The spiritual uses of objects and the land here also accomplish one additional noteworthy task. In evoking Hawaiian “spiritualities” rather than Hawaiian “religions,” the NPS and other agencies make public space for the “religious” in the “secular” state. Rupert Tripp and the Jehovah’s Witnesses apparently recognized this on the April day of my recent visit to HVNP. If secular society exiles “religion” to the individual interior, shaping our understandings of the spiritual in accordance with this presumably inviolable (and politically silenced) interiority, “spirituality” also often escapes these boundaries and operates without these constraints. At HVNP, it manifests, formally and officially, as an under-the-radar assertion of the United States (and its “possessions”) as “one nation under God(s).”
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