The history of world Christianity has typically relied on certain binary categories such as Western/non-Western, missionary/native, modern/traditional, and liberal/conservative. Our globalizing context, in which well-established political and ideological borders are constantly being crossed, raises questions about the adequacy of such binaries. Using Christianity in North India as a case study, this article explores the limits of these inherited frameworks for the study of world Christianity.
While the western Christian missionary desire to ‘civilise’ Christians from other cultures has been well documented and researched, the desire of local Christians to appropriate western civilisation in the face of missionary resistance to such appropriation has not been critically studied. This article examines debates in nineteenth-century North India missionary conferences between Indian Christians who wanted to adopt many accoutrements of western civilisation, and missionaries who wanted Indian Christians to retain as much of their Indian culture as possible. The article also looks at parallel cases in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that local Christians were extracting and employing materials from European civilisation and culture to create new religious and social identities for themselves in their own particular contexts. This argument provides a counterpoint to Homi Bhabha's view of hybridity and mimicry as processes imposed by foreign western imperial regimes on subject peoples. In the process of creating new communal identities, local Christians clashed with missionaries who were at least partly motivated by the ideal of a native and indigenous church, but who also were worried about losing their authority to westernised Asian and African Christians in the emerging church. Local Christians also clashed with other members of their own society who wanted the former to keep their low social status. Indian Christians’ understandings of what counted as indigenous – which could include foreign influences – differed in significant ways from missionary and some Indian views of indigeneity.
A hybrid identity, which results from an amalgamation of different cultures, different religious traditions and ideologies, and different social locations, with each having varying degrees of importance for identity formation, and being more or less well defined, has been a feature of Jewish and Christian life since biblical times. This article explores a variety of processes of hybridization in the formation of Christian identity. It also describes different effects that the condition of hybridity can have on Christian experience. Finally, it raises the question of whether hybridity should not be simply normal but also in some way normative in the religious self-understanding of Christians.
Pentecostal revivals in India have been recorded since 1860, and Pentecostalism is flourishing in the subcontinent today. Yet this phenomenon is neither simple nor monolithic. Rather, it interacts with other Christian traditions and with other religious traditions in a number of different ways. Despite its rigid and exclusivistic rhetoric, Pentecostalism functions as a highly malleable and adaptable religious movement.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.