As Scottish studies has sought to engage with themes of global connection and interaction, the Pacific has become an important context for research about one of Scotland's most famous authors, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94). It is no coincidence that these developments have taken place simultaneously; it has been aptly argued that the study of Scottish cultural history and the international circulation of Scottish literature are mutually reinforcing pursuits. The movement of ideas is aided by the movement of materials across borders. Stevenson studies has no doubt benefited from the wider re-evaluation of Scottish culture in the wake of debates about Scottish (and British) national identity. With these political and cultural impetuses, recent decades have seen the publication of a number of strong monographs, all written by scholars based outside of Scotland, which have explored Stevenson's Pacific oeuvre from perspectives such as psychology, law, photography, and environmentalism. The aim of the present study is to make a distinctive contribution to this burgeoning field by emphasising the intellectual and cultural significance of religion in his writing. Specifically, the thematic focus of this book is the impact of Pacific Islands Christianity on the mind of Robert Louis Stevenson.

I describe how this takes place by invoking the anthropo-theological term ‘inculturation’. Inculturation helps to explain the ways in which Pacific Islands Christians created their own communitarian and supernaturally ordered versions of the European Christianity that Western missionaries brought to the Pacific in the nineteenth century. Although the term ‘inculturation’ is open to charges of anachronism because it only begins to be used in scholarly literature around the mid-twentieth century, this criticism may be answered by the fact that cognate terms such as ‘enculturation’ and ‘interculturation’ have been applied in Scottish literary contexts. I claim that because of his own religious literacy, that is, his experiential knowledge of a religious tradition, Scottish Presbyterianism, Stevenson was particularly well positioned to recognise this Pacific Islands inculturation and the emergence of distinctive Christian communities. I further argue that Stevenson articulated the style and ethos of that emergent Christianity in his later fiction and that he was also moved to rethink his views of European history and ecclesiology.