Encounter Of Religions Research Paper

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1. A Model Of Encounter

In many studies of culture contact there is a perceived dichotomy between the acceptance and the rejection of Christianity. This model of religious change, often advanced by those who have a stake in defending religious boundaries, stems from false assumptions about the nature of the religious encounter. Its premise is of an essential or textual Christianity confronting an essential or ideal traditional (or folk) religion—the religion of the invader confronting the religion of the autochthon. But, Christianity has never been propagated as a monolithic entity encountering a homogenous local society. A more appropriate model involves a number of modes interaction. First, there was the encounter of a variety of mission Christianities, often mediated by local agents, with a traditional religion which was open, dynamic, and plural in nature. And, this religious encounter cannot be divorced from its political and socioeconomic context. It needs to be situated within a second set of conjunctions between the forces of capitalist imperialism and local institutions. Moreover, those encountering Christianity never adopted it wholesale. Specific ethnic groups, classes, and social categories appropriated particular ideas and practices and new forms of popular or vernacular religion, both traditional and Christian emerged out of processes of gleaning, borrowing, and recoding. This research paper considers these various modes of interaction with specific reference to Africa but with a Latin American aside.

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2. Scholarly And Popular Misconceptions About The Encounter Of Religions

2.1 Syncretism

In order to arrive at the above model of religious encounter it is first necessary to deal with a number of scholarly and popular misconceptions about the process. First, there is the issue of syncretism. This is a contentious term, often used to denote inauthenticity, or the pollution of a notionally pure tradition by symbols and meanings taken from alien traditions (Shaw and Stewart 1994). In African studies, missiologists and theologians have used syncretism as ‘a term of disapprobation denoting the confused mixing of religions’ to explain the rise of movements of Christian Independency, such as Zionism in Southern Africa and Aladura in West Africa. In Latin American studies, syncretism has far less of a pejorative connotation. Here scholarship on culture contact has been coloured by the optimism born in the heyday of the American melting pot ideology and portrayed African derived cults such as Vodun or Santera as a celebration of indigenous agency in the face of colonialism and other forms of alien domination (Shaw and Stewart 1994; see also Rostas and Droogers 1993). Recently, anthropologists and social historians have discredited the idea of essential, untainted traditions, exploring instead the processes by which they have been invented or imagined. Where the study of syncretism has most value is when it is understood as a form of cultural politics in which religious practitioners engage in heated polemic about religious hybridity while seeking to claim the moral high ground of authenticity.

2.2 African Traditional/Folk Religion

A second set of misconceptions surround the nature of African traditional religion which has been portrayed consistently as ahistorical in contrast to the dynamic religions of the book, Christianity and Islam. If missionaries prior to the twentieth century admitted Africans had a religion at all, most, but not all, saw it as no more than primitive superstition blocking the advance of Western civilization. While early twentieth century anthropologists such as Edward EvansPritchard and Meyer Fortes were better informed about African traditional religion they viewed it no less ahistorically. Critical of missionaries whom they argued were destroying ancient and intricate mechanisms of social cohesion, they wrote detailed studies on the function of traditional religion in maintaining the organic stability of African societies. Some of the next generation of missionaries such as Bruno Gutmann or Mabel Shaw (see below), inspired by this functionalist anthropology came to appreciate the supposed communality of African traditional religion and sought to engineer these values in an ‘adapted’ Christianity.




Historical models of African religion also found their way into scholarship beyond social anthropology. Scholars of comparative religion sought to respect all religious traditions and make points of connection between them. Thus, eminent comparative religionists described African traditional religion completely in experiential terms (Parrinder 1954). Leading African theologians have also asserted an historical model of African religion. Mbiti has contended that African religion has no future tense and possesses no founders, prophets, or converts. Africans shared the same underlying philosophy but each ‘tribe’ had its own religion into which its members were born. While celebrating this integration of religion and society, Mbiti argues that the boundedness of African traditional religion means that it is incapable of adapting to the increasing scale of interaction that colonialism has engendered, and will inevitably decline (Mbiti 1969).

