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Is Conversion to Christianity a move towards or away from Modernity?

When applying the language and terminology of anthropology to Christianity the two often
sit uneasily. No more so is this the case than when regarding matters of conversion. In the
first instance it is difficult to arrive at a definition of what exactly might constitute
conversion to Christianity, as Cannell points out, many of the concepts involved are
apparently “chimerical” since Christianity “is not an arbitrary construct, but ... a historically
complex one.” Christianity in theory and practice are different across the world and both
are often influenced by other cultures and ideas; Christianity is not monolithic. Jean
Comaroff cites the example of Tshidi Pentecostalists who seem to combine both indigenous
and U.S. Pentecostal spatial symbolisms into their rituals.

The discipline of anthropology is one rooted in enlightenment rationale and critique of

religion. Early social theory was, broadly speaking, social evolutionist, “at least in the loose
sense of speaking of one form of society giving rise to another, more complex and less
‘primitive’ form over time.” This has important implications for how the theory behind these
disciplines has developed. As Robbins states, “The core problem on the theoretical level is
that cultural anthropology has largely been a science of continuity.” By this he means that
cultural anthropologists have for the most part either argued or implied that the things they
study, for instance symbols and meanings in societies, have an enduring quality and are not
readily subject to change. Whilst there is no inherent fault in this way of thinking, for as he
himself admits, “in many (indeed, perhaps most) cases, cultural structures, patterns, or
models are extremely enduring, and even in cases of radical cultural change many of them
may persist alongside the new ones that people take on,” one must, he maintains, be aware
of the prejudices inherent in such an approach.

These ideas rest upon an essentially desacralized and naturalized view of time. It is, “not an
episodic view of time that expects major disruptions and discrete epochs but an
“evolutionist” one that sees change “as a kind of perpetual process” rather than an event.”
This process occurs within what Benjamin (1969, 261) calls “homogeneous, empty time,” “in
which all moments are alike and effect follows cause in a predictable manner... and supports
a model of the world in which continuity is the default assumption.”

Religious experience, often behind religious conversion, is sudden, heterogeneous and

complex. Therefore, it seems to be beyond the primary considerations of cultural
anthropologists. Traditionally, conversion to Christianity amongst native tribes has been
regarded as a kind of secondary phenomena or top coat that has been applied by external
forces” to a pre-extant culture. Since the prevailing view is that cultures are in some way
discrete, the Christianity visible is only mock and evidence rather of the corruptive influence
western ideas have had on an otherwise ‘untainted’ society. Drawn from the original
enlightenment critique of religion anthropologists have often sought to examine ‘earlier’
and more ‘primitive’ cultures since they can be seen to be more authentic . Robbins argues
that amongst anthropologists there is a “conviction of superiority ... which leads to an
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anthropological hermeneutic of suspicion” when looking at primitive societies that have

been influenced by Christian missionaries.

With regards to conversion, this suspicion often manifests in arguments that “converts’
fundamental ways of looking at the world have not really changed.” One common argument
that anthropologists deploy in support of such skepticism is that people actually convert for
everyday, pragmatic reasons. For example, Cannell writes of how some local informants in
New Order Indonesia discussed their Christianity in terms of being modern” especially after
the colonial government declare that citizens should modernise themselves by adopting a
world religion. These arguments suggest that, while converts may dress up their speech and
behaviour in Christian clothes, they still maintain the same view of the spiritual world as
they had done before. The Comaroffs in Of Revelation and Revolution clearly illustrate this
approach to the matter. Their ethnography argues that Protestant missionaries working
amongst the Tswana in South Africa failed to teach the indigenous population the message
of the gospel. On the other hand, however, they succeeded in imparting aspects of the
capitalist culture they represented in less verbally articulate ways and by doing so they
profoundly changed the world in which the Tswana lived.

