1 The Changing Fortunes of Syncretism

It is better that we syncretize. Concord is a mighty rampart.

—Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1519

Christianity demands an undivided loyalty—there is to be no coexistence and no syncretism.

—Alan Tippett, 1987

Syncretism’s varying connotations have become sedimented within the word over time, often unconsciously. Thus the most perceptive way to unearth the perceived challenges around syncretism is to study the word’s history—its use, how it has been deployed, about whom, and for what ends. While the definition has not changed dramatically, syncretism’s differing connotations signal the sorts of challenges still implicit within the notion, since varying connotations have become dialectically enfolded into the word.

In the second and sixteenth centuries, for example, Plutarch and Erasmus tried to reconcile opposing factions through appeals that various sides “syncretize.” Christian theologians in the seventeenth century and the twentieth century maligned supposedly inadequate forms of Christianity by calling them syncretic. Even though the word largely applies to religious mixing today, writers from Plutarch to authors of nineteenth-century political tracts used the term for building constituencies amid fractious divisions in the realm of governance. Even in the same time and place, usage varied: twentieth-century European missiologists saw syncretism as pejorative, while historians of religions saw it as descriptive.

The one consistent aspect of syncretism—whether in irenics, invective, or something in between—has been a surprising or unexpected mingling of seemingly unlike elements of human culture, whether religious, political, philosophical, or otherwise. The notion indicates that, through cultural mixture, people are stretching categories and classifications beyond their perceived capacity. From the second to the mid-nineteenth centuries, it applied to politics as often as to religion. In Europe’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as we will see, its use in “politics” versus “religion” could hardly be disaggregated. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, theology and religious studies became the primary realms associated with syncretism, and that remains so today. Across the centuries, then, there have been four basic usages of syncretism: reconciling factions, questioning mixture, neutral descriptor, and—in Christianity over the last century—epithet.

Given such variety, this first chapter provides an intellectual history of syncretism’s shifting connotations up through the early twentieth century, with particular attention to its pejorative turn in Christian circles. The history describes the intellectual architecture of syncretism’s varying connotations, exploring when its connotations shifted and why. While there are many themes related to syncretism that occur across this history—such as notions of purity and superstition during Reformation debates—my sifting method is to focus specifically on use of the term “syncretism.”¹ Various moments in this history indicate recurring concerns that themselves become themes of this book, such as ahistorical Christian doctrine or tensions between cohesion and change in a tradition’s identity. To be clear, use of syncretism is not usually the causal factor of the challenges that I address. Rather, syncretism is a bellwether of sorts: its changing uses indicate other challenges relating to religious interpretation across culture. As the chapter moves toward exploring syncretism’s decisive shift toward the pejorative in Christian theology, it is clear that its connotation could have gone in any number of directions. It was far from inevitable that it would take on its present pejorative sense. The fact that it does so relates to fears surrounding challenges related to, and historically embedded within, the notion of syncretism.

The primary challenges relate to revelation and race, such that syncretism becomes entangled with these issues. The challenge of revelation relates to understanding how divine revelation becomes communicated to historically embedded, culture-bearing human beings. Christians may hold that God is eternal, but humans are always interpreting within finitude. Thus humans employ tools and resources from their respective cultures to comprehend divine communication. By the early twentieth century, this challenge of revelation manifested itself most clearly in concerns about pluralism and historicism. By historicism I mean the recognition of the historical character of all human experience and knowledge. Calling something “syncretism” became shorthand for saying that “this or that pluralism” or “this or that historical expression of Christianity” was out of bounds. The challenge of race is subtler because Christians rarely made direct statements relating syncretism and race. Rather, their deployment of the term shows how vital race became to syncretism’s shift to theological epithet. By the early to mid-twentieth century, missionaries and theologians came to use “syncretism” almost exclusively for expressions of Christianity beyond Europe and North America. Christians used the term within an imaginary that moved from center to periphery, with Western, white Christianity at the center, and African, Asian, and Latin American Christianity at the periphery. The journey of syncretism thus involves far more than a single word’s shifting usage. Because this shift involved the complicated challenges of pluralism, historicism, and race, tracking syncretism’s pejorative turn also tracks some of modern theology’s and religious studies’ most perennial questions.

The word “syncretism” dates back to at least the second century CE, when historian and political philosopher Plutarch spoke of Cretans’ propensity to forge political alliances against common foes despite their own internal divisions. While Plutarch provided the first known use, he wrote as if Cretans themselves already knew the term. In his essay “On Brotherly Love” in the Moralia, he wrote,

Then this further matter must be borne in mind and guarded against when differences arise among brothers: we must be careful especially at such times to associate familiarly with our brothers’ friends, but avoid and shun all intimacy with their enemies, imitating in this point, at least, the practice of Cretans, who, though they often quarreled with and warred against each other, made up their differences and united when outside enemies attacked; and this it was which they called “syncretism.”²

The Greek word συνκρητισμός thus meant to come together as Cretans, syn-cret-ism. Plutarch applied the term appreciatively. He considered the Cretans praiseworthy for their prudence in overcoming internal divisions for the sake of self-defense and preservation of political community. Thus syncretism began as a term for cooperation amid external dangers, a connotation retained in subsequent Byzantine texts.³

Centuries later, Erasmus of Rotterdam brought the term into the Western church through his efforts to join reformers into common union. With a disposition averse to Reformation and Counter-Reformation invective, Erasmus cited Plutarch’s praise of the Cretans, thereby encouraging reformers to “syncretize” with him. In a letter written in 1519 to Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon, he said, “You see how the hateful conspire against good learning. It is better that we syncretize. Concord is a mighty rampart.”⁴ Increased recognition of difference—whether between Catholics and Protestants or Christianity and classical learning—became a key ingredient for noticing syncretism at all. While syncretism became closely associated with humanists and their irenics, of which Erasmus was representative, others in the Reformation viewed syncretism similarly. Zwingli urged syncretism with allies when Swiss Reformed churches faced persecutions for their doctrine of the Eucharist, while Martin Bucer negotiated between ecclesial factions by encouraging syncretism.⁵

At this point syncretism served as an ecumenical invitation—or at least prudent cooperation. Erasmus, Zwingli, and Bucer did not seek to dismiss differences among various reformers; rather they sought alliances that would advance their theological and political aims. They utilized syncretism as a strategy to pursue broader goals like reformation without schism (for Erasmus) or ending persecution (for Zwingli). Christians did not view the term, however, with universal sympathy. Reformed theologian Zacharias Ursinus, a chief author of the Heidelberg Catechism, criticized the syncretism of the humanists, who, in his view, rebelled against God through their irenics and used the bonae litterae at the expense of the scriptures. Nevertheless, in subsequent years, a “syncretist” implied an irenic theologian or a humanist who tried to reconcile fracturing churches.

