Last week, I wrote about the Hawaiʻi Republican Party and its need to decide on an identity.
An identity is a way of seeing the world and moving through it. It tells you which problems are problems and which solutions are allowed. It is a sense of how one relates to other people, and to God. What is true of a man is true of a party, which stands for some things and against others.
The mistake is to imagine an identity can be built in a “secular” way, with the ultimate questions left politely at the door. But every identity rests on faith. The questions of politics are always second questions. The first ones are older: Who are we? Where did we come from? What must be done to make things right?
Last week, I noted that no party in Hawaiʻi speaks for the 6 in 10 adults here who are Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or Mormon. This is true of the Republican Party, too, though its platform runs under the banner of faith, family, freedom. A slogan is not a creed.
The core problem with the Hawaiʻi Republican Party is that it pays lip service to the God of Scripture, and lip service is a kind of service He has never accepted.
Few of the party’s leading figures can say how the faith shapes their decisions, and it shows in the platform, which is less a philosophy than a pile of them.
Brenton Awa, who is running against Jill Tokuda to represent Hawaiʻi in Congress, has a hyperlocal focus. He has tried twice to ban foreign ownership of land, which the U.S. Constitution will not allow. He has gone further and argued for birth requirements for office: “If you’re not born and raised, you should not be leading because if you’re not born and raised you ain’t looking out for the people born and raised.”
Awa was raised in a Mormon community and now and then invokes God in a speech. Beyond that, the public record is silent on what he believes, and a voter is left to guess.
Lieutenant governor candidate Daniel Anthony goes further than Awa down the Hawaiʻi-for-Hawaiians road. A lifelong sovereignty activist, Anthony does not embrace his American citizenship. He has argued that the militaries of the world, Russia and China included, should bid for the rights to Pearl Harbor.
He holds the genealogy of Hawaiʻi’s old religion, in which man is the younger brother of Hāloa, the kalo plant. He has urged us to make a place for Hāloa in our homes, borrowing the language of Genesis to say we must be “our brother’s keeper.”
Meanwhile, others in the local party are still keeping house in the conservatism of William F. Buckley, the Yale man and Catholic who stitched together the postwar coalition. Traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-communists were held together by the Soviet Union, which had the decency to be an enemy everyone could agree on. Thirty-five years after the Cold War, the coalition has come apart, and some of its members have not yet heard.
Others have gone all in for the Trump realignment of the party, which owes much of its success to American evangelicals. But that realignment is held together by a personality, and personalities retire. It remains to be seen where the national party goes in 2028. Neither J.D. Vance nor Marco Rubio has yet gathered a coalition broad enough to lead it.
The Hawaiʻi-for-Hawaiians line cannot win in a state where Hawaiians are a minority. Worse, as Anthony shows, its logical end is animus toward the United States.
And beneath Anthony’s worldview is a cosmology hostile to the Christian account of creation. It is hard to see how a party hoping to represent the 6 in 10 can platform men who deny that faith’s first chapter.
It’s often remarked that politics is downstream of culture. But culture is downstream of worship. What we worship, and how, shapes everything we think about politics. There is no identity apart from worship; there is only an identity that has not yet admitted what it worships.
Gary Cordery, the Republican candidate for governor, began his run as the champion of conservative evangelicals. He went so far as to trumpet some of their fringe conspiracy theories. That was a ditch on one side of the road. Like Trump, he gave in to the temptation to feed the base its baser appetites.
Cordery has since moderated, tacking toward the middle. He has even made common cause with Anthony. And here he seems to have found the ditch on the other side, trading a conviction for a coalition.
The gap between the two men’s accounts of creation is not small.
Hawaiian tradition traces the origin of man to these events. Wākea (Sky Father) and Papahānaumoku (Earth Mother) bear the islands and a daughter, Hoʻohōkūkalani. Wākea desires his daughter. With his priest Komoawa he devises the kapu nights and the ʻaikapu, the sacred eating restrictions, as a religious pretext to separate himself from Papa and lie with Hoʻohōkūkalani.
Their first child is stillborn and buried; from the grave grows the kalo, Hāloanakalaukapalili. The second child, Hāloa, is the first human and the ancestor of all Hawaiians and their chiefs. Papa discovers the deception, curses Wākea, and takes another husband. Wākea then takes other wives.
So at the origin of man, in this telling, a husband deceives his wife, lies with his daughter, and then takes other wives. And the religious law is invented to serve his appetites. The kapu system governed everything from eating to sacrifice for centuries. The tradition remembers the kapu as born of a lie told to cover incestuous lust. Most myths flatter their makers. This one does not.
The Christian account is otherwise. Man and woman have dignity because they are made in the image of God.
Where does the dignity of man come from in the Hawaiian account?
Nowhere. The genealogy was used to justify the rule of a few chiefs over many commoners. The kapu system justified slavery, human sacrifice, and the ritual subjugation of women. It stood for centuries and fell in 1819, 40 years after Cook.
That is the distance between Cordery’s faith and Anthony’s. It is not a policy difference. It is a difference about what a man is.
Gary Cordery claims the title “statesman.” He might imitate the greatest statesman Hawaiʻi has had.
The greatest period of civic flourishing in Hawaiʻi’s history was led by a God-fearing man, Kauikeaouli, Kamehameha III.
He did not start that way. In his youth Kauikeaouli was a drunk. He kept Kaomi, a man, as his favorite companion and made him a kind of co-ruler. He carried on an affair with his own sister, Nahiʻenaʻena, and got her with child.
The child died within hours of its birth in 1836. Nahiʻenaʻena died a few months later.
After that, the king seems to have turned from his sins and toward Christ. Whatever one makes of the timing, the history is plain: something died in the man, and something better grew in its place.
Then came the Declaration of Rights of 1839 and the Constitution of 1840. Within a decade, Hawaiʻi was a modern nation. Nearly everyone could read, and the world took notice.
Kauikeaouli did not get there by softening his faith to please the room. He wrote it into the constitution: “no law shall be enacted which is at variance with the word of the Lord Jehovah, or at variance with the general spirit of His word.” And God blessed the Hawaiian kingdom.
Cordery would do well to follow Kauikeaouli. And Daniel Anthony should follow him, too. The greatest Hawaiian to rule these islands turned from idols to Christ.
Civic renewal for Hawaiʻi will not come from a political party. It comes, as it always has, from God. But God will not bless a people that keeps its idols. He never has. He is, on the other hand, famously willing to bless the ones who put them down.
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