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Religion in the Cook Islands Missionaries have had a tremendous impact on the Cook Islands and today, the worship of God is deeply ingrained into the islanders psyche. Missionaries from The London Missionary Society arrived in the Cook Islands as early as 1821 and hit upon the idea of using converted Polynesians to spread the Word. The islanders back in the early part of the 19th century were probably more interested initially in the material benefits brought their way by Europeans and may well have ceded that changing allegiances from the old gods to a new one were more beneficial to them. For all that however, they became converts quickly and have remained firmly entrenched in a tropical religious bastion that is very important to them, ever since.