Amid the invective of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, however, syncretism did not retain its irenic association for long. A negative connotation emerged through a seventh-century debate known as the Syncretism Controversy. The dispute pitted German theologians seeking unity among Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic churches against Lutheran scholastics favoring doctrinal specificity and strict uniformity. Georg Calixtus, a German Lutheran theologian with humanist sympathies, opposed growing factionalism in various quarters of the Reformation. He worried that theologians articulated dogma with increasing specificity, and thereby closed ranks against one another. Calixtus had traveled extensively through Reformed and Catholic lands, and his encounters along the way made him wary of the theological and political consequences of Christian internecine conflict—most notably the violence of the Thirty Years War. Calixtus proposed formulations of Christianity largely based upon the teachings of its first five centuries, with room for free investigation and disagreement on matters considered adiaphora.⁶ Along with his fellow theologians in Helmstädt, he proposed an expression of faith based in scriptures and the Apostles’ Creed, interpreted through the Vincentian Canon, that is, “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” For Calixtus, nothing short of the Reformation was at stake. Historian Paul Tschackert writes: “He looked with concern upon the crystallization of theology and the ecclesiastical authorization of fixed dogma as a menace to free investigation, the peace of the Church, and the hope of Protestantism.”⁷ Lutheran scholastics like Abraham Calovius, however, made a life’s work of resisting such irenics, promoting a Lutheranism that strictly preserved—and expanded—the Augsburg Confession and the Lutheran Book of Concord.

With the opposing factions represented by Calixtus and Calovius, the Syncretism Controversy emerged out of the 1645 Colloquy of Thorn. Calixtus prepared his minimalist conception of Christian doctrine for the colloquy, which was an attempt to reconcile Prussian Protestants and Catholics. The Colloquy failed to forge unity due to intractable positions on all sides, instead drawing resistance from Lutheran delegates Johann Hülsemann and Calovius, who accused Calixtus of abandoning the Augsburg Confession and threatening the very foundations of the Lutheranism. This confrontation instigated a series of public rebuttals and refutations between Calixtus and Calovius. Calovius accused his opponent of ninety-eight heresies, called his writings “the excrements of Satan,” and asked that Calixtus’s party be expelled from the Lutheran Church. The latter effort failed, but meanwhile the opposing parties crafted thousands of pages against one another, with support from local princes.⁸ Calovius’s camp even invented a false etymology for syncretism, συγκεράννυμι—to mix together—implying the mixing of incompatible things. They intentionally shifted the word’s connotation away from its positive association with overcoming divisions, suggesting instead that it derived from confused mixture.⁹

Calovius and his party in Wittenberg came to promote forms of doctrine stricter than the Lutheran Book of Concord, expressed in a new formula called “the Consensus.” This statement presented Calovius’s belief that Lutheranism was the one true church—Catholics and Calvinists excluded—with absolute standardized dogma including, in Tschackert’s words, “such eccentric doctrines as the knowledge of Old Testament believers of the whole doctrine of the Trinity, the real faith of baptized infants, and the ubiquity of the human nature of Christ to all believers.”¹⁰ By the time debate regarding the Consensus reached its height, Calixtus had died and his son Friedrich Ulrich Calixtus carried on his father’s legacy, arguing that the elder Calixtus was far closer to orthodox Lutheranism than his accusers alleged. Attempts to promote the Consensus as a new Lutheran doctrinal formula faltered, partly through Friedrich’s efforts. So great was the enmity between Friedrich Calixtus, Calovius, and their respective parties that political authorities intervened to forbid polemical writing and preaching. The two held their negotiations in princely courts through legal representatives. While many prominent Lutherans sought to smooth the rough edges of Calovius’s and Hülsemann’s rhetoric, Philip Spener among them (although neither did Spener side with Calixtus), the denunciations continued unabated. The controversy largely ended in a stalemate with the death of Calovius in 1686, but not before the word “syncretist” had taken on the additional connotation of one who too readily abandoned elements of Christian doctrine, in this case to seek unity with other churches.

The controversy itself, insofar as it represented certain preoccupations of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, added new and lasting connotations to the word “syncretism.” Most significantly, Calovius’s invective became layered into the word. Thus the use of syncretism often marked a fear of the dilution of Christian doctrine. While Christianity had long promoted expressions of doctrinal unity, displayed in its creeds and the agreements of its early ecumenical councils, in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation uniformity became more detailed and more strictly articulated. In retrospect, many theologians viewed the Syncretistic Controversy as a taint upon the history of the church—a time when internal Christian squabbles over minutiae of doctrine threatened larger concerns. Tschackert, in a statement typical of many European theologians before the First World War, wrote in 1908, “The despotic determination [of Calovius] to force a Consensus repetitus, as the only and final dogma and theology before which all investigation and progress must fall prostrate, raised up its own factional limits.” For Tschackert, Calovius’s inflexible stances resembled the kind of behavior that led many away from the church: “The most deplorable result, surviving to the present, is the alienation from the church of educated men, and thereby the demoralization of a great unitary spirit, for the need of which the German Evangelical Church is suffering.”¹¹ Whatever one makes of Tschackert’s assessments, Calovius’s vehement denunciations represented increasing entrenchment by differing sides after the European Reformation, which only increased the belief that some held the absolute truth of Christianity over and against others. The more fiercely some sides argued, the more they sensed that they possessed Christianity itself—a pattern that will return over and again in discussions of Christianity and race.

What Calixtus and Calovius shared, however, proves quite pertinent to the challenge of revelation. Both Calixtus and Calovius sought a fairly static articulation of Christianity, albeit with opposing degrees of specificity. Based on the Vincentian Canon, Calixtus sought a formulation of faith that would serve as a measuring line for Christians across time. Calovius sought a detailed exposition of the faith that would clarify doctrine and resolve questions to such an extent that future conflicts over doctrine would be avoided. That is, once such detail has been articulated, it requires no additional supplements. Notably for Calovius, doctrinal consistency became paramount, at the expense of historical considerations. If salvation comes through reconciliation with the triune God by way of Jesus Christ, his eccentric doctrines like Old Testament figures knowing the doctrine of the Trinity is sensible, if absurd from an historical standpoint. Regardless, for Calixtus and Calovius fear of conflict and fear of syncretism led to formulations of doctrine that removed the gospel from engagement with the variabilities of history. They both forged unity through common belief, with practices and tasks of Christianity largely overlooked. Despite their vehement disagreements, the legacies of their shared approach continue to inhibit careful analysis of syncretism in theological circles. Indeed, avoiding historical considerations in the doctrinal enterprise would become a Protestant habit that was rather difficult to break until religious studies literature on subjects like syncretism would force the matter. While this is the first example of syncretism highlighting the formulation of static doctrine, it recurs in syncretism’s history.

In the 1700s and 1800s, most people using “syncretism” did so within the realms of philosophy and politics.¹² For some, Plutarch’s appreciative connotation prevailed, while for others, following Calovius, it indicated confused mixture. Philosophers expressed a tension between logical coherence and the potential of the unfamiliar. Some would eschew the intellectual mixtures of syncretism, while others thought that syncretism could press thinking in new and productive directions. Similarly, during this time syncretism became caught up in European nation-building. Syncretism became associated with coalition, which led to intellectual questions similar to those in philosophy. Does the state possess a singular identity in which difference threatens unity, or can the state contain differences that themselves may contribute to a larger whole? While philosophers and politicians posed these questions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, syncretism would later draw out similar intellectual questions among theologians about the adaptability of Christian identity worldwide.