The rise of African history as a discipline from the late 1950s onwards confronted ahistorical notions of African traditional religion. Particularly important has been the emergence of oral history. Some African religions such as the Mbona cult in southern Malawi have shrines maintained by priesthoods who retain extensive traditions referring back to founding figures and cycles of revival, cleansing and prophecy (Schoffeleers 1992). Moreover, the notion of the boundedness of African religious and social identity has been challenged by research on ethnicity. Many of the ‘tribal’ identities claimed by contemporary Africans are in fact colonial and postcolonial creations. Hence, the concept precolonial Kikuyu or Shona religion makes no historical sense.

African historians have now replaced the old model African religions as a total organic collectivity with a more dynamic and complex one. African cults symbolized and articulated social and economic relationships and thus their adherents were involved in a range of religious interactions that began at the level of family and faction but could extend across their polity and beyond. Guilds of men propitiating hunting spirits united disparate groups of hunters throughout a region. Cults of the land, sometimes operating across a number of polities, enforced ecological rules concerning clearing, planting and reaping. And cults of alien or a-social spirits established the rules of communication between traders and the communities with whom they interacted (Ranger 1987). This more open and pluralist model of African traditional religion helps explain its resilience and adaptivity through the twentieth century.

2.3 Missionaries And Local Agents In Africa (And Latin America)

Neither was African traditional religion ‘crushed’ by a destructive monolithic mission Christianity acting as the handmaid of colonialism. Such a wholly negative view of missionaries not only overlooks the contribution of local agents to the foundation of the African church but it also ignores the variety of mission Christianities and complex relationships they had with colonial states and African societies. Missionaries were influenced by different theologies and they were as diverse as the historical contexts and social sources from which their movements arose.

The contrast between the earliest Catholic mission enterprises and those of the first nonconformist missionaries could not be greater. The first wave of Catholic missionaries to sixteenth century Congo were controlled and sponsored by the Portuguese state. Mission took the form of a single religious enterprise conceived of in terms of territory. Co-opting state machinery in a union of faith and politics, Portuguese Catholics sought to create Christian kingdoms through the conversion of elite (Gray 1990). The early nineteenth century nonconformist missions were an extension of the culture of voluntary association and private enterprise that underpinned industrialization. Nonconformists like the London Missionary Society (LMS) in southern Africa were not especially interested in converting kings and aristocrats but rather turning ordinary Africans into sober and industrious Christians (Hastings 1994).

Missionaries also differed on the meaning of conversion. High Church Anglicans from the UMCA, German Lutherans, and Catholics believed that salvation was received through the sacraments and the liturgy, and sought to Christianize entire communities. By contrast, those Protestants influenced by revivalism placed a greater emphasis on salvation acquired in an intense and personal way. Their emphasis on moral conduct and lifestyle led to greater separation of the convert from their former community. While many missionaries were ethnocentric and culturally arrogant others did make a sincere and concerted attempt to come to terms with African culture and religion. As early as 1855 Bishop Colenso of Natal wrote a cogent argument for toleration of polygamy in his Remarks on the Proper Treatment of Polygamy. By the twentieth century a whole spectrum of missionary responses to their local settings had emerged. There were imaginative attempts at the translation of Christian ideas into an African idiom. Mabel Shaw of the LMS made extensive use of image of God Jesus as ‘Chief’ and the idea of the Christian community as a ‘tribe’ in her work amongst the Bemba. Another approach was the Christianization of traditional rituals so that they might find force in a Christian community. The most common example of this was the adaptation of traditional rituals of initiation. Here the endeavors to Christianize the traditional rite of passage by UMCA Bishop to Tanzania, Vincent Lucas of Msasi, have been well documented (Ranger 1972).

