However, between 1900 and the 1920s, in the context of the institutionalization of a fieldwork-based professional ethnography, this publicly acknowledged symbiosis between missionary informant in the field and metropolitan theorist gradually broke down. While the Anglican priests Charles Elliot Fox (1878-1974) and Walter George Ivens (1871-1940), as well as the LMS missionaries William James Viritahitemauvai Saville (1873-1948) and Holmes, continued to publish in anthropological journals until the 1930s, scientific contributions from anglophone missionaries declined though they remained acknowledged experts in the linguistic field. Before and during this period, missionary activity in Oceania was in transition from the exuberance of the era of early conversions to the routine work of educating and guiding converts — less glamorous and more frustrating than pioneer work. Some of the perceived faults in converts, seen originally as manifestations of heathenism, persisted. Missionaries began to question whether such faults were also the result of 'inferiority' or 'backwardness'. In times of frustration, they tended to endorse what had long been a widespread popular sentiment — that supposed 'backwardness' and 'inferiority' were inherently physical qualities, deemed either immutable or capable of change only in the very long term, rather than attributes of the presence or absence of heathenism. Such distinctions were often couched in terms of the varying levels of progress achieved by different 'races'.

A belief in the existence of separate, physically discrete races was held by many writers, secular and religious, over most of the period under discussion. Indeed, the term race was embedded in contemporary discourses, its meaning ranging from a generally benign descriptor of physical human appearance to a highly value-laden and proscriptive demarcator of unbridgeable human difference. Missionaries tended to use race in something approaching the former sense. This paper investigates some of the nuances in their understanding of human difference. Such beliefs were rooted in their Christianity and yet partook of widely-held ideas originating in contemporary scientific or legal circles.

Racialist assumptions informed the gloomy evolutionism which saw the Methodist John Burton (1875-1970) equate long-Christian Fijians with 'adolescents' who are 'proverbially difficult to manage' and 'make unreasonable demands on patience and resource' (1926:3). His colleague William Bennett (1914:475-6) found teaching Fijians 'a slow and tedious process' and complained of a 'half-knowledge … ready to beget a loud-mouthed boasting'. Yet Bennett held such views in tension with his confidence that 'a native Church indigenous to the soil, withal so strong and stable in Christian character that it can stand of itself', was being developed. Another Methodist, John Francis Goldie (1870-1954), referred to the people of Roviana in the western Solomon Islands as having recently been 'Stone Age savages' (1927:4). But earlier he also described his weekly class, listing each man by name (1914:574-6): one was 'a living epistle, a monument of God's power to save'; another was Goldie's constant and valued assistant. Goldie and Bennett knew and respected individual Islanders. Evolutionist language, normalized in popular discourse, slipped into their writing and yet was tempered by personal experience of individual Islanders which moderated any racial generalizations and confirmed their underlying Christian belief in human similitude. Just as missionary anthropologists tended to subvert the developmentalist paradigm by insisting on the discrete nature of their subjects and resisted their placement within a rigid theoretical framework, so many of the writers in the Methodist centenary volume (1914), edited by James Colwell (1860-1930), emphasized the skills, the positive attributes, and the great progress achieved by the people with whom they worked. The celebratory nature of the volume accentuated this tendency: these 'darkness-to-light' stories, rooted within the great narrative tradition of Christian progress, generally eschewed evolutionary language. Any overt or tacit acceptance of social evolutionism based on biological or racial presuppositions remained interwoven with descriptions of particular societies and individuals with unique value and potentiality in the sight of God. The trajectory envisaged for them was a rather different developmental path, from 'heathen darkness' to the 'light' of Christianity, through which they could realize their human potential in this life and have salvation in the next.

The concurrent acceptance within missionary and church circles of varying, even antithetical, discourses about human beings can be seen in two 'Study Circle books' on the Pacific Islands: John Burton's The Call of the Pacific (1912) and Frank Paton's The Kingdom of the Pacific (1913).^[6] Both were designed to instruct Protestant congregations in Britain and Australia about missionary endeavours in the Pacific Islands and to foster their financial and moral support or, as Burton (1912:1) put it, 'to set forth … the great needs which still clamour from the Isles of the Seas'. Yet there are some distinct differences between the two books, unremarked at the time in reviews or advertisements — which may show how common it was for apparently divergent discourses and vocabulary to be used in tandem. Burton's work incorporated more strident social evolutionist language and concepts than was usual in missionary texts. He ranked Islanders according to well-established stereotypes. Of Fijians, he commented:

Burton's relative lack of confidence in the abilities of Islanders and his readiness to use normalized evolutionist judgements about them must be seen against his personal experience. He had served as a missionary in the Pacific region for ten years but worked mostly with indentured Indians in the Rewa area of Viti Levu in Fiji, though he was involved in industrial training schemes for Fijian boys. What he lacked was any personal knowledge of Fijian village communities and his limited familiarity with the Fijian chiefly system left him unimpressed.^[7] In writing The Call of the Pacific, Burton relied on the accounts of secular writers and other missionaries; this lent a degree of detachment and a somewhat theoretical air to his writing. The personal did not complicate his theoretical hierarchies.

By contrast, Frank Paton (1870-1938) had lifelong experience of Islanders. Born and brought up on his father's mission station in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), he returned there after education in Australia and Europe as a missionary in his own right for several years. His personal appreciation of certain Islanders was such that he ended his earlier book about his years on Tanna with the words (1903:311): 'We may travel far afield in the providence of God, but we shall never meet with nobler or more Christlike men than Lomai and his brave fellow teachers. They are heroes, every one of them, God's Heroes'. Any ranking of Islanders, such as Burton's which put New Hebrideans near the bottom of an evolutionary hierarchy, offended Paton's childhood experiences and most that had come after it.

Accordingly, The Kingdom in the Pacific, though published only a year after Burton's book, used different language and arguments. Paton (1913:2-3) did not hesitate to expound on the 'evils' of the pre-Christian Pacific Islands, cannibalism, war, and widow-strangling, and like most other missionary commentators saw this 'depravity' as induced by the thraldom of pagan religion. But the relatively unsophisticated lifeways of Pacific Islanders were attributed to geographic isolation rather than an inherent lack of ability. He employed a discourse of Christian humanism which was universalist in its assumption of human value, emphasized economic and geographic explanations for differing levels of human development, and stressed European responsibility for aiding human progress in the Pacific region. Burton (1912:299), while regarding independent indigenous churches as the ultimate aim of missionary endeavour, believed that 'these newly-won people require the greatest care in treatment … we must not force their growth'. Paton (1913:76) envisaged the development of indigenous churches with a 'strong native ministry, composed of men and women who are filled with faith' as a closer reality.