Among those who employed the term negatively, some philosophers saw syncretism as attempts to unite too many varying strands into untenable union. In 1766, J. H. S. Formey portrayed syncretism as uniting opposing factions at the expense of coherence. Plato, he claimed, attempted to unite other philosophers such as Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, “mangling them in such a manner as to adapt them more easily to his scheme.”¹³ Plato’s syncretism was an unsuccessful attempt to join together too many opposing philosophers. A similar essay from Knight’s Quarterly Magazine in 1824 considered ancient philosophy after Plato and Aristotle too loose in its syntheses: “It was certainly a singular era in the history of the human mind, when, not only all the religions of polytheism were amalgamated into one incoherent mass, and almost all the jarring sects of philosophy were forced into union, but this multifarious superstition and this syncretistic philosophy, instead of being opposed to one another, were blended into one religious system.”¹⁴ Due to the union of too many oppositions, syncretism implied untidiness and a lack of rigor. By the late 1800s, some philosophers began to contrast syncretism with eclecticism, the former being “the jumbling together of different systems or parts of a system without due respect to their being consistent with one another” and the latter being the joining together of parts “brought together [with] a kind of congruity and consistency,” according to philosopher Charles Krauth. By this account syncretism does not seek reconciliation of opposing doctrines; “It merely places them in juxtaposition.”¹⁵

Yet this negative appraisal was by no means a consensus among philosophers, for Johann Gottfried Herder spoke of syncretism with great appreciation. In his book Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, published in German in 1786 and in English translation in 1800, he examined that same period of Hellenistic philosophy which others disparaged. Yet he saw syncretism as intellectually generative. Hellenistic philosophy thrived because it harnessed insights from differing cultures in the expansive Greek and Roman empires. The interconnection between peoples and nations—“the gradual amalgamation of the sentiments of all in the Greek and Roman Empire”—gave rise to the wisdom of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy. Philosophy became enriched not simply by the exchange of ideas, as if its sole purpose was dialogue. Rather it was syncretism, which he saw as the effort to bring these ideas together into union, that proved so productive. Herder admired the Hellenistic ability to “assimilate the ideas of Indians, Persians, Jews, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Barbarians.” By this account, syncretism resulted in insight as Hellenistic authors drew from a wider range of sources than they could have before. Syncretism led to exchange, and dialogue led to synthesized wisdom. Indeed, Herder contended that Christianity’s own beauty and richness emerged from this intellectual milieu as it grew in Alexandria, Egypt, the place where syncretism “most eminently flourished.” By acquiring the wisdom of other traditions, Christianity thrived: “If Jerusalem were its cradle, Alexandria was its school,” he wrote.¹⁶

By the early nineteenth century, syncretism carried a similarly positive connotation but in the context of political tracts. French historian and statesman François Guizot, who would serve as the French prime minister by mid-century, encouraged cultural syncretism between political and ecclesial parties in a popular 1839 essay entitled “Du catholicisme du protestantisme et de la philosophie en France.” He urged French unity over factionalism amid the growth of European nationalism. He also argued that rival political parties—as well as rival Catholics and Protestants—contributed to the distinctive union that was French culture. Rather than one faction defining French identity, what proved distinctly French was the sum of its varying parts. The English translator of Guizot, Frances Foster Barham, advocated a similar strategy within British culture and politics of the early to mid-nineteenth century, translating the essay as “Syncretism and Coalition” in its 1839 publication.¹⁷ Similarly, the London-based intellectual magazine The Monthly spoke of syncretism in glowing terms in the magazine’s first issue, using it frequently in subsequent publications. In a public letter addressed to Queen Victoria, the editors promoted coalition-building, citing Guizot, and hailed the irenic syncretists of ecclesial history as models for her own political strategy. Syncretism binds differences together in a kind of mystical nationalism, they claimed; it need not promote confusion and incoherence. In florid language, they wrote, “Bright and youthful Queen whose mind is now opening in its first clearness and amplitude, nor yet overclouded and contracted by the impious quarrels of parties, O seek the sublimer sovereignty of religion, and the larger empire of universal syncretism, patronage, and coalition. Thus become the delight of mankind, and the glory of thy people. . . . [L]et none rise above thee in catholicity, or extend beyond thee in philanthropy; but follow that supreme law whose seat is the bosom of God, and whose voice the harmony of the universe.”¹⁸  The Monthly went on in subsequent issues to distinguish syncretism from eclecticism, in response to readers’ concerns that syncretism led to undue confusion. Thus The Monthly made a different distinction than the philosophers I have previously discussed, saying that syncretism—rather than eclecticism—combines differences into a productive result. But such positive appraisals were not the only interpretation in politics. Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, another intellectual magazine of the day, portrayed the syncretism of politicians as disorganizing rather than unifying.¹⁹ Overall it was not always clear in political literature whether syncretism retained differences within a unity, or whether the state was an amalgamating power that, through time, overcame difference.

The overall intellectual instincts at play during this period are familiar, even while syncretism has traveled quite far from the Reformation and the Syncretism Controversy. Two poles remained: those who used syncretism for reconciling factions and those who used it for questioning mixture. Erasmus, Calixtus, Herder, and Guizot, while writing on quite different topics, all tended toward appreciative readings of syncretism; Ursinus, Calovius, and others worried about confusion and incoherence.²⁰ This intellectual tension became embedded within syncretism’s use. Matters of syncretism and race were also close at hand during this period of European state consolidation. The question of whether syncretism and mixture between differing peoples enhanced the union of the state or undermined it helped to shape European understandings of race, as we will see.²¹

Before closing discussion on this period, however, one more reference to syncretism deserves attention. A very different connotation for syncretism emerged in one of the same journals that spoke of syncretism in contexts of nation-building—a new connotation that would become its primary association in subsequent decades in the young field of religious studies. In 1853, Fraser’s Magazine ran an anonymous book review of a new edition of The Octavius of Minucius Felix, a second-century Christian apologetic in the form of a dialogue between a pagan and a Christian. The anonymous author employed the term “syncretism” in its most neutral sense yet—neither as notably praiseworthy nor as derogatory. He wrote that the Christian Minucius and his pagan interlocutor both employed syncretism, since each one appropriated diverse intellectual resources in his argument against the other. The pagan philosopher’s argument, the reviewer said, “was both in its form and purpose syncretic—that is, it aimed at a species of notional optimism, and attempted to harmonize all previous systems, and to extract from each, however discordant or however irreconcilable, their joint or several stock of truth.”²² While his description of syncretism and its aims resembled those of others like Herder, this author refrained from judging whether syncretism was in itself a worthwhile task. As for Christianity, the author suggested: “The Christians were most inclined to fraternize with the Platonic academy, and a syncretic reconciliation had in fact commenced in some quarters, and especially at Alexandria, between them.” The reviewer subsequently noted that the Roman emperors themselves strove for such syncretism as a strategy for consolidating disparate peoples into a single coherent political whole. Syncretism was, as so often, simultaneously religious and political.

