David Lindenfeld's ambitious volume proposes to shift the scholarly lens on the expansion of Western European Christianity on a global scale to focus on indigenous experiences of conversion. Lindenfeld proposes to interpret the indigenous perspectives on Christianity and their strategies in relation to Christianity's demand to evangelize and convert native peoples. His volume surveys indigenous experience in colonial Latin America, Native North America, Africa and the African diaspora, the Middle East, India, East Asia, and the Pacific. Wide-ranging in scope and offering a synoptic perspective on global processes that have become increasingly important since the fifteenth century, Lindenfeld combines analyses of individual regions with global coverage. He looks closely at how religion is interwoven with political, economic, and social history.
Lindenfeld draws extensively from his previous research and publications on indigenous Christianities (based on primary and secondary sources from various regions, though he has never done local field research in any indigenous communities). He and his colleagues have made important theoretical reflections on the question of conversion. One of the prominent themes he finds cutting across the multitude of experiences in colonial Latin America, for example, is the tendency in global Christianity and local indigenous experiences towards both “concentrations” and “diffusion” of spirituality (47). These, along with a series of other terms presented in the Introduction, offer a heuristic framework for characterizing indigenous “strategies” in their interaction with the agents of Christian expansion, especially the missions. This book offers to the reader a nuanced perspective on the diversity, range, and complexity of indigenous conversion experiences and strategies from resistance to accommodation and to commitment to Christianity.
However, as an Americanist whose research both in local indigenous communities and in the archives has focused on indigenous histories, cosmologies, and conversion to Christianity, I found this work to be highly selective in its presentation of cases, perhaps necessarily so given the global scope of the work. Yet it omits whole regions where discussions of these questions have generated significant scholarly production. I also did not find convincing the claim that this work is written from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples since the vast majority of his sources—outside of Native North America—provide non-indigenous perspectives on local situations.
Similarly, his chapter on Native North America religious movements of the colonial and modern periods leaves aside, for example, a discussion of the well-known movements from Neolin of the Delaware to the Native American church, each of which represented a different form of accommodation to, or rejection or revision of, Christian symbolism. He affirms that these “nativist movements” converged with Christian movements “at the level of strategy, namely concentration of spirituality” (my emphasis; 64) as a means to revitalize native cultures. While he discusses the nineteenth-century “Ghost Dance” and Christianities among the Lakota, he makes no mention of continuities in more recent pan-indigenous Christian movements, for example, such as that led by Lakota theologian Richard Twiss and the Wiconi International.
Chapter 2 on the region of “Colonial Latin America” is somewhat awkwardly subtitled “The Nahua (Aztecs) and Their Neighbors” (31). Regarding the Maya, Lindenfeld's seemingly apologetic view of early Franciscan missionary relations with the Indians (33) hardly squares with their intolerance and “epistemicide” through their burning of indigenous books. Lindenfeld's discussion would have benefited greatly from a dialogue with other authors who have written about the same questions on indigenous Christianities. Jennifer Scheper-Hughes, in particular, has offered a novel and important interpretation from an historical perspective of the indigenous reshaping of Christianity in Central America in her The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (New York University press, 2021).
Neither Lowland South America (especially Amazonia) nor the Andean Highlands receive much attention in this chapter. The complex Andean and Mayan religious histories are reduced to two pages in a comparative section on “Yucatan and the Andes” (44–45). For Lowland South America, there are numerous works, by Brazilian and other scholars, that have looked very closely at the meaning of conversion for Amazonian native peoples. Aparecida Vilaça's book Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia (University of California Press, 2016), for example, offers one of the better discussions of “Amerindian perspectivism,” a kind of cosmology that is often found in indigenous Amazonia that expresses a predominant concern with predation (especially in its hidden forms of sorcery) as a form of relation among beings. This has implications for conversion to Christianity and related discussions regarding indigenous sorcery and prophet movements in the colonial context.
In the section on Melanesia, of the chapter on “The Pacific” (chapter 8), Lindenfeld cites approvingly J. Robbins’ 2004 book regarding one of the most pervasive and globalizing missionary organizations ever to work in this area since World War II, the New Tribes Mission (NTM), based in Sanford, Florida. This organization has also operated in South America, and a comparison with Melanesia would have been welcome. The organization has always condemned indigenous spiritualities and challenged them to absorb mission-taught Christian identity. Yet, for a variety of reasons, despite the traumas from the epistemicide, native peoples have both shaped and been shaped by Christianity, and new religious and political identities have emerged from the interweaving of religious ideas.
Over the past half-century, there has been a large number of important scholarly volumes on indigenous conversions to Christianity. The Anthropology of Christianity, Religious Studies scholars, and historians have all contributed to a better understanding of indigenous conversions throughout the world. Native theologians and clergy, such as Vine DeLoria and George Tinker, have long offered valuable reflections on Christianity and Native traditions. Scholars of global Christianity in world history have much to offer to the discussion. The topic, in short, is worthy of an encyclopedia. Lindenfeld's book provides a panoramic overview of regional, historical situations across the globe, seeking to incorporate indigenous perspectives on spirituality where possible. His conceptual framework offers a heuristic that points to potential paths for future research on conversion among indigenous communities at local levels.
