Introduction

Abstract

Recent decades have marked a watershed in World Christianity as an emerging academic field, its development into an interdisciplinary endeavor in particular. Reflection on the complexity of Christianity as a pluricultural, global phenomenon has been robust. As was highlighted by our inaugural international conference in 2018, World Christianity as a field has been shaped in large part by its distinctive historiography and diverse methodologies. In 2019 our primary focus was on ethnographic methodologies for World Christianity.1 Accordingly, a wide range of questions about the nature and relevance of ethnography to the study of World Christianity were explored, along with the difference ethnography makes or could make in providing granular accounts of local Christianities around the world. Likewise, in view of the fact that ethnographic research is being increasingly incorporated into studies of World Christianity at a time when concepts of “culture” are rigorously contested and the loci of research have become extraordinarily diverse, we interrogate the major challenges scholars face or are likely to confront in their research. The event also provided a space for exploring and reflecting on past practices and new directions, drawing on case studies representative of the currents and eddies of Christianity in the majority world and beyond.While research on Christianity’s cross-cultural, transnational, and diasporic manifestations has burgeoned, interrogation of theory and methodology (grounded in case study research) should be an ongoing process as well. Interrogating interrelated issues of methodology, interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity enables us to think critically and reflexively, within and beyond our academic “comfort zones.” What fields/areas of study are seen or not seen as primary or secondary bedfellows of World Christianity? How do such fields shape or fail to shape approaches, theory, and methodology? Who is actually doing the seeing and what lens is being used or ought to be used in the process?As Dale Irvin contends,Such a characterization speaks further to a more complex historical evolution of the field but also enunciates methodological underpinnings vis-à-vis the field’s inter/multi/transdisciplinary character. In fact, Princeton Theological Seminary’s Program of World Christianity and the History of Religions has benefited considerably from Dale Irvin’s seminal insights as our program “dedicates itself to fostering an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to the study of Christianity as a pluricultural, global phenomenon.”3 Thus, our program seeks to widen the horizons of theological education by means of interdisciplinary inquiry into the cross-cultural diffusion of Christianity, its emergence as a dynamic religion in the global South, and its various diasporas. Considering that the religions are the primary matrix out of which Christianity arises in the global South, World Christianity is an integral component of the History of Religions as an academic field of study.While our first two international conferences (2018 and 2019) focused on historiography and ethnography, World Christianity’s interaction with other religions forms the last of three major subfields still to be explored. Thus, our (recently concluded) 2021 World Christianity conference “Currents, Perspectives, and Methodologies for the Study of World Christianity and Its Interactions with Other Religions,” was framed loosely in terms of Irvin’s conceptualization of the study of World Christianity as a crossing of three borders. This is based partly on the premise that Christianity never emerges cross-culturally from a vacuum but always reciprocally in a variety of global contexts already conditioned by pre-existing religions.The mere conceptualization of World Christianity as an inter/multi/transdisciplinary field renders the quest for a single methodology redundant. It is more realistic, as far as we are concerned, to explore multiple methods of research and research methodologies, and in some sense seek for a polymethodic approach. In concrete terms, we would categorize the question of what methodology to use as a second-order interrogation, with the first-order question being: What sources, resources and toolkits are available for studying World Christianity? Put differently, questions about what research question(s) we are asking; what data we are looking for and how we source that data precede any questions about the appropriate methodologies that might suit research in/on World Christianity. To do it the other way round will be tantamount to putting the cart before the horse. The sampled essays in this special issue were papers originally presented at our 2019 conference, which in our view most explicitly addressed much-debated questions of theory and methodology, some on the basis of case studies, others more abstractly, and all of them constructively.James Spickard outlines the import of ethnography as a method of studying religions and World Christianity. He focuses on the growing realization among anthropologists of ethnographic reflexivity—the process by which the ethnographer identifies the social, cultural, and intellectual perspectives that shape that ethnographer’s own standpoint, and thus shape what that ethnographer can see about the religious group under examination. Why is ethnography important for the study of religion and of World Christianity? Spickard aptly responds, “It gives us a detailed, nuanced picture of how religion is actually lived.” He advocates expanding this social, cultural, and intellectual reflexivity to include a theological dimension. Scholars of religion and World Christianity, who are more used to recognizing their own theological assumptions, have something important to contribute to ethnographic reflection.Sonja Thomas explores the concept of “studying up” and how scholars of World Christianity need to grapple with the ways Christianity has facilitated and supported state policies and institutional structures of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and brahmanical patriarchy. According to her, “studying up” refers to studying the functionings and institutionalized nature of racist, caste-ist, and settler heteropatriarchies. Thomas contrasts “studying up” as it pertains to Christianity in India where Syro-Malabar Christians are a small but powerful middle-class minority, and in the Christian majority country of the United States, and contends that to fully understand and support anti-caste, decolonial, and feminist anti-racist movements for social justice worldwide, the time for “studying up” in World Christianity is long overdue.Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in South India, Ghana, and England, Anderson Jeremiah explores the place of sacred objects such as the Bible and sacral images for personal and communal benefits. The author suggests that social-ethnographic research is crucial in understanding that material religious symbols and objects turn things that are not visible into the visible and—what is more—transform the “transcendent” into the “immanent,” as the “spiritual” is made “physical.” Thus, we are enabled to capture more clearly the relationship between people’s lives and their notions of “sacred” within Christianity.Based on research within Pentecostal churches in Cape Town, South Africa, Henrietta Nyamnjoh highlights the significance of visual methods, suggesting that photography and short videos, provide a rich basis for thinking more methodologically about visual representations in the study of World Christianity. The article draws attention to how ethnography has mostly focused on traditional research methods to the exclusion of visual methods, which are generally used as illustrations or the methods reserved for usage by visual anthropologists. A visual turn, she argues, will complement traditional ethnographic methods for the study of Pentecostalism specifically and World Christianity generally.Pauline Muir aptly argues that congregational music and verbal utterances are germane to the liturgical practices of World Christianity. Using a model of music discourse and data drawn from an ethnographic study within the context of a neo-Pentecostal African mega church in the United Kingdom, the function and character of congregational singing and the use of chanted confessions as a signifying practice are analyzed. The author concludes that paying attention to the sonic representations in congregations may prove to be a fruitful site of inquiry for scholars of World Christianity.Jonathan Seitz describes a large-scale phone survey of Christians and non-Christians conducted by a group of Christian social scientists from major Taiwanese universities. The author argues that such a broad swath of data affords ample scope for in-depth discussion of analytical methodologies in the field of World Christianity while also enabling researchers to envision future ethnographic and cultural studies having the potential to challenge the conventional categories used to describe Christian life in Taiwan.Finally, Felipe Fanuel Xavier Rodrigues explores the religious tropes of the contemporary literature of Afro-Brazilian women writers. By analyzing the Afro-Diasporic religious symbols in their creolized texts, he underscores the process of survival of African deities on Brazilian soil vis-à-vis the religious history of the country’s decolonization process. He argues that the use of literature by Black Brazilian women as a cultural defense against racism and religious intolerance not only testifies to their resilience but also illuminates how they produce transformational discourses in order to reverse the epistemic violence they have historically experienced because of the way Christianity was imposed. As a result, Rodrigues observes, such authors are empowered to creatively narrate their personal and collective identities.