During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, more writers began using the term “syncretism” specifically for religious phenomena. In the next two sections, I first discuss its use within religious studies and anthropology, then address its use within Christian theology and mission literature. Syncretism became a neutral descriptor in the relatively new field of religious studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as in anthropology in the early twentieth century.

Early on, this literature often portrayed syncretism in an evolutionary sense, as a transitory stage between pagan polytheism and the monotheism of supposedly more “developed” religions like Judaism and Christianity. The transition toward syncretism as neutral descriptor was still in process, for at this point syncretism often indicated that a religion was less pure or sophisticated than Judaism and Christianity. William Allen aptly represented this tendency in his 1890 textbook on ancient history. He wrote, “Syncretism is that development of pagan religion which recognizes the universality and identity of the religious sentiment, but has not yet advanced to the conception of a genuine unity of the divine nature or monotheism.” Yet syncretic polytheism, by his account, gestures toward monotheism. He continued, “It is polytheistic, but a form of polytheism which embraces all countries and nations, seeing in their different systems of gods only varying names for the same beings.” The fact that gods were translatable across differing pantheons was not only an act of syncretism, but also a recognition that divine acts and beings appear to differing peoples in similar ways but with different names. Such recognition could be the beginnings of synthesizing the divine into a single deity. “It was an act of Syncretism,” Allen wrote, “when the Romans identified their Minerva with the Greek Athena, and their Mercury with the German Woden.” In time these acts led to a more comprehensive religious or philosophical system, he contended, as in Platonism.²³

Indeed, by many accounts, syncretism evinced movement within a Hegelian dialectic. On the one hand, syncretism was an expression of conflict as religions grew in scope and came into conflict with one another. On the other hand, as Allen noted, syncretism could also represent a coming new synthesis. German historian of religion Hermann Usener showed a similarly Hegelian tendency: even though syncretism was a mishmash of Christianity with other religions that distorted the Christianity articulated by the church fathers, it was also, in Carston Colpe’s assessment of Usener, a “necessary transitional stage in the history of religions.”²⁴ The struggles that arose from syncretism proved productive.

For others during this period, however, syncretism reflected religious stagnation rather than a productive dialectic. As various religions came together, each lost something of its original vitality. Contemporary scholar of syncretism Kurt Rudolph describes this portrayal: “Syncretism or ‘syncretistic’ became the mark of a late stage of a secondary development, combining elements of either ideological or cultural practices, which originally had nothing to do with one another and thus lost their intrinsic ‘purity’ or ‘integrity’ in the ‘blend.’ ”²⁵ Syncretism was a feature of religions that did not stand the test of time or that grew up along the periphery of the “great religions.” In the latter case, these religions were diminished, less comprehensive forms of the “great religions.” Major religions retained privileged status as more sophisticated and more civilized expressions of religious impulses.

A vital designation during this time was “syncretistic religion,” which identified beliefs distinguished from seemingly more pure religions. Scholars employed “syncretistic religion” largely for traditions that self-consciously blended or borrowed from recognized religions, exemplars being Manichaeism, mystery religions, and Gnosticism. Manichaeism, for example, intentionally borrowed elements from Babylonian, Iranian, Hellenistic, and Christian religions, forming them into a single whole. As Manichaeism found expression within Christian or Zoroastrian or Buddhist lands, it accreted additional syncretisms. Scholars saw Hellenistic mystery religions as similarly syncretic: they might revere a particular god but form a cult separate from that god’s geographic home—residents of Asia Minor, for example, reverenced the Zoroastrian deity Mithra. Gnosticism, meanwhile, took existing syncretisms of Greek, Eastern, and Semitic religions, blending them into mythic narratives of a great redeemer. Syncretistic religions tended to be what Carston Colpe called “metasyncretisms”; that is, they joined already-syncretized beliefs and practices into a new whole.²⁶

This notion that some religions are more syncretized and less pure than others already echoes racial discourses that recur across syncretism’s journey, which is no accident. Religion and race are categories with overlapping genealogies. More than that, as Theodore Vial argues in his book Modern Religion, Modern Race, these categories emerged together as “conjoined twins” in modernity—and more specifically in German intellectual traditions that shaped the History of Religions school.²⁷ Schleiermacher’s and Herder’s expressivism, for example, saw a people’s shared language as a source of their distinct cultures, customs, and practices. Religion then becomes a means of grouping such cultures, customs, and practices into a single whole. Distinct languages and religions became means of essentializing peoples, and thereby a means of racializing peoples. As in Kant (whom we come to shortly), it was common in these intellectual traditions to build hierarchies upon such essentializing. In their modern manifestations, notions of religion and race built up together to the extent that “the category of religion . . . in religious studies is a racialized category,” Vial argues.²⁸ This is not to say that it was Schleiermacher’s or Herder’s—much less later writers in the History of Religions school—intention to help fashion the category of race; on the contrary, Herder rejected Kant’s thinking on race and his rankings of peoples. As indicated in his treatment of syncretism, Herder believed that the development of distinct groups aids wider developments of the human race as a whole. But he did group by culture in ways that fed the concept of race. Here we see tragic aspects of race’s development—even figures like Herder who reject the concept can still reinforce it.

Let us return to the designation “syncretistic religions.” This term for high syntheses of other religious systems led to the question of whether Christianity deserved such classification. Christianity, after all, was the de facto religion for most of these researchers, whether or not they considered themselves adherents. Some scholars argued that Christianity was not a “syncretistic religion” or that syncretic Christianity served as an evolutionary stage toward a presumed “fuller” expression of Christianity. Others argued that Christianity had a nonsyncretic character, since it had a single founder in Jesus. Others said its historical continuity with the existing religion of Judaism gave it a purity that others lacked.

Such defenses of Christianity’s purity would not hold for long, however. Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), a founder of form criticism and a prominent figure in the History of Religions school, discovered syncretic aspects of early Christianity, such as “borrowing of the sacraments from mystery religions.”²⁹ Gunkel did not focus upon the originality of religions like Christianity or Judaism but rather searched for precedents explaining the sources of their seemingly novel elements.³⁰ This methodology of assuming precedents would press assumptions about the originality of Christian scriptures and revelation to their limits. Syncretism became one of Gunkel’s primary terms: for him, many elements that appeared original in Judaism and Christianity were only original insofar as they applied existing religious tools to new environments or new circumstances. If Christianity blended Judaism, Stoicism, Platonic philosophy, and numerous other systems, scholars had difficulty saying that Christianity was not syncretic. Given that the History of Religions school included theologians in its number, these theologians generally accepted such points about syncretism in their own theological work. With Christianity now considered a syncretistic religion, by the early and middle twentieth century, scholars generally acknowledged syncretism as an aspect of all religions across times and cultures.