Indeed, while many missionaries to Africa have been criticized for their cultural imperialism, others may be taken to task for their conservatism. The German missionary and anthropologist, Bruno Gutmann, believed that the growth of African personality and morality was connected to the essential forms of community life: clan, neighborhood, and age grade. Thus, he developed an ‘indirect rule’ approach to mission, highly attractive to the Tanzanian colonial state, which sought to create Christian communities through traditional institutions and leadership (Kaplan 1995). When the radical black American educationalist W. E. B. du Bois visited West Africa in 1923, he criticized the fashionable ‘emphasis on the preservation of traditional culture.’ This du Bois thought, formed part of a white man’s plot to maintain the African as a willing but useful servant of the imperial cause.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the last great new wave of mission Christianity, following earlier Catholic and nonconformist waves, has been the most adversarial towards traditional culture and religion. This is the Pentecostal movement that arose in America and northern Europe, 1900–10, and collided with Africa and Latin America almost immediately after its inception, and in subsequent surges throughout this century (Maxwell 1999a, Freston 1995). In part a reaction against the liberalism and modernism of established church theology, Pentecostalism actively believed in the supernatural. But while taking African and Latin American belief systems seriously Pentecostalism nevertheless demonized them (Maxwell 1999b, Lehmann 1996). Traditional spirits, whether good or bad in local cosmological terms, were collapsed into the category of the demonic. Thus, Pentecostals have been characterized by their aggressive stance towards traditional practices, and the destruction of charms and fetishes as polluted objects. Yet, even this Pentecostal attack on things ‘traditional’ can be interpreted as a form of Africanization: a perpetuation of a tradition of cyclical societal cleansing.

Finally, those scholars who continue to insist on the alien nature of African Christianity fail to grasp the role of local agents in the Christianizing of the continent. Pioneer missionaries were responsible for vast tracts of territory. Few and far between, their priorities were first translation work and then the construction of mission infrastructure. Many simply struggled to survive disease and learn the local language. The work of conversion was left to local agents, freed slaves, and converts from already missionized areas. Because overstretched missionaries were unable to monitor their activities these Catholic catechists and Protestant evangelists had much room for creativity. There were also movements of Christians happening completely independently of missionaries such as the Christian refugees who fled the expansion of the Zulu Kingdom in the 1830s and carried Christianity with them into Lake Malawi region. Another example was labor gangs, such as groups of Pedi in the Transvaal, South Africa in the 1840s–1860s, who encountered Christianity in their work place and spread it through the process of labor migration. Often missionaries would arrive in a village to find Africans already there teaching the faith.

3. A Latin American Comparison

Latin America did encounter a monolithic mission Christianity. For over three hundred years the subjects of Spanish and Portuguese empires were exposed to state-sponsored Catholicism. Yet, from the very beginning of these Iberian empires there was a debate within Catholicism about the nature of traditional belief. While Spanish imperialists exterminated Indian peoples on the pretext that they were idolaters or devil worshippers Bartholome de Las Casas described their pagan practices as their own way of approaching the Christian God. Las Casas, a sixteenth century Dominican, also argued for a clearer separation of the church from the imperial project, while the Franciscans and later the Jesuits established local regimes which while patriarchal did offer more humane conditions than their secular coevals.

Latin American Catholicism could also embody regional and national identities. The cult of the dark faced Virgin of Guadalupe, which dates from the mid-sixteenth century, offered a range of protective and curative functions. The Virgin appeared on the banners of those who sought independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century (led by village priests) and was subsequently made universal patron for the whole of Mexico (Brading 1991). Official Catholicism, initially opposed to nationalist movements, took a generation to come to an accommodation with the new nations before becoming embroiled in a century of warfare between conservatives and anticlerical liberals or radicals.

The strength of the sacred canopy of Catholicism varied across the continent. Some of the Amazonian peoples remained ‘unreached’ until the arrival of twentieth-century Catholic and Protestant missionaries. In other instances the Catholic overlay remained thin. The Maya of Guatemala, who resisted for centuries, retain numerous traditional beliefs, praying to the ancestors as well as the saints, visiting the shaman alongside the priest. In Brazil, Catholicism is often cross-referenced with belief in African Gods imported along with African slaves. In contrast to the literature on African religion, scholarship on Latin America more often equates ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ religion, not with non-Christian religion, but with a ‘syncretistic’ mix of Catholicism and surrounding religions.

