Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. - book reviews

Christian Century, Dec 8, 1993 by Lewis R. Rambo

Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation.

Edited by Robert W. Hefner. University of California Press, 326 pp., $45.00; paperback, $15.00.

CONVERSION to Christianity is a splendid addition to the recent upsurge of publications on the topic of conversion. Robert Hefner, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, compiled this book from presentations given at a conference on Conversion to the Worm Religions, held at BU in 1988. All the contributors, with the exception of New Testament scholar Howard Clark Kee, are anthropologists.

Hefner's introduction is a sophisticated survey and assessment of the relationships between "traditional" religions and "world" religions. Though keenly aware of the problems involved in such distinctions, Hefner uses Max Weber, Robin Horton, Robert Bellah and Clifford Geertz, among others, to examine the ways in which world religions, especially Christianity, have greatly influenced much of the world. He compares these religions' institutional and ideological qualities to the resources, resilience and creativity of indigenous religions and their responses to missionary overtures. The reactions ranged across the spectrum from enthusiastic adoption to selective acceptance or rejection of particular features to total repudiation.

The book may be considered an extended and fascinating dialogue with Robin Horton. Horton's provocative essays on conversion, published in 1971 and 1975, serve as the major point of reference. His central point is that indigenous peoples are active in their engagement of their circumstances, and that they creatively adapt their traditional religions in order to more viably reconstruct their cosmologies and modes of life in light of changing conditions.

The positive response of many Africans to Christian and Muslim advocates is due, Horton contends, to Africans' modifying their own cosmologies, moving from a virtually exclusive focus on the microcosm (local spirits and ancestors) to the macrocosm of contact and interaction with the wider world of Africa, colonial powers and missionary Christianity. Horton is especially critical of the notion that the mere presence of Christianity and Islam in sub-Saharan Africa was solely responsible for the enormous creativity and resilience of African religions.

Among the most important contributions of the book are the richly textured descriptions of conversion (or resistance to the process) in places such as Africa, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and Taiwan. These ethnographic studies are sensitive to multiple points of view--those of the missionaries, the indigenous peoples and the critical scholars--and also to the complex worlds of those who accept, reject or mix with indigenous beliefs and behaviors the religion proffered by the missionary.

One of the highlights of these anthropological field reports is the scholars' scrupulous observation of particular situations and their receptiveness to novelty, surprise and perplexity. Their willingness to uncover what actually happens when Christian missionaries and indigenous peoples interact is a singular accomplishment in this time of ideological conflict about the motives, methods and consequences of missionary endeavor.

These essays make us aware that each encounter is unique and should never be forced to fit some prefabricated theory or narrow set of presuppositions. Anthropologists are willing, perhaps more than most academics, to confront the messiness of real human situations and not be too eager to force data onto the Procrustean beds of academic theory. That is not to say that theory is not important to anthropologists, but they are willing to recognize the extraordinary complexity of a situation.

The tone and content of Conversion to Christianity invite dialogue with theologians, missiologists and other scholars interested in the nature of religious change and the role of religion in the modern world. This book points to the variety and complexity of conversion and provides a sophisticated exploration of a process that has been and continues to be a critical factor in shaping the lives of millions of people.