The most developed account of syncretism during this period belongs to Dutch scholar Gerardus van der Leeuw, in his 1933 book Religion in Essence and Manifestation.³¹ Van der Leeuw decisively moved beyond seeing syncretism as a deformation of earlier religions or as a stage in evolutionary development. Rather, van der Leeuw called syncretism “one form of the dynamic of religions.” By focusing on the “dynamic” of religion, he began moving away from the study of religions as formal systems—the common approach of that period—toward attention to their refashioning over time. Religions retain a static form vital to their continuity—a form he considered their essence—yet they also remain dynamic. “A historic religion, then, is an organized system. Nonetheless its characteristics are not fixed and rigid; rather they are in perpetual flux: not manufactured but growing, and in a state of incessant expansion.”³² His spatial terms like “growing” and “expansion” suggested a determined center, such that as religions change they retain continuity. In constructing a general theory for all religions, not just Christianity, he identified syncretism as a universal feature.

At this point, with religious studies developing as a field, the study of syncretism began to reflect certain ideological and methodological fissures. Christian historians making normative claims about Christianity’s status as the one true religion diverged from those wishing to avoid such claims. Through the early twentieth century, many members of the History of Religions school served as theological faculty in Protestant seminaries and universities. Distinctions were still emerging between insiders and outsiders in the study of religion, as many members of the school considered themselves Protestant theologians as well as historians. The fact that these distinctions were not entirely clear would lead some Christian thinkers to see such historical research as an abandonment of the Christian theological enterprise, because it seemed to relativize Christianity itself. Others, however, like van der Leeuw—himself a clergyman in the Dutch Reformed Church—saw such historical research as integral to understanding the nature of divine revelation. This literature also indicated struggles with race and culture that would continue as religious studies became more established. Here again, much writing assumed a hierarchy of religions, with the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity at the top and others down the hierarchy. When such hierarchies applied to more contemporary religions, it was non-European religions that more often received the label of syncretism.

Before we move to Christian theology’s uses of syncretism, the field of anthropology during the early and mid-twentieth century deserves attention. First, in contrast to religious historians, anthropologists joined Christian missionaries in employing “syncretism” for contemporary phenomena, whereas religious historians generally used it when referring to antiquity. Second, anthropologists’ showed a marked contrast with Christian intellectuals when interpreting indigenous religious practices. By the time anthropologist Melville Herskovits began employing “syncretism” in the 1930s, Christian usage had become almost exclusively pejorative. Yet Herskovits retained religious historians’ neutral and descriptive connotations. For Herskovits, and later anthropologists like Roger Bastide, syncretism of African traditions with Catholicism in the New World indicated a powerful cultural past that endured well into the present, during a time when so much Western intellectual culture posited the very opposite—claiming Africa had no past, at least not one preserved. Even if many conclusions of Herskovits’s research have been subsequently challenged, for our purposes the fact that an anthropologist took African history so seriously is a salutary contrast with Christian intellectuals who failed to do so, partly out of their fear of syncretism.³³

Melville Herskovits employed syncretism in his research on continuities or “retentions” of African cultures among enslaved people in the New World after the transatlantic journey. Drawing from the theory of Franz Boas, who eschewed the then-prominent view that cultures existed on an evolutionary scale, Herskovits envisioned cultures as discrete units, each largely self-contained until coming into contact with others. Herskovits applied this Boasian understanding to his own research by discovering cultural practices retained after transatlantic journeys. The Baptist Shouter movement, for example, used Christian hymns sung by European Americans, starting songs with the “lugubrious measured quality” of much European music, then transformed the tune by speeding up the tempo and adjusting the hymn tune. “The tune is converted into a song typically African in its accompaniment of clapping hands and foot-patting, and in its singing style,” he wrote. Similarly, such shouters marked their ritual space with white chalk at the doors and center pole, “reminiscent of so-called ‘vever’ designs found in Haitian vodun rituals,” all characteristics that Herskovits had seen in West Africa.³⁴ Likewise, Orisha deities from West Africa became transposed to Catholic saints in Brazil and across much of the Caribbean. The institutional church permitted such syncretisms for certain Catholic festivals, even while some cults moved underground and provided the impetus for revolts among enslaved peoples.

Thus syncretism was a means of cultural survival for Herskovits: it not only entailed borrowing from one cultural context and applying it to a new culture, but became a means of perpetuating certain religious beliefs and practices long after peoples had left Africa. Already within this early use of syncretism in anthropology, one detects a celebratory tone when marking religious practices that continued seemingly against all odds—a tone that would continue into current anthropology. In the early and mid-twentieth-century United States, so awash with racism, Herskovits’s project aimed to show that those of African descent living in the Americas had a long cultural history, providing more social status in an era in which the perceived pedigree of one’s ethnicity and its history carried social prestige. Again, Christian mission literature would generally take a rather different view of indigenous African beliefs and practices.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a major shift in syncretism’s connotation in Christianity. Early on in this period, no single connotation proved decisive. Many missionaries were quite familiar with growing literature in the history of religions and its descriptions of syncretism in the ancient world; many of them used syncretism in a similarly descriptive sense. Others shared Calovius’s deep suspicion that syncretism would lead to compromising the Christian message. Still others echoed Calixtus’s appeal for unity by syncretism. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, Christian missionary usage spanned reconciling of factions, questioning mixture, neutral descriptor, and epithet. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, syncretism turned decisively toward a Christian epithet.³⁵

Some missionaries in the late nineteenth century employed syncretism with the neutral tone of religious historians. In the monthly journal of an organization called the Evangelical Alliance, for example, an 1861 article used syncretism to describe Christianity and Islam mixing together, but the tone was simply descriptive. The author wrote: “The rise of reforming sects, aiming at a syncretism of Mohammedanism, and of a modified form of Christianity, is a remarkable symptom of the process which is going on in men’s minds.”³⁶ Even if the author eventually criticized such religious mixture, the label “syncretism” only explained the phenomenon. Similarly, Count Goblet d’Alviella dispassionately ascribed syncretism to the mixing of Hindu and Christian practices in colonial India.³⁷ As late as 1913, James Shepard Dennis’s book The Modern Call of Missions took a Calixtian approach to syncretism, sympathetically calling it a means of finding common doctrine among Christians.³⁸

Of the literature that viewed syncretism negatively, missionaries especially referenced East Asian religious traditions, especially during the nineteenth century. After all, the “religions” of East Asia did not necessarily see themselves as self-consciously discrete from one another in the same ways that Christianity and Islam did. Even if they shared a great deal of history and teaching, Christianity and Islam tended to hold their distinctions more tightly, especially given their shared category of human salvation, which most Christians and Muslims held came through their own religion and not the other. A commonly voiced sentiment farther east, however, was that Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were harmonious in their teachings. Christian missionaries worried about this very sentiment, concerned that Christianity might also be considered harmonious with them and lose its distinctiveness. This worry led to syncretism’s negative connotation in East Asia, with one author going so far as describing it as “a bleak black cloud on the horizon of Japanese Protestantism.”³⁹

Gustav Warneck, founder of the field of missiology, offered a similarly negative portrayal of “Asian syncretism” as a threat to Christianity. Speaking of Japanese Christianity in his 1884 Outline of a History of Protestant Missions from Reformation to the Present Time, Warneck encouraged shifts “in the forms of worship and constitution” according to the “national peculiarities of Japan.” But theological shifts he strongly discouraged. Warneck exhibited a sentiment quite typical among Western Christians, suggesting that seemingly external aspects of Christianity—like its worship and ecclesial polity—might shift in various cultures, but Western forms of doctrines should be wholly transported. In a notably revealing statement, he feared “a Christianity different from Western, i.e. from historical Christianity.” Western Christianity here served as the sole normative standpoint for “historical.”

