The title of David Lindenfeld's ambitious volume is likely to cause some initial confusion. This is not a study of ‘indigenous’ people in the sense of aboriginal populations confronted by European colonisers nor a synthetic history of their experiences of Christianity. Instead, it is a collection of seven regional surveys of the introduction and reception of Christianity in colonial Latin America, Native North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, India, East Asia and the Pacific. By ‘indigenous’, Lindenfeld appears to mean non-Europeans in general and so the surveys of the Middle East and Asia include populations not generally labelled as ‘Indigenous’, even including groups belonging to Christian sects predating the post-1500 missionary surge out of Europe and its settler colonies. The chapters vary in composition and scope – the chapter on Native North America, for instance, focuses mainly on the case studies of the Cherokee and Sioux Nations while the chapters dealing with Asia present general accounts largely organised around the impact or lack thereof of particular churches and missions on local populations as whole. Lindenfeld has read widely in the scholarly literatures and writes clearly and confidently. While regional experts will no doubt question some of his choices and interpretations, the book serves as an excellent orientation to the varying fortunes of Christianity in different regions of the non-Western world.
The regional surveys provide the materials for Lindenfeld's broader goal ‘to investigate the strategies that a variety of indigenous people worldwide employed in dealing with the presence of imported Christianity in their midst during the colonial period’ (p. 2). In a thirty-page introduction, he advances a familiar critique of how world histories, including those focused on Christianity, tend to ‘view indigenous people as static, unchanging, “traditional” in contrast to the dynamism of the Europeans’ (p. 2). While scholars studying religious change at the local level have increasingly focused on the agency of local people, most world historians continue to marginalise religion or else frame religious change in terms of master narratives such as the transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘world’ religions or secularisation. The goal of highlighting local agency in histories of world Christianity is further stymied by reliance on concepts of conversion and syncretism which Lindenfeld complains are far too imprecise to capture the nuances of local responses, on the one hand, and lend themselves to the assertion of unilinear narratives of change, on the other. Countering such deficiencies requires a more precise vocabulary that accurately reflects the range and multileveled responses non-Western people have had in their encounters with Christianity.
Lindenfeld identifies eight types of responses, which he characterises as ‘strategies’, stretching across a continuum from ‘resistance and rejection’ to ‘acceptance and commitment’. The more mixed responses between these poles include ‘selective incorporation’ of Christian teachings and practices; ‘conversion of form’ where indigenous elements are maintained with a Christian framework; ‘vernacular translation’ in which local people develop their own distinctive understanding of Christianity; ‘dual religious participation’ in which people retain commitments to separated Christian and indigenous religious spheres; and ‘selective acculturation’ which embraces elements of Christianity specifically because they are foreign.
Lindenfeld reserves special attention for an eighth mode, ‘concentration of spirituality’, which he places at the centrepoint of his schema and which comes closest to a master theme for the book. World histories have tended to conform to a narrative of an evolution from diffuse local cultural forms to ever more homogeneity, from worlds of ‘enchantment’, in Weberian terms, to a singular world of rationality and conformity. The study of local responses to Christianity suggest a much more complex and pluralistic reality. All religious traditions, Lindenfeld argues, exhibit a tension between concentrated expressions in the forms of religious offices, collective rituals, core mythologies and so forth and the diffuse more personal and private experiences of individuals. Engagement with mission Christianity brought not only new foci for concentrated spirituality but also shifts in the more diffused ways people experienced and expressed spirituality. In more of a coda than a conclusion, Lindenfeld contests the idea that the Western world is becoming ever more secular. Instead, taking an expansive view of religion, he argues instead that the trend has been towards an ever more diffused personal spirituality. The inherent tension that he suggests is at the heart of every religious tradition now plays out on a scale, as Churches continue to expand in the global South even as they decline in the West.
The short conclusion provides one of the rare instances where Lindenfeld attempts to generalise beyond regional levels. Suggesting that his schema of ‘strategies’ should be deployed as a ‘vocabulary’ rather than a typology, for the most part he draws on it lightly, more as commentary than analysis. Each chapter presents an informative synthesis of regional scholarship enlivened by the author's often acute insights on the myriad ways local peoples responded to the challenges and potentialities in their encounters with Western Christianity. The general picture Lindenfeld presents, however, is for the most part fragmentary and diffuse. World Christianity and indigenous experience does not so much serve as a model for a comprehensive approach to World Christianity that acknowledges the contributions of the non-Westerners who today make up the majority of its adherents but rather as evidence of how challenging that goal remains.
