How I Found a Faith That Doesn’t Insult My Ancestors

MY ANCESTORS ARE the Indigenous people of the Samoan Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The island chain is now separated by its colonial legacies: At one point, Germany and New Zealand controlled what is now the Independent State of Samoa, and the United States remains in territorial control of American Samoa.

The consequences of that history forced me to turn inward and clearly hear the lamentations of my ancestors. I think many Indigenous people with similar colonial wounds would agree we just want to heal from our pain. And the only appropriate remedy is justice.

But justice, in the Western sense, does not exist in the Samoan language. Samoans say amiotonu: Amio means “behavior,” and tonu means “right,” so amiotonu means “right behavior.” Indigenous Samoan ways of living and communicating with each other did not include Western concepts such as “yours” or “mine” and instead used terms such as “ours” — matou — and “everyone” — tatou. In short, “right behavior” is steered by how one interacts with the community and not just one’s own family or interests. You are accountable to everyone, and everyone is accountable to you. When an individual is wronged, the wrong is felt by the community.

My pursuit of amiotonu led me to liberation theology — a pathway that I believe was Jesus’ primary framework of ministry. Naturally, to do liberation work, one must cultivate a hermeneutic of suspicion. Unfortunately for me, most Samoans don’t like to stir the pot. In fact, many of my colleagues in ministry interpret my suspicions — either my theological suspicions or the activism and political views that grow out of those suspicions — as an offense to the opportunities given by the United States to Samoan people.

Many Samoans view the U.S. as sacrosanct, like the Bible or the church: holy, and not to be critically analyzed or challenged. The expectation is to simply acquiesce to the idealism of the American Dream and its so-called “greatness.” But I think that’s a great insult to my ancestors.

My grandfather, father, uncle, younger brothers, and I all served in the U.S. military, with tours of duty in places such as the Marshall Islands, Vietnam, Korea, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. My family’s history of sacrifice and legacy of service is not unique. Thousands of other Samoans have served, bled, and died for this country. Thousands more were victims of colonial diseases and European savagery from the late 18th to the mid-20th century. Their blood speaks to me from beyond the horizon.

I have no desire to comply with systems and structures that oppress us to the point where Samoan people become spectators of the demise of our culture, our language, and our land. This motivates me to pursue amiotonu in my role as a Samoan faifeau (literally, “someone who serves”), who pastors a church in the heart of Compton, Calif. I am conscious of the harsh realities my kinfolk must endure to survive from one day to the next. And I believe that what I am learning has broader implications for what it looks like for us to pursue right behavior as followers of Jesus.

Samoa's ‘third and fourth genders’

MY JOURNEY LED me to Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where I was the first full-time student with Samoan heritage. I arrived there after attending Kanana Fou Theological Seminary in American Samoa. Fresh from that very structured and regulated seminary, I was thrust into an academic institution that made room for multiple religious perspectives, cherishing and nurturing the intersectionality of all our experiences.

For two-and-a-half years at Union, I slowly realized that I was a mess. I wasn’t the top student as I had been in Samoan seminary. I didn’t have a traditional educational trajectory like many of my classmates: I was in the academy during my mid- to late-30s. I wasn’t sure if I had anything of substance to contribute to academia. But I did have the most profound classroom teacher and mentor in James Cone, the founder of Black liberation theology. He would remind me: “You have something to say.” He challenged me to look deeper into my own culture and ask: Who are the poor in Samoa? Who’s at the “bottom”? Who doesn’t have a voice in the circles that I had been privileged to navigate? I realized that I was at Union to write not for, but in solidarity with the fa’afafine and fa’afatama of Samoa.

Samoan fa’afafine — literally, “in the manner/ways of a woman” — and fa’afatama — literally, “in the manner/ways of a man” — are usually known by Western anthropologists as Samoa’s third and fourth genders. However, that description depends on who you ask in the community. The Samoan family is primarily structured according to one’s socioeconomic role, not by gender. And fa’afafine and fa’afatama are no exception. Samoan society and culture cherish the fluidity of Samoan fa’afafine and fa’afatama, which allows them to navigate spaces beyond European identity and gender markers. The history of fa’afafine and fa’afatama in Samoa predates the arrival of Christianity. However, the church and its fundamentalist doctrines have become the fa’afafine and fa’afatama community’s leading nemeses.

My master’s thesis was a critical analysis of the way the Samoan church exploits the labor of fa’afafine in the context of a shallow and hurtful theology that would see them banished to eternal hellfire. I interviewed fa’afafine serving in different capacities in the church. Some of them were churchgoers; others were clergy who had yet to unveil their true selves in fear of backlash from family members and the community, largely due to the church and its teachings.

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I wanted Samoans to feel the rejection that fa’afafine and fa’afatama faced within their own families, villages, and churches. I wanted my people to look inward. I wanted them to remember Jeanine Tuivaiki, a 19-year-old Samoan fa’afafine who died by an apparent suicide. To add insult to injury, the Sunday edition of the Samoa Observer published a photo of Tuivaiki’s dead body in the church where she was found, and they misgendered her. A spokesperson for the Samoa Fa’afafine Association said, they “ripped any remnants of humanity from her corpse. They dehumanized her.” I wanted to appeal to the hearts of Samoan people, especially the Samoan church.

