World Christianity and Indigenous Experience: A Global History, 1500–2000, by David Lindenfeld.

Abstract

“How,” asks David Lindenfeld, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University, “can cross-cultural interactions inform the operation of religions in world history?” (1). The culmination of his sixteen years of research on this question is found in his important new book, World Christianity and Indigenous Experience. In elaborate detail, Lindenfeld defends the thesis that cross-cultural interactions between Christianity and non-Christian groups not only help us answer this question but also shed light on the debate over European exceptionalism—namely, the phenomenon of Europe’s progressive secularization.Lindenfeld employs an innovative conceptual typology to explain the complex range of cross-cultural responses to the spread of world Christianity. His typology is divided into eight categories: resistance and rejection (13), selective incorporation (15), concentration of spirituality (16), conservation of form (20), vernacular translation (21), dual religious participation (24), selective acculturation (25), and acceptance and commitment (27). Lindenfeld applies this typology through a diachronic and cross-cultural study looking at seven major geographical areas covering the spread of Christianity. Readers who want to get the most out of Lindenfeld’s approach will have to grapple with the technicalities of his typology, which are spelled out in the introduction. Be forewarned that Lindenfeld is averse to terms such as “conversion” and “syncretism” and explains why in considerable detail.In chapter 2 on Latin America, Lindenfeld traces how indigenous peoples interacted with the dual process of colonization and Christianization during the Spanish conquest. He argues that such interactions progressed from initial acceptance of missionaries to disillusionment and rebellion and, finally, to resistance following defeat (42). In detailing these developments, he draws mainly from the perspective of the Nahua people’s experience of Christianization, through selective acculturation, dual participation, and conservation of form. He discusses how the missionaries tried to understand the indigenous worldview and find analogues in the local culture, whether through the veneration of Mary as a seeming stand-in for Aztec goddesses or by utilizing Nahua concepts to express Christian theology (40). Lindenfeld also briefly mentions Maya and Incan interactions during the colonial period. Absent, however, are vast regions of Latin America, with a history of fascinating encounters such as the Jesuit mission to the Guarani and other indigenous groups in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil. The curtailing of time and space mainly to the Nahuas unfortunately paints a partial picture of an exceptionally vibrant Christian region of the world, past and present.In chapter 3, Lindenfeld demonstrates a more promising approach in his treatment of the expansion of Christianity in North America. He contributes to this by locating silenced Native American voices within the broader scope of world Christianity. Lindenfeld aptly describes the diffusion and expansion of Christianity in North America as a multidimensional process. This process occurred primarily—according to his typology—by the concentration and diffusion of Christianity among Native Americans. This assumed various forms through cycles of diffuse spirituality followed by periods of concentrated spirituality.Diffuse spirituality is evident in the selective incorporation of English Protestant and French Catholic religion along with the preservation of aspects of Native American “political, economic, and cultural autonomy” (62) in the colonial northeastern United States and Canada from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Concentrated spirituality can be seen in selective acculturation, such as that witnessed in some indigenous settlements during the eighteenth-century Great Awakening (61). By the nineteenth century, as the interaction between Christianity and Native culture was increasingly taken for granted, greater concentration of religion, resistance, and vernacular translation of Scripture emerged (72–73). In the Great Plains and American Southwest this typically led to dual participation and negotiation of spiritual practices as Native Americans attempted to preserve their cultural and religious practices (73).Lindenfeld offers an insightful contribution in the North America chapter by highlighting the complexity of interactions between Native Americans and Christians of European descent. Rather than a unidirectional line of influence, Lindenfeld rightly notes the contribution Native Americans made “to the white world” by the “preservation of an earth-centered spirituality” and to European understandings and development of their own spirituality in the New World (89).In chapter 4 on Africa and its diaspora, which starts with a discussion