For Warneck, the trouble with syncretism was not just its distortion of the Western character of Christian doctrine, but also its perceived connection to historical critical scholarship. “This tendency” to syncretism, he wrote, “is undoubtedly connected also with the modern critical theology introduced into Japan not from Germany alone which has produced in the heads of many young Japanese more confusion than enlightenment and has favoured their inclination to rationalism.”⁴⁰ Distorting Western doctrine and exposure to historical critical scholarship, for Warneck, were linked in this case. Such scholarship highlighted ways Christianity had mixed with surrounding cultures across history, potentially opening the way for other cultural mixtures that could distort the Christian gospel.

By the World Missionary Conference of 1910 in Edinburgh, syncretism’s primary connotation was still uncertain. Conference contributors still largely saw syncretism as a descriptive term, yet made increasingly negative conclusions. The term also shifted from Asian contexts to any geographic context—or at least any context outside the West. Contributor H. A. A. Kennedy described Hindu religious blendings as “curious religious syncretism.” Drawing from Adolph von Harnack, he compared syncretism in the early church to syncretism in his own time, arguing that syncretism helped Christianity spread to new regions but came “at too great a cost” as paganism infused Christianity.⁴¹ One report from 1910, speaking on indigenous practices in Africa, said, “In all his labours . . . the missionary must never attempt to combine Animism and Christianity. A syncretism is impossible.”⁴² The conference itself exhibited the sorts of fissures that would become crucial to syncretism’s subsequent connotations. Missionaries and scholars presented widely varying views of Christianity’s relationship with other traditions. They differed as to whether historical critical scholarship offered new openings of interpretation or threatened long-held orthodoxies. Overall, rising concern over syncretism also reflected an increasingly anxious and defensive stance in missionary circles regarding secularism and pluralism in their own societies.⁴³

By the 1920s, the term became consistently negative. Protestant missionary efforts grew in public recognition, while Europeans’ and North Americans’ knowledge of religious traditions beyond Christianity grew. In response, theologians and missiologists worried that Jesus might become a revered figure in other traditions without the entirety of Christianity being absorbed. Charles Harris, in his book Creed or No Creed, expressed such a worry. “There is only one effective barrier against syncretism,” he wrote of “heathen” religion, “and that is the fearless assertion of positive dogma.”⁴⁴ By this point, Harris required no additional qualification for syncretism; he did not need to explain further whether a “syncretism” was positive or negative.

Delegates at the 1928 missionary conference in Jerusalem spoke similarly. They did not necessarily eschew borrowing from other religious sources—some contributors encouraged it outright—but delegates did consistently discourage syncretism. Renowned Quaker Rufus Jones, for example, detected a great opening for Christianity in its encounters with other religious traditions, an opening like Christianity’s early encounters with Greek philosophy. He told the Jerusalem gathering, “What ought to have happened long ago, and what must happen now as soon as possible, is that the leaders of the Church and the leaders of the Christian forces generally should joyously welcome all freshly discovered truth as from God, and should re-interpret Christianity in the light of all the truth that can be demonstrated as truth.”⁴⁵ Jones’s points are especially indicative of syncretism’s negative turn because—unlike some voices in the conference—he openly welcomed Christianity receiving outside influences. Even if Christianity might grow in its wisdom from outside traditions, however, syncretism proved out of bounds. It became the term that indicated an unacceptable border had been crossed. In a similar statement, W. E. Hocking of Harvard University encouraged missionaries to view Christianity as “hospitable” to other forms of thought. Yet he perceived syncretism as that line beyond which Christians should not go. He compared syncretism with eclecticism in philosophy: “Mere syncretism has no charter of life in it,” he wrote, because it thoughtlessly combines its sources without careful concern for coherence.⁴⁶ (We see, again, syncretism and eclecticism used in divergent and inconsistent ways.)

Notably, Europeans were the ones primarily worried about syncretism, and worried for churches outside Europe. “Another topic that claimed special attention was the danger of syncretism,” the conference proceedings said, “which many, especially in the continent of Europe, feel confronts the younger churches.”⁴⁷ Even though the 1928 conference included substantially more voices beyond Europe and North American than the 1910 gathering, Europeans expressed little worry about religious mixture closer to home. Indeed, a decade after the Jerusalem conference, the term “syncretism” was almost entirely pejorative in Christian mission. To call something syncretism required no additional clarification.

One important distinction between religious studies literature and theological literature during this period was the depth of analysis on syncretism. During syncretism’s pejorative turn, very few confessional Christian writers provided criteria for distinguishing what qualified as syncretism and what did not, especially when compared with religious studies scholars who went out of their way to make such determinations. Historians of religion and anthropologists detailed the historical conditions of syncretism, carefully assessed its sources, and—later in the twentieth century—offered detailed typologies of syncretism. In contrast, theologians usually used syncretism as a gut-level judgment without indicating why something qualified as syncretism. Intellectual tensions inevitably followed: why was syncretism acceptable in the ancient world but not in their own time? The result of this lack of criteria was that Christianity that appeared familiar avoided the designation of syncretism, while Christianity that appeared unfamiliar received it. In practice, this meant that the least suspicious Christianities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia were those that resembled Western Christianity.

In closing this section, we should recognize one contributor to the Jerusalem missionary conference who spoke more carefully about syncretism, even if his voice proved the most vociferous against it. Syncretism was an “ominously rising tide . . . in the modern world,” he wrote, not limited to regions outside the West. This writer worried about proposals like those of Jones and Hocking, which gave too much ground to other religious traditions. He worried that certain conference papers, failing to stipulate “the essential difference and absolute uniqueness of Christianity,” were “drifting on the dangerous waters of syncretism.” He was also one of the few voices who indicated more specifically what syncretism might entail. This voice was Hendrik Kraemer, renowned Dutch missiologist whose negative appraisals of syncretism—covered in the next chapter—hardened the word’s pejorative status.⁴⁸

What led to syncretism’s pejorative turn in Christianity? Accounting for such a change in language is rarely a simple task because of the complicated factors involved.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, three facets repeatedly arise across the literature—pluralism, historicism, and race. This section addresses pluralism and historicism, the next race. The facets of pluralism and historicism can be treated together for two reasons. First, missiologists and Christian theologians spoke about them quite openly. They did not speak so plainly about race. Furthermore, pluralism and historicism both relate to a single challenge, that of perceiving divine revelation beyond channels already recognized within Christianity. Pluralism addresses this challenge in regard to other religious traditions, historicism in regard to Christianity’s history.

