New Guinea Lutheran missionary disguise (“Report Refuted” 1936, 6).

In the end, the Papua had an even stranger role to play, taking part in neither a heavenly haul of souls nor a German nationalist attack on Australia. When war in Europe was declared in 1939, the two German laymen employees who at that point piloted and took care of the Papua took off for the highlands in the hopes of escaping over the border into Dutch New Guinea. At one point during a refueling stop, an Australian colonial officer held them and tried to get them to swear an oath of neutrality, which they refused to do. Realizing that the men had just onboarded enough fuel to make it over the border, the Australian had them sign instead an oath saying that they would not use their fuel to escape. The men signed the oath, flew to another Lutheran station, dumped out the fuel about which the oath had been made, filled the engine’s tanks with new fuel, and made a desperate flight over the border to Merauke in Dutch New Guinea.Footnote ²⁹ From there they traveled by boat to Japan, crossed into the Soviet Union, rode the Trans-Siberian Railway into Germany, and joined the Luftwaffe (Sinclair Reference Sinclair1978, 222). The Papua was never recovered, and the Lutheran aviation program had to start from scratch when, after the war, American Lutherans tried to reconstitute the vast mission program.