of the Portuguese introduction of Catholicism into the Kingdom of the Kongo starting in the early 1500s, Lindenfeld ambitiously attempts to show how his eight categories of cross-cultural interaction fit in the African context. In the process, both the strengths and limitations of his approach are revealed. By including the history of the transatlantic slave trade as a diaspora narrative, Lindenfeld enlarges the history of African Christianity. That said, Lindenfeld’s excursus into British scholar Humphrey Fisher’s theories on the diffusion of Islam in Africa seems to oversimplify the complexity of the religious encounter of Africans with this “world” religion (94).In chapter 5 on the Middle East, Lindenfeld notes that despite episodic instances of peaceful coexistence between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Middle East, the predominant form of interaction between Christians and non-Christians in the region has been resistance (142, 144). Lindenfeld masterfully summarizes the encounters between non-Christians and various forms of Christianity, beginning with its arrival in the seventh century, then exploring the role of Catholicism during the Crusades and analyzing the various sixteenth-century reform movements that concentrated the spiritualities of Christians and Muslims. The chapter ends by underscoring the role of Protestant schools in subsequent centuries and their relationship (mostly negative) with indigenous Christians, Jews, and Muslims.The Middle East chapter showcases the usefulness of Lindenfeld’s technical vocabulary. His description of mutual selective incorporation and of the complicated interactions between Christians and Muslims in the region allows for more nuanced descriptions than simply acceptance, rejection, and syncretism. On the other hand, the chapter also highlights areas where Lindenfeld’s taxonomy could be strengthened. Despite arguing against using the term “syncretism,” he continues to employ it, even when his own terms might work better, such as when he calls Messianic Judaism “a genuine syncretism” rather than a conservation of form. Moreover, Lindenfeld seems to lack a term to describe the kind of interaction with Christianity in which people engage with foreign Christians for their own (often nonreligious) ends, as when the Copts use the French to climb the social hierarchy while resisting French culture and missionaries. This seems irreducible to acculturation, incorporation, or acceptance. A term such as “creative opportunism,” in which the introduction of a nonindigenous form of Christianity disrupts the status quo, creating new social, political, and economic possibilities for indigenous people, would augment Lindenfeld’s analysis. Lindenfeld also seemingly idealizes non-Christian or nonmonotheistic religions and societies in his description of Christianity’s encounters with them (143). For example, he attributes religious persecution in the Middle East to the establishment of monotheistic state religions while ignoring similar phenomena in nonmonotheistic cultures such as China and Japan in the early modern era (221).In chapter 6 on India, Lindenfeld begins with an examination of the term “Hinduism,” suggesting that prior to the nineteenth century, the term was used to describe the religious practices and ideas of all those Indian peoples who did not self-identify as Muslims. Lindenfeld therefore claims that “Hinduism” has always been a “container of contradictions” (199) and demonstrates how this became evident in Hindu and Christian encounters. As he shows, this was manifest both through the ire Christian missionaries provoked among many in Indian society, but also through Christianity’s “attractive force” for those Indians who felt marginalized by the caste system, as well as for some “women and ethnic minorities” (199). Education and translation (185), thus, played key roles in the spread of Christianity, allowing many marginalized communities advance socially and experience a level of status and material security previously denied them. This elicited two basic responses from Indian society: first, Christianity acted as a stimulus for reform and concentration of spirituality, thereby galvanizing Indian nationalism; and, second, Christianity served as an “attractive force” of social enhancement in a caste-based society (192–93). Lindenfeld’s India chapter is a concise yet illuminating account of its religious reality. With brevity and care, he sketches a history of Hindu-Christian relations and demonstrates how those relations continue to influence India’s public spaces today.In chapter 7 on East Asia, Lindenfeld’s line of reasoning seems somewhat more mixed. He begins with an overview of the “three teachings” associated with the Chinese religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, then analyzes the Chinese emperor’s reception of the Jesuits and later the Franciscans in terms of the diffuse and concentrated spirituality spectrum. Lindenfeld