Pluralism proved the context-shaping cultural reality that allowed missionaries, and Christians in general, to notice syncretism at all. When Christianity was the primary religious tradition that Westerners encountered, they were far less worried about it mixing with other traditions or other cultures. As the contributors to the 1910 and 1928 missionary conferences indicated, however, European and North American Christians were experiencing unprecedented exposure to the wide variety of religious expressions across the world. The scale of the religious “other” dramatically increased. Even though the European colonial enterprise had been underway for centuries, Protestants’ involvement in missionary activities in the nineteenth century and enhanced communications between missionaries and metropoles meant that Europeans and North Americans had far more exposure to non-Christian religious traditions. In earlier centuries, through the colonial ventures of the Spanish and Portuguese, knowledge of such religious variety had been largely limited to intellectual circles. By the early twentieth century, such exposure became pervasive. It pressed affirmations of Christianity in ways not felt before—or at least in recent centuries—regarding the exclusivity, rigidity, or porosity of Christianity’s identity. While Christians had been long accustomed to the “other” of Jews or Muslims, there were now seemingly ever new religious encounters. “The idea is that the problem of the other is discovered through telling its history,” as Stanley Cavell writes.⁵⁰ Even if the telling was rather one-sided, by means of Western missionaries or colonists, hearing others’ histories inevitably pressed new theological questions.

Two such questions were the truth of Christianity in light of other religious traditions and accommodating seemingly outside beliefs and practices. Regarding the first, Christians could not, for example, claim consistency between Chalcedonian Christology and Islam’s portrayals of Jesus as merely a human prophet. Is Christianity’s understanding of Jesus as the primary revelation of God the ultimate summation of God’s communication to human beings, or do other religious traditions carry revelatory quality? If they do, in what ways are they revelatory—as forms of natural theology? The second question related more directly to syncretism: to what extent could Christianity accommodate certain beliefs and practices from other religious traditions? The proceedings of the 1910 and 1928 missionary conferences on this question proved representative. Most contributors imagined a golden mean between accommodation of other traditions and resolute Christian distinctiveness, but they differed fiercely on determining that mean.

Wherever they located the mean, and whatever they believed about Christianity’s distinctiveness, by the 1920s and 1930s “syncretism” came to indicate undue cultural accommodation. Amid these questions of pluralism, calling something “syncretism” became an easy—and often lazy—way of distinguishing something as outside the boundaries of Christianity. Given the extent to which these questions of pluralism pressed on Christian intellectuals, having a simple designation for unacceptable mixing in pluralist environments proved quite appealing.

Gustav Warneck’s remarks regarding modern methods of theology and biblical criticism reveal the second aspect of syncretism’s pejorative turn. The culprit behind such syncretic compromise, he said, was “modern critical theology.” Warneck worried that new methods of biblical criticism exposed texts to historical scrutiny in ways that challenged their status as unique means of revelation. Warneck was hardly alone in these concerns. Historicism became a growing concern for missionaries and theologians largely because it made divine revelation more difficult to perceive. Historical studies, like those of Usener and Gunkel, claimed a new level of knowledge about the ancient world that challenged the epistemic authority of the scriptures. Through new discoveries in archaeology and new methods in textual studies, scholars gathered more information about the historical contexts of biblical figures than prior generations. Scholars claimed to know Jesus of Nazareth with a historical authenticity that the gospels themselves seemed to lack. As such methods detected historical inconsistencies within biblical texts, Holy Scripture—and thereby God’s perceived action in history—seemed tainted by the contingencies of human history. Archaeologists found no historical evidence for Israelites leaving Egypt in the numbers given in the Pentateuch; they found little evidence of the conquests described in Joshua; they discovered that Israel borrowed extensively from local Canaanite beliefs and practices, even in the strictest expressions of ritual practice. New Testament scholars and theologians began contrasting the Jesus of ancient Palestine with the divine figure revered in Christian creeds, seeing the latter as a construct of Greek philosophy as much as perceived historical fact. Lines between God’s activity in the world and human calculation in history blurred.⁵¹

Syncretism proved central to these concerns about divine revelation and historicism. When Gunkel uncovered precedents for Israelite rituals among other religious practices of the ancient Near East, for example, the clarity of God’s revelation became clouded. The source of the Israelites’ seemingly distinctive practices was not necessarily an exceptional word given by God, but the retooling of existing practices borrowed from elsewhere. As ancient Israelites borrowed aspects of bovine sacrifice rituals from neighboring cultures, scholars similarly showed that Jesus borrowed from Cynic teachers of his day. If revelation once entailed the display of something humans could not know on their own, such newness now appeared a mere chance of history. If syncretism was in fact pervasive, what then distinguished God’s revelation from ordinary processes of cultures mixing and mingling?

The overall question relating to historicism and syncretism might be put this way: if human beings absorb God’s revelation in our historical particularity, in what ways and to what extent does revelation come to bear the marks of such particularity? How, for example, might God’s revelation in the ancient Near East, as portrayed in the Old Testament, push through the limitations of Bronze Age conceptions of gods during that time to show forth the true God? Modern theologians have generally recognized that ancient Israel absorbed God’s revelation but not without some disquieting marks from its cultural milieu, such as divine violence, xenophobia, and tribalism. Modern theologians have also contended that Israel simultaneously absorbed a message of a loving God who makes faithful covenant with God’s creatures. How do theologians determine which aspects ascribed to divinity in Bronze Age cultures are true aspects of God, and which are merely human projections?⁵²

In sum, while pluralism and historicism may first appear separate matters when investigating syncretism, they are interconnected. Both are concerned with divine revelation mingling with seemingly non-Christian or non-Israelite cultures. Pluralism expresses this concern in a more contemporary moment, as Christians encounter other religious traditions. When they find parts of these traditions compelling—especially elements they have not found in Christianity—questions arise concerning God’s revelation beyond the person of Jesus, or at least Jesus as recognized heretofore. Historicism expresses these same concerns regarding the past. Syncretism presses modern theologians to realize the extent to which revelatory events in scripture and the early church borrowed seemingly foreign elements from their surrounding cultures more than theologians had previously thought. With both pluralism and historicism, syncretism became a shortcut for naming mixtures deemed beyond Christianity’s normative bounds. It became a classification that reassured theologians Christianity had internal coherence amid the temptation to think pluralism or historicism made divine revelation appear contingent.

Syncretism’s pejorative turn also emerged from and within an increasingly racial imagining of the Christian self, in which Europe and North America became the self-understood center of Christian life and reflection. The role of race could hardly be clearer: missionaries and theologians rarely, if ever, applied the word to Western, white Christianity. They spoke of their own syncretism so rarely because such assumptions about race were so embedded in Western Christian consciousness that they could hardly recognize its role.

In his book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, Willie Jennings provides a compelling portrayal of Western Christian identity becoming “woven into processes of colonial dominance,” such that “pure” Christianity became associated with white Christianity. As Christianity spread around the world, alongside various empires, European Christianity became abstracted from place, he argues, separated from the contingencies of its geographic origin. The culturally white aspects of Christianity became normative and then seemed invisible to white Christians. Jennings writes, “It is as though Christianity, wherever it went in the modern colonies, inverted its sense of hospitality. It claimed to be the host, the owner of the spaces it entered, and demanded native peoples enter its cultural logics.”⁵³ In addressing race, then, this section focuses especially on three areas: missionaries categorizing peoples, the association of divine providence with European colonialism, and European Christianity serving as the agent of human salvation rather than Christ. While this section gives an overview of the challenges of race, later chapters provide additional perspectives based on discussions of syncretism among various thinkers.

