In this fascinating book, Jesse Zink uncovers the continuities and ruptures behind the mass conversion to Christianity of Dinka people in South Sudan at the end of the last century, a process that began during the senseless wars that killed tens of thousands. In the middle years of Sudan's second civil war, in the 1990s, the author, an Anglican clergyman, had encountered many so called ‘lost boys’, young male refugees of the Nilotic cattle-keepers, refugees to Ethiopia or Kenya. The origins of John Garang and other leaders in the South can be found in this dimension, the sacred-secular grey zone that emerges with the most clarity in trauma, and retrieves from the past for itself genuine or spurious precedents.

Dinka people had seen Anglican missionaries’ teachings and divulged mainly socially burdensome individuals to their schools, widows and the lame. Now in the ‘immense social carnage’ of warfare (p. 7), masses of ordinary Dinka people declared for ‘Christian’ leaders, then were vetted as members of the Anglican (Church Missionary Society) communion. Zink shows among these Christians continuity with the ‘Dinka institution of prophecy’, of the jok (p. 9) somehow without in the least disparaging their orthodoxy.

Besides a brief period of revivalism in 1947 (p. 32), ‘religious change’ meant ‘leaving the cattle camps for good’ until late in the second civil war. By then, because men then might have only dispersed communities to return to (p. 77), religious change stopped implying this desocialisation. Real processes of dislocation and dispersal accelerated first. The heart of the work is a study of the Dinka men and women leading the revival in the ’90s, this time among the mainstream Dinka, and how their composition of hymns refracted and reinterpreted warfare and Christianity together, to nurture the growing Dinka faith. The millennium is often expected; its fire is punishment for ‘worshipping wood and animals’. In reconstructing a popular theology, Dinka Christians saw the world as a punishment or a trial. Notably, however, they adopted as the word/idea for Jesus’ ‘cross’, the word for the solid central post of the Dinka cattle byre – a very similar equation was made by Baptist missionaries in Marathi in India. It was solidity itself when their actual cattle herds’ byres had often been torched. War made the turn to the city permanent for many young refugee men, as by the sudden permeability of the Dinka.

Zink then considers new Dinka ‘prophets’ claiming Christianity. They were partly modeled on the nineteenth-century Ngundeng Bong and Ariandhit, Dinka prophet-leaders operating earlier. A high point is Zink's consideration of Kon Ajith, the naked prophet (in some Dinka areas men wore nothing); his interaction with the SPLA (the Southern Sudanese forces) enhanced his reputation. These prophets found Sudan and so themselves in the Old Testament, as ‘Cush’, and formed an identification with Jews – something quite common (Zink does not seem to know this) in the annals of Christian missions worldwide. The Cush reference distinguished them however. It was then made manifest in the ‘Good News’ translation of the Bible that proliferated in the ’90s, which supplied the extra-King Jamesian subheading ‘God will punish Sudan’ as if biblical text. The new Christians recovered earlier sacred missionaries’ legacies, from the 1920s, as respected (in retrospect) ancestral figures. The appeal to these almost forgotten foreign men helped heal rifts that might otherwise have sundered the nascent congregations.

Zink uses Godfrey Lienhardt, a fascinating guide to perceived ‘forces’, to understand what was going on in Sudan and South Sudan, but then reverts to Robin Horton's intellectualist and subject-oriented notion of religion as explanatory and predictive, an old-fashioned turn and less useful. The shattering of the microcosm was a precondition for conversion; well, yes, here, the community was truly shattered in the 1980s and ’90s. There is little to no context given for jok as an institution (pp. 40, 42) – it is ageless for Zink, and the background is not rich. The benefits of Christian communion for ‘explaining and predicting’ the world are not so clear. What is ‘efficacious’ divine healing? Christianity's ‘benefits’ (p. 47) were not always apparent? The Church was ‘rooted in an understanding of God’ (p. 61)? In these moments we are stuck in the domain of emic terms, translations evoking people's perceptions, masquerading as analysis.

The Durkheimian view would take religion, as Russell McCucheon chooses to put it (Critics not caretakers: redescribing the public study of religion, New York 2001, 23–5), as ‘a social formation’, so that the deployment of religion as a term is a ‘redescriptive’ strategy, not a way to indicate a domain in which change occurs. If in the end the Hortonian (and not Durkheimian) approach is taken in explanation, Zink can only sum up, ‘when other actors in societies seemed to be impotent then women [and men] turned to the Christian God’ (p. 143). One could press that analysis further.

But one cannot end a discussion of this thoughtful and revealing book in this way. Instead let us note Zink's extraordinary and revealing look at the songs of Mary Achol Deng, Mary Aruay Majuh, Doruka Akuek Makuac and other indigenous transformers of Christianity into Dinka. They extended the rhythmic and verbal musical expectations of jok songs into a re-appropriation of the CMS tradition, producing a ‘Book of Songs for Worship’. Anglican priests vetted it, and so the destruction all around them was part of a change, ‘God is bringing into the world’ (p. 149). The elements that raise some men above all others in prophetic leadership lie both in reborn Christianity, and in the Dinka institution of the holy site and holy man, or jok – put through the fires of modern warfare and refugeeism. The native literature that Zink consults, insofar as it confuses emic and etic terminology in our secular field of the study of religion, does not predict what is best in Christianity and catastrophe in Sudan. Zink's study is an important one for historians of Sudan as well as for pastors.