goes on to probe the Taiping movement through his typology, avoiding any pronouncement on whether it was genuinely Christian. More than other historians of world Christianity, Lindenfeld delves into other religions, as he notes that three-fourths of Japanese households reported having a Shinto or Buddhist altar at home in the 1980s and mentions a 2007 survey revealing that more Chinese venerated ancestral spirits at gravesites than the combined total of Chinese who visit a place of worship (254).Lindenfeld astutely chronicles the explosive growth of Korean Christianity in the twentieth century, but some of his psychologizing seems unsubstantiated, as when he quotes a study that speculates: “God/Jesus replaces the husband as the primary intimate companion and the locus of male authority in a woman’s life” (252). Moreover, methodologically, Lindenfeld’s categories here in this chapter are impressive but somewhat question-begging. How does his model explain the conflict Christianity faced in places with diffuse spirituality (e.g., Japan) while being accepted in other areas also characterized by a diffuse spirituality (e.g., Korea)?In chapter 8, Lindenfeld presents a more promising approach when discussing Christianity in four nations and regions of the Pacific: the Philippines, Polynesia (including a special section on New Zealand), Australia, and Melanesia. Lindenfeld argues that Christianity took root there by greater dual participation, given that many people living there already had notions of sin and repentance (293). He suggests that missionaries’ abilities to navigate these complex relationships would ensure either success or, in the worst cases, a bloody death. Diffuse spirituality abounded in each region, being sometimes harnessed into a concentration of spirituality, as in the case of the fiestas the Spanish created in the Philippines, or coexisting with a concentration of spirituality, as in the case of Polynesian notions of manu (or mana) and tapu (taboo) (263-65). This chapter reveals that despite the often-deadly encounters and clashes of mores between indigenes and missionaries or colonial powers, indigenous persons were crucial to spreading Christianity.However, it is difficult to hear indigenous voices in the Pacific chapter, particularly in the case of Australia. Lindenfeld’s reliance on secondary sources limits his data, making it difficult to understand what indigenous Christianity meant and still means to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Lindenfeld’s focus on documentary sources reinforces the great need for more studies in world Christianity to include examinations of material culture as sources of indigenous voices where documentary evidence is lacking or inaccessible through limitations of language (281).After this tour de force of intercultural encounters between Christianity across different geographical areas, Lindenfeld extrapolates implications for the future of spirituality in the West (281): first, religious interactions do not follow a progressive Weberian track, and, second, the pattern of concentration and diffusion of spirituality he identifies can be applied to the West as well (i.e., Europe; 293–94). Lindenfeld concludes by claiming that cross-cultural interactions seen through the spread of global Christianity can teach readers that Christianity is not necessarily dying or becoming more secular. Rather, its future will depend on how well its adherents balance the concentrated and diffuse elements in its spirituality (300). While Lindenfeld performs a masterful evaluation of secularism in the West, one has to wonder why it is necessary to look at Christianity across seven different geographical areas to reach this conclusion?Overall, David Lindenfeld’s World Christianity and Indigenous Experience is a major contribution to the field of world Christianity, in part because it examines regions and peoples that have been understudied in world Christianity, such as indigenes in North America and the Pacific. His ambitious book provides an edifying journey across the globe in the footsteps of missionaries, but his overreliance on the dual lens of spiritual density and appropriation sometimes diminishes the rich complexity evinced by the diversity of encounters with Christianity that he discusses. The results at times may seem like a kaleidoscope of world Christianity arranged nationally and regionally in ways that are more sociological than historical. Nevertheless, Lindenfeld’s work deserves praise for attempting to reorient the positionality from which one approaches and observes the spread of Christianity, moving from the traditional gaze of the missionary to perspective of those people and localities that received it in their own indigenous contexts. His work contributes to the wider discipline of world Christianity by fitting it within the broader scope of “global history” and reclaiming it from its relative neglect “by world historians of the modern era” (3).