Well, point well taken. We don't normally think of Hawai'i as part of the American West. But perhaps in this context, we should. Or at least I don't think these posts are too far afield. Here's why.
Part of the acknowledged history of the American West is the missionary history of the West. This occurred everywhere in North America, to be sure, but the individual Protestant and Catholic missionary activity, undertaken by the churches on their own, is a particularly strong part of western movement in North America. And by the second half of the 1800s, it had a particular style to it, in which individual faiths endeavored to establish missions in geographic regions.
That's really what occurred, and highly successfully, in Hawai'i The pattern of missionary activity strongly fits into the same pattern of that of the American West. For that matter, US colonization and annexation of Haawai'i, while unique in many ways, also strongly resembles what occurred in the American West. So, exotic Pacific locality aside, these posts are not really out of place.
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