I wanted them to revisit a precolonial time in Samoa when, as Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese, Samoa’s former prime minister, explained, we believed that the boundary between all living things was tapu — sacred — because of our shared divinity with the god Tagaloa. “This belief,” Tupua Tamasese continued, “underlined Samoan religious thought and practice and permeated every aspect of ancient Samoan life, i.e. how they worked the land, fished the sea, built their houses, engaged with each other, structured their society, celebrated life events (births, deaths, and marriages), joked with each other, flaunted their bodies, and their sexuality, and treated their ill.”

But in truth, I was naive in my yearning to be heard. I was too heady. I cited too many theologies that were from a Western lens. I was too concerned with people hearing me, and not the community I set out to write in solidarity with and for. I realized that I had neglected the truth of the gospel that underlies the stories of pain and suffering that fa’afafine and fa’afatama were sharing with me.

Well after I had written that thesis, Jesus’ words “Blessed are the poor in Spirit ... Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” became more coherent to me. My fa’afafine, fa’afatama, and queer and transgender Pacific Islander siblings embodied those words. The unstinted support queer and trans Pacific Islanders show for their own — even for those who align with toxic ideologies that perpetuate their invisibility — has been its own Sermon on the Mount enacted in drag.

Queer and trans Pacific Islanders preached healing and life on themselves despite the death that many self-righteous pastors in Samoan churches preached to them. Their hurt and pain is their story to tell. But many can bear witness to their contributions to Samoa and the world. Queer and trans Pacific Islanders are trusted community leaders, cultural weavers and custodians, parents, deacons, clergy, choir directors, mentors, and fierce fighters against injustice. Fa’afafine and fa’afatama are divine manifestations of God’s radical outpouring of love for those who are the least loved today.

What would true solidarity look like?

I eventually navigated toward the United Church of Christ (UCC) because it was a rowdy bunch of church folks who would say anything to antagonize hellfire-preaching Bible thumpers. I am now an ordained pastor of the Congregational Christian Church of Samoa with dual standing in the United Church of Christ. However, decolonization in progressive church spaces proved to be a surprisingly laborious task. How do you do decolonial work when folks already believe they have completed that task among themselves?

I discovered that many of the all-white churches I had attended or preached at had similar decolonial or justice ministries with curriculum centering advocacy for LGBTQ people, immigration reform, racial equity, and Indigenous sovereignty. Yet many of these ministries were only intellectual in nature. Their discussions were with their like-minded and like-skinned peers, parishioners, and neighbors, not with others outside of their normative spectrum. Colonization only works if the colonized are in the room. How do you decolonize without those same colonized people?

To complicate things further, the UCC itself has a legacy of colonialism that stems from the first missionaries of the London Missionary Society, the religious arm of the colonial horde. They too saw themselves as allies in an age of spiritual awakening, called by the Holy Spirit to bring the gospel to the “gentile savages” across the vast blue ocean — the moana, as we call it. Early missionaries were the 19th-century version of modern-day progressive Christians, folks purporting to ally with us without including us in the discussions of our own liberation.

The work of decolonization and liberation are exhausting forms of labor. The incessant barrage of efforts aimed at dismantling nonwhite and nonstraight progress can leave even the most tenacious people desolate and feeling futile. Victories are often fleeting. The losses sometimes feel like an endless miserable nightmare. Liberation is an often solitary lifestyle. Radical justice warriors and truth-tellers usually don’t get their flowers until, as Cornel West put it, their bodies become “the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.”

But, as Dr. Cone taught me, struggle gives you perspective. Struggle creates in you what Samoans call tofā — a wisdom that searches and is both compliant and defiant. It’s a wisdom that calls us to embrace God’s love for all regardless of faith, race, gender, sexual orientation, or class, and is defiant when that humanity is forced into suffering. It is a wisdom and love that has called me to be in solidarity with the Native people of Standing Rock, the Indigenous Kanaka of Mauna Kea, and my Compton neighbors in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

Through my struggle, I’ve also discovered that the critical lens I apply to systems and structures such as the UCC, the Samoan church, and the U.S. Empire must first be applied to myself. I have discovered that though I am not fa’afafine or fa’afatama, and though I am not the same as many of my neighbors in Compton, the road toward amiotonu is a call to work on behalf of all people while still being faithful to my own history. What unimaginable possibilities await us if we confess that we belong to each other as neighbors and siblings joined in mutual agape love? What lessons can be learned from striving toward moral values that bring us collective joy, not just short-term happiness?

This is who I am: I am a Samoan liberation theologian constantly in search of amiotonu. In spaces such as the UCC, amiotonu looks like a church engaged in dialogue for the sake of true solidarity, not institutional stability or passive tokenism. This is also a challenge to my beloved Samoan church: Are we willing to sacrifice our titles and honorifics at the foot of the cross for the benefit of marginalized Samoans such as the fa’afafine and fa’afatama?

I have much more to learn in my search for amiotonu. My hope is that many more of my Samoan colleagues in the faith — and all my people — will journey with me someday. Until then: Tatou mātua (ancestors) and Jesus le Amiotonu lead the way. Fa’afetai and soifua — thank you and live well.