Abstract
This impressive volume examines how “indigenous peoples” (or “indigines”) across various world contexts experienced Christianity. It examines Amer-Indians of Latin America, Native Americans of North America, Sub-Saharan Africans, and societies of the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific. The book makes a significant contribution to global history by the sheer force of its comprehensive vision. Each chapter synthesizes relevant scholarship of a given world area to describe how societies interacted with Christianity amid experiences of conquest, white settlement and expansion, and the work of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries and their local catechists. Global histories often focus on the spread of commodities such as cotton or stimulants, migrants, or the impact of great empires. Far less so do they concern religion. By including such vastly different societies within his book, David Lindenfeld seeks to present Christianity as an aspect of global history (3).
Several factors distinguish this book from other approaches to World Christianity. One concerns its notion of the “indigenous.” This concept is most meaningful when distinguishing white settlers from “indigines” such as Nahua-speaking peoples of Tenochtitlan, the Cherokee of Appalachia, the Massachusett or Wampanoag Indians of the American northeast, or aboriginals of Australia. Beyond instances of white settlement, the notion of the indigenous becomes more unruly. In what sense can we view Arabs, Chinese, or Indians as indigenous peoples without introducing a category they would not apply to themselves or without rendering Christianity—the other half of the apparent binary—as perpetually foreign? Is there a statute of limitations after which Christianity moves from the liability of being foreign (an attribution inflicting great damage in places like India) to the virtue of being indigenous? Where other scholars of World Christianity engage this question extensively, this book remains uncomfortably silent.
Lindenfeld deploys terms that attempt to capture dynamics between missionaries and locals and the agency of the latter in either embracing or resisting Christian influence. “Concentration of spirituality” refers to how “indigines use foreign incorporations to sweep away large portions of their native religion, thus narrowing the focus to one or few features and thereby ridding the previous religion of its distorting or ‘superstitious’ practices” (15). Conversion to Christianity or Islam worldwide illustrates “concentrated spirituality” because of how these religions confronted idolatry and displaced indigenous culture with more centralized foreign concepts (such as Trinitarian monotheism) and institutions. Concentrated spirituality presented for the Wendat Indian converts of North America an alternative to their complete collapse under the weight of disease and forcible displacement (56–57). It expressed itself in the reformist and apocalyptic vision of the Kongolese prophetess Dona Beatriz de Kimpa Vita amid the slave trade and hostility from local authorities (99), in the severing of ties between East African revivalist pilgrims and their families (129), and in aspects of the Christian impact in India. Conversely, “diffuse spirituality” refers to the decentralized indigenous practices of East Asian shamanism, Hindu polytheism, the veneration of saints in Latin America, African spirituality, or Native American practices. Lindenfeld acknowledges that all religions contain elements of both concentrated and diffuse spirituality (47). The distinction provides for the author a platform for what seems to be his priority of critiquing evolutionist and secularization theories of religion (293–300).
Other concepts employed by Lindenfeld include “selective incorporation,” “middle ground,” and “cultural hooks,” which relate to gradations of cultural contact, preservation, or displacement experienced through missionary encounters with indigines worldwide. When examined as a whole, the book creates the impression that missionaries sometimes “accommodate” local culture to “hook” people, whereas indigines at best “incorporate” what is foreign, as their lives are degraded by conquest, disease, and modernity (or guns, germs, and steel, to channel Jared Diamond). What is lost in this framework is the sense that Christianity—like Islam or Buddhism—can undergo processes that alter its cultural complexion, producing Christianity as indigenous experience.
World Christianity and Indigenous Experience presents a truly global account of important aspects of Christianity’s interactions with non-European peoples. In contrast to other studies of World or Global Christianity, the book offers no compelling narrative that explains how Christianity became owned, lived, and theologized by non-Europeans, despite experiences of white settlement, slavery, or various forms of imperial rule. Readers will want to understand what the enslaved Nahua in Tenochtitlan, Kongolese slaves of the Carolinas, or displaced Cherokee on the Trail of Tears share in common with Nigerian Pentecostals, China’s registered or unregistered churches, Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church, or India’s Pandita Ramabai. In the absence of a big story, we are left with weighty fragments. Each chapter presents a highly informative synthesis of literature, but as a whole the book never moves us beyond its troublesome binary of World Christianity and indigenous experience. The book’s vocabulary is useful for addressing theoretical concerns relating to disenchantment, secularization, and the centralization of religious practices, but it does little to revise or advance understandings of World Christianity as a concept or as a phenomenon occasioned by new demographics and new stories arising from the Global South. Still, seminarians or teachers of world history survey courses will find in this book a useful resource for learning about Christianity in a given world area.