The link between conversion to Protestantism and discourses of modernity is a fairly

demonstrable fact, that said, one might contest that evidence like that found in Of
Revelation and Revolution illustrates more the connection between Christianity and the
liberal capitalist ideas of Western colonists more than the modernising power of the actual
conversion process, if one might call the pseudo-adoption of Christianity a conversion at all.
More recently there have been attempts to examine the transformative power of the
introduction of Christianity into a new society. Whitehouse argues that “conversion to
Protestantism introduced a new and distinct form of cognitive experience” for some of the
native population where it was introduced in Melanesia, and that this was clearly
recognisable. The religion found in Melanesia was a “complex and fundamentally
indissoluble mixture of heterogeneous elements” some of which appeared to be indigenous,
others appeared to be Christian, while others seemed to be syncretistic or novel.
Whitehouse argues that the new cognitive experience which Protestantism offered “centred
on the learning and reproduction of text based liturgies. Standardization and replicability
enabled the rapid spread of these new forms, in an account highly reminiscent of Weberian
rationalization.” Protestantism provided the Melanesians with a new of thinking without
eradicating the pre-existing ways since they could perform different roles. Christian worship
and revelation are “intimately linked to a regime of procedural and schema-based learning”
which is continually consolidated by regular observance of orthodox Church dogma.
Melanesian rituals, on the other hand, operated not via semantic knowledge like Church
Dogma, but rather through the memory of climactic events and hence provided
“declarative, exegetical knowledge, codified as abstract generalisable religious principles.”
Certainly it is undeniable that the missionary Christianity that Whitehouse is examining has
had a transformative effect on Melanesian thought, “in appropriating, reinterpreting, or
rejecting missionary Christianity, Melanesians have been grappling with profoundly alien
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models of codification, transmission, and political association:” evidence that missionary

Christianity has had a transformative, modernising even, effect on Melanesian religious
thought.

However, Rutherford has shown how in Biak despite the apparent success of the
missionaries in the form of mass conversions; the power of the Gospel become understood
as a mysterious absent force, reaffirming pre-existing ontologies, rather than being
recognised as the word of God. The Biaks continued to understand power as “the lure of the
ancestral ... of kinship ... and of the foreign.” Whilst to the missionaries present at that time
the conversion may have heralded the emergence of “modern forms of consciousness”
amongst the Biak and the evidence of the modernising power of Christianity; Rutherford’s
analysis hints more that conversion was a new strategy for incorporating foreign power, and
engaging with coveted objects. The bible and Christian religious objects, as other, became
directly associated with the indigenous religious objects, korwar. Korwar were objects said
to be occupied by the spirits of dead ancestors which would provide good fortune, similarly
Christian texts began to be regarded almost as “booty.” It was the very strangeness of the
goods and words provided by the evangelists was what endowed them with this power.
Rutherford shows how in Biak mythology there is a pattern to the establishment of magical
objects and that the appearance of missionaries with the bible could easily be construed as
a continuation of this mythology. In Biak mythology magical objects are found and then, in
time disappear, and then new foreign objects are found or appear which are held to be
inhabited by spirits and are thus revered for their potential to bring good fortune. An
example of the misappropriation of Christian rhetoric in Biak can be found in the Koreri
uprisings. Koreri uprisings were intended to occur at the return of a great ancestor and
would be heralded by a prophet. These prophets used the language and rhetoric of the
missionaries and even read the gospel as a reworking of the ancestor myth in order to rouse
the masses.

The difference between the integration of Christian practice in Biak and in Whitehouse’
studies seems to be the extent to which the Christian mission is enforced by the governing
nation. In Biak there was little or no support for what few missionaries were there hence it
would have been difficult for the missionaries who were dependent on the villagers
themselves,, to demonstrate the physical power of the Christian faith. In Whitehouse’
studies, however, missionaries operated in areas where there was at least some colonial
presence and hence the advantages of a Christian way of life would be easier to impart,
both because of the display of power and because native Melanesians could be controlled
meaning that disorganised uprisings such as the Koreri would be unlikely to occur. However,
this begs the question to what extent any modernisation is the result of something
specifically Christian

In conclusion, historically there has been a definite link between the introduction of
Christianity and a move towards modernity. However, it remains extremely difficult to
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ascertain the relationship between the spread of modernity and Christianity for it seems
extremely difficult to isolate Christianity and modernity both from the contexts from which
they arose and from those which they encounter in new cultures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Joel Robbins - Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture, Belief, Time,
and the Anthropology of Christianity
 Fenella Cannell – The Anthropology of Christianity

a little thin but still some important points are made - 63