The degree to which Latin American Catholicism drew from other religions rather than retaining a more distinctive identity is explained by combination of two factors: first, its close relation to the institutions of the state; second, the absence of alternative and competing Christianities. Catholicism was the established religion. Even at local level the church was often a major landowner and the priest involved in local politics. Catholic ideology legitimated social relations of production on the hacienda. The local level Catholic representative was usually not a catechist but a foreign priest. In the absence of other Christianities and a strongly independent Catholic dynamic Latin Americans were far more selective in their response to Catholicism and that selectivity came to be accepted by the authorities. Thus, for instance, Ecuadorian Quichua used the cult of the Saints and different visions of the virgin to reach those extrahuman forces they believed dominated them. Prayers, ritual drinking, dancing, and the wearing of lavish costumes took place to influence God’s intermediaries. The same process of selection, of course, occurred within African Christianity, but in an atmosphere of Christian pluralism, African Christian identities took on a sharper definition.

Latin American Catholicism, in its different forms, remained monopolistic until the late nineteenth century when liberal elites opened doors to north Atlantic Protestantism and migration. The first wave of missionaries were predominantly older Protestant denominations such as Methodists and Baptists, offering welfare and education, but throughout the twentieth century Pentecostal and conservative evangelical waves came to dominate. The opening up of the religious field was accompanied by the break-up of Catholic sociopolitical hegemony. Agrarian reforms, anticlerical regimes, the rise of the mega-city and the partial liberalization of Catholicism made alternative religious adherence possible.

The persistence of pre-Christian cults is supplemented by their re-invention by middle class intellectuals in search of an authentic religion. One such group is the Association of Concheros in Central Mexico who have fused Catholicism with a blend of notional religious traditions from peoples such as the Aztecs and Chichemecas (Rostas 1993). In the African context such invented religious traditions are not so much sources of spirituality as markers for ethnicities.

Doubtless, if Spain and Portugal had retained and expanded their mercantile empires in Africa then African Catholicism may well have more closely resembled the early Latin American type. But Spain and, to a lesser extent Portugal, did not figure highly in the ‘Scramble(s)’ and the accompanying Catholic impulse was generally of a non-Iberian variety, involving a plurality of Catholic missionary orders working in competition with Protestantism. Given the open and plural nature of African traditional religion, the varieties of mission Christianity and the contribution of local agents, the African encounter took a profoundly different form from the Latin American one.

4. Resilience And Innovation In African Traditional/Folk Religion

Throughout the nineteenth century traditional religion innovated in response to the array of changes that accompanied the slow penetration of first, mercantile, and later capitalist, relations into the African interior. The increasing scale of social interactions that these changes brought led local intellectuals to innovate to make sense of this new world breaking in. In some cases they developed the idea of the High God with a macrocosmic reach to match Africans’ expanding horizons. In other contexts, cults of possession became more widespread linking people together over wide regions through their shared affliction by the same amoral spirit. In many places the colonial occupations of the 1870s–1890s coincided with and precipitated ecological crises. In what appeared to many as a millennial moment, great prophetic figures, such as the Shona Chaminuka medium, arose to interpret colonialism and capitalist imperialism in a way that offered their followers conceptual control over what was happening. Thus, the great transformations were not an alien imposition but part of an unfolding local narrative.

In a similar manner, the new religion of Christianity was understood in terms of the old categories of traditional religion. Some missionaries were seen as witchcraft eradicators, whose presence inaugurated movements destroying charms and fetishes (Maxwell 1999b). Other missionary pioneers, with their bags of simple medical cures were seen as traditional healers (Hastings 1994). Others still were welcomed as sources of revelation about the High God.

