Efforts to Christianize the non-Western world were a persistent feature of Western colonialism. Corroborating a salient trend in colonial studies, the seven essays in this book (by historians and students of religion) emphasize the agency of intended converts throughout the world (Africa, Thailand, Latin America, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, and China). “Confronted with a Christian ‘package deal,’ local populations have demonstrated a remarkable ability to select certain elements while rejecting others,” observes editor Stephen Kaplan (p. 2). Kaplan, an Africanist, proposes a six-fold typology for analyzing these relationships: toleration, translation, assimilation, Christianization, acculturation, and incorporation. These categories move from the most orthodox through successively greater “indigenization” to the most heterodox forms of Christianity.
Few of the essays employ this model explicitly in examining conversion efforts by both Catholics and Protestants, but they draw on its components to explain cross-religiocultural relationships and adaptations. The contributions tend to accentuate the “indigenization” of Christianity, and this characteristic obtains in the two Latin American contributions: Jan Szeminski’s “From Inca Gods to Spanish Saints and Demons” and Eric Van Young’s “Messiah and the Masked Man: Popular Ideology in Mexico, 1820-1821.”
Following a pattern in recent studies of colonial Peru, Szeminski uses the writings of Guaman Poma de Ayala and Pacha Cuti yamqui Salca Maygua to argue that Christian doctrines of original sin and salvation were rejected or reinterpreted according to Andean worldviews and concepts of sin, and concludes that “Catholic history went native” (p. 72). His analysis does not distinguish between Inca state religion and the pre-Inca Andean cults and beliefs that, other Andeanists (such as Sabine MacCormack and Kenneth Mills) have argued, survived Spanish proselytization.
Van Young’s contribution complements his recent analyses of the divide between popular and creole ideology in late colonial Mexico, in which he argues that the symbols that united elites and popular sectors in the revolt against Spain had very different meanings for each group. Here, in an attempt to explain how Indian rebels could venerate the apex of oppressive colonial rule —the king—while killing gachupines, he emphasizes the interface between Spanish monarchical and patriarchal traditions and Indian messianic beliefs. Rooted in Mesoamerican traditions of a cyclical cosmology, man-gods, and messianic prophecy, messianic expectations also incorporated the idea of the Spanish king as protector of local community structures. “Indian messianic hopes represented a primitive political irredentism: a basically conservative, even reactionary ideology combining elements of native monarchical legitimism with those of a rigidly localocentric worldview . . .” (p. 146). This is certainly a far cry from creole visions of a new state. Such heterodox interpretations had been nourished in the forms of popular piety tolerated by the baroque church, and a permutating messianism (in forms that varied with the degree of acculturation) survived Bourbon attempts to impose orthodoxy.