While specific forms of traditional religion, such as hunting guilds, declined under colonialism, other forms of traditional religion moved to the center of the stage. African religious leaders, such as the famous Kinjikitile in Tanganyika, offered their cults as means of uniting acephalous societies against German occupation. And during the era of decolonization, religious leaders once again helped coordinate resistance against colonial states. In Zimbabwe’s war of liberation Shona spirit mediums moved popular understanding of myth and taboo to enable stranger guerrillas to be legitimated in local terms as hunters and warriors (Lan 1985). Although the labor migration led to decline of some cults of the land, in other instances traditional religion became more ecologically orientated helping Africans to become peasants and articulating their objection to state intervention in their agriculture.

5. The Foundation Of Vernacular Christianities In Africa And Latin America

Nevertheless, Christianity has made tremendous headway in Africa and Latin America. In Africa great movements of Christianity in Buganda, the Ivory Coast, Igboland, and Manicaland occurred during the Scramble(s) and in the first decades of the twentieth century. But these grassroots initiatives often happened in a haphazard and unplanned manner far from missionary influence or control, and through this indigenous agency local or vernacular Christianities were founded.

Besides the significant contribution of African agents, vernacular Christianities had two other key defining features. The first was the seizing of the landscape by symbolically sensitive missionaries and African Christians. Mountains, rocks, caves, trees, and pools, which often had traditional religious associations, were resacralized in Christian fashion. Catholics turned them into shrines and grottos— places of pilgrimage. The Anglicans made holy ground through creation of cemeteries.

The second key feature of these vernacular Christianities was the adoption of Christian symbols and powers and Christian literacy because they had utility in helping Africans prosper and relate to the colonial economy. While traditional religion could become more ecological in orientation to help Africans become peasants, Christianity could equally fulfill that role. Catholic prayers, invocations, and rituals were perceived as efficacious in protecting crops and providing soil fertility. American Methodism with its strong emphasis on discipline, an intense personal experience, and gospel of the plough provided the perfect ideology for peasant entrepreneurs (Ranger 1987).

Christian approaches to healing were also important. Pentecostal and revivalist emphasis on the satanic causes of illness resonated with traditional personifications of evil and disease. Likewise, divine healing through the laying-on of hands resembled the practices of traditional healers, though, of course, Pentecostals claimed a different source of empowerment. Miraculous cures through veneration of the saints provided a Catholic counterpart to Pentecostal spiritual healing. St Therese of Lisieux was perceived as particularly powerful in Africa. Seminaries of African priests were placed under her protection and she was appointed ‘regent’ of at least one African country. Finally, African Christian movements were often animated by a grass roots adoption of literacy. For these Africans, literacy, schooling, and church were synonymous in representing progress (Ranger 1987).

Specific social categories were often responsible for the localization of Christianity. In the nineteenth century Africa, kings and chiefs often converted to extend their ideological legitimation and to benefit from the technological and diplomatic advice missionaries had to offer. But these traditional leaders were slow to change their ideas and practices. In both continents younger men and women often converted and changed the very culture these male gerontocrats wished to preserve. The conventional language of Christians: ‘coming forward,’ ‘setting themselves apart,’ and declaring for a ‘completely changed life’ took on a new meaning when merged with Christianity’s individualist conscience (Fields 1985). It offered younger men, returning from the workplace, legitimate reasons for ignoring the burdensome demands of traditional commensality, the Latin American fiesta (Earle 1992), or African fertility and harvest rituals. Likewise, it enabled more individualist peasants to separate themselves from the ‘wasteful’ and time consuming demands of their kin, and in the Latin American context, fictive kin: God children (Goldin and Metz 1991). Faith in Christ gave women recourse to another male authority other than that of the household head, and directly undermined elder male notions of patriarchy by demonizing the ancestor spirits which legitimated it. Likewise, the prayer band and the fellowship meeting offered a vital source of solidarity for women otherwise divided by exogamy, polygamy, and fear of witchcraft accusation, and an engine of resocialization for the wayward male. Pentecostalism offered its own unique source of empowerment. Gifts of prophecy, tongues, healing, and exorcism turned a marginal woman or man into someone of consequence (Gill 1990). Catholicism was frequently an intensely feminine religion. Its Marian emphasis offered women a double-edged model of liberation and resignation.

Material benefits also accompanied conversion. The church offered networks of contacts and solidarity to labor migrants entering the cities, mines, or farms, and it created new alliances of Christian kin within the village. Although Pentecostalism’s doctrine of male headship legitimated gender inequalities, its emphasis on industry, sobriety, and sexual propriety diminished aspects of male sex roles that are harmful to women (Gill 1990). Throughout the townships, shantytowns, and villages of Africa and Latin America the puritan ethics advanced by Pentecostals, other nonconformists, and groups like the Watch Tower have pulled families and small communities out of cycles of poverty, or at least stopped them from slipping over the edge.

Where Christianity has not eroded African traditional religion, it has nevertheless often changed it. Christian ideas and practices have found their way into non-Christian religions. Contemporary African genealogies tracing the origins of significant territorial spirits may include references to Hebrew patriarchs such as Noah or Abraham as useful embellishments (Bourdillon 1988). And traditional concepts of God have likewise been sharpened by Judaeo–Christian ideas about the divine.

None of the above should for one moment suggest that missionaries have not been important. It is rather that their importance came in ways they did not expect. Missionary teachings on domesticity shifted gender relations and created new social classes out of missionized elites. And work on languages such as the creation of vernacular alphabets and grammars has had an immense impact. Not only has it created written languages where none previously existed, but these in turn have helped create new ethnic identities in both continents. In Latin America, the influence of one organization in particular, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, cannot be underestimated. In Africa, literacy and schooling enabled Africans to form their own cultural movements and provided access to political ideas other than those peddled by colonialists.

6. Christianity In Contemporary Africa And Latin America

The process of culture contact of course continues. Despite the fact that the center of Christendom no longer lies in the post-Christian West but in the South, the Western impulse to mission has not abated. It has, however, changed in nature. First, the majority of contemporary missionaries are North American in origin, reflecting the rise of the US as the new imperial power. Second, these missionaries are usually evangelical, charismatic, or Pentecostal and believe that conversion entails an individualized born-again experience. Finally, this new strand of born-again Christianity has a strong affinity with the electronic media.

The arrival of this new type of conservative Protestantism, which exploded across Latin America in the 1960s, and across Africa a decade and a half later, raises the inevitable question of whether it is just another American cultural export (Gifford 1998). While America is the major cultural and missionary dynamo for the born-again movement there are other epicenters in Southern and West Africa and Brazil, each contributing their own ‘prophets’ and media packages to increase the heterogeneity of the movement. But more importantly, the born-again movement has always been conducive to indigenization. Its lack of tradition, its scorn of formal theological education, its reliance on lay initiative and management, its family and neighborhood cell structure, and its acceptance of the supernatural make it particularly responsive to local agendas. While its stress on releasing converts from the demands of kin, both alive and dead, and its emphasis on building nuclear families may smack of western individualism, these tendencies are useful to African (and Latin American) peasants facing the decline or break-up of the communal system and migrant workers coming to terms with the rise of the mega-city (Martin 1990).

Finally, culture flows do not just move from the West to the South, they are multidirectional. While African and Latin American diaspora have for centuries transported their religions to the West, contemporary Latin American and African Christianities impact on Europe and America in ever more profound ways. In the 1970s and 1980s Latin American liberation theologians shook up Western theological establishments, while the spirituality of Latin American base communities inspired many Westerners working for justice and peace. Today, mission partnerships bring African Anglicans to British parishes and returning missionaries import Christian song and liturgy from the South into their home churches. Added to this is the growing appeal of African Pentecostal and charismatic leaders in Western preaching and healing circuits. Some of these leaders’ churches also finance their own mission initiatives. The arrival of African missionaries in London’s Oxford Street, or Brazilians in Portugal, brings mission Christianity full circle.

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