One of the earliest and most pervasive examples of white normativity in Christianity was the categorizations of peoples based upon their bodily features. These appeared from the very beginnings of European colonialism and mission. Indeed it was often theologians and missionaries who provided these categorizations rather than the European explorers. Gomes Eanes de Azurara (called Zurara), court theologian of Portuguese explorer Prince Henry the Navigator, provided an early example in the fifteenth century. Reflecting upon a field of enslaved peoples, he made a scale measuring human worth with two poles, white and black as opposing ends. Some appeared almost white, “fair to look upon” and “well-proportioned.” Darker-skin persons he described, however, as “so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.”⁵⁴ That is, it is as if they came from hell. Jesuit Alessandro Valignano later provided a similar scale, describing gradations downward from white Europeans to Japanese to Chinese to Indians down to Africans. For Valignano, this scale developed into a schematic for assessing readiness for salvation. Those closer to Europe at the top of the spectrum displayed progress in civilization, intelligence, and cleanliness, and thus increased preparation for salvation. He contrasted them with Africans who “go around half naked, . . . have dirty food, practice polygamy, show avarice, and display ‘marked stupidity.’ ”⁵⁵ By the sixteenth century stricter gradations of race emerged in the New World. One categorization, for example, provided sixteen categories delineating types of racial mixtures. The closer one’s racial mixture came to whiteness, the higher one’s place on the scale. Indian mixtures with whites appeared higher, down to mulatto and so forth.⁵⁶ Delineating and categorizing human peoples was not new, of course. From genealogies in the Old Testament to Aristotle’s comments on barbarians, people had long found categorizations that put themselves above others. What was new, however, was categorizing based so purely upon bodily features, with so many gradations in between. Abstracting the categories from place and geography then reified them all the more, making them exportable to various corners of the world.

At this point we are still some way from the modern concept of race; there are not yet pseudoscientific explanations of peoples that led to efforts like the eugenics movement. Yet we have clearly come to modern race’s precursors, with European intellectuals connecting human capacities to color of skin and biological features like face shape and hair type. Once such racial thinking took off, having been informed by these colonial ventures, this thinking further justified colonial ventures. Race became a means of explaining slavery and servitude, which played vital roles in sustaining the economic growth of European empires and settlements.⁵⁷ The formulation of race never took place purely in the abstract; it was shaped within such colonial encounters, within the economics of its labor systems, within politics promoting colonial ventures. The concept of race was propelled and reformulated over and over again through its constant interactions with these economic and political conditions. Even if the concept seemed to carry its own logic and evolution, in every moment it remained the product of human action and decision, utterly contingent.

By the eighteenth century, racial delineations became increasingly common in European intellectual life, notably among Enlightenment philosophers. Immanuel Kant offered similar categorizations, with one subtle but indicative shift noted by J. Kameron Carter: whites moved out of the categories themselves. For Kant, whites served as the original human form with others being deviations underneath the form of whiteness.⁵⁸ This move set up brutal implications for other races, themselves only corruptions of white purity. More subtly, however, abstracting a white race set up another intellectual pattern that would appear over and again. With whites portrayed as ideal humans, it put them in a particularly advantageous position to assess the world around them. Their very nature provided an avenue to observe the world in a more objective fashion.

It is worth pausing here because this portrayal of white objectivity will recur across syncretism’s genealogy. A contemporary phrase that sums up this perspective is the “white gaze”—the idea that whites possess a certain impartiality, that they innately possess the capacity to define the world around them. The white gaze is first a physical and material reality, the phenomenon of whites staring at the bodies of persons of color with implicit or explicit judgment, but it then also becomes an interpretative assumption. Because whites do not recognize the extent to which whiteness has shaped the world, they see their interpretation of this world as natural. The phrase “white gaze” may not have been in currency when Kant wrote, but it captures his perspective and much racial thought and action that followed. George Yancy sums up this legacy of whiteness that Kant helps shape: “Whiteness is fundamentally predicated upon a world within which whites understand their being white (and the ethical, aesthetic, and legal benefits that accrue) as an ‘unconditioned’ state of being.”⁵⁹ Whiteness is “ethical solipsism,” he writes, referring to whites’ perceived superiority when making ethical judgments about themselves and others. Later in this book’s intellectual history, I show how academic analysis easily slips into a white gaze, since its very methods often presume the scholar as a dominant center examining the world as if at some remove. But the white gaze is not simply academic—it begins in lived experiences of the physical world. Frantz Fanon first speaks of the white gaze as a stare from another that encompasses him in someone else’s narrative, interpreting him without any say from him.⁶⁰ The somatic white gaze leads to the intellectual white gaze: whites deciding upon hierarchies of human bodies and establishing colonial orders based upon these hierarchies lead to intellectual moves like Kant’s abstracting whites’ perspectives as purer, more refined, and more objective. Indeed, in the concrete case of Kant’s theory of race, the intellectual white gaze drew directly from travelogues and documents of earlier Europeans’ somatic white gazes. This style of reasoning also came to pervade missionary descriptions of their cultural settings. Missionaries delineated levels of readiness for the Christian gospel among peoples, resembling the categories of Valignano. Seemingly advanced cultures in Asia had more preparation for the gospel, while African cultures contained little or no preparation for Christianity.

In addition to shaping racial categorizations and the white gaze, Christian theologians similarly reconstructed divine providence around race, putting God’s providential purposes at the heart of the imperial enterprise. Zurara, while moved to tears seeing the atrocities associated with Portuguese slavery, consoled himself by seeing God working amid slavery. Slavery would be the enslaved’s means of encountering Christianity, he reasoned. He thereby assuaged his moral concern. This became a pervasive argument from both sides of the Atlantic over subsequent centuries—slavery became an avenue of salvation. In the sixteenth century, Jesuit José de Acosta rendered similar portrayals of providence. One of the most intelligent theologians to write of the New World during that time—and immensely influential in later European literature—Acosta recounted how various details of the colonial enterprise, down to the invention of the compass, were God’s doings so that colonized peoples could become Christians. Even human lust and greed played its part. Divine providence carefully placed gold in the New World: as a father might give a larger dowry for a more unlovely daughter, Acosta said, so God deposited gold in the lands of indigenous peoples of the New World as an incentive for Europeans to desire their gold and bring along their Christian religion. Jennings writes, “God is responsible for colonial desire.”⁶¹

The salvation story of Christianity itself then began to shift in focus. First, Europe came to replace the covenant people of Israel as Europeans saw themselves and their conquests as chosen and graced by God, a point central to the construction of race in both Jennings and Carter. “Heathen” religion shifted from non-Jewish religion to non-Christian, especially non-European. The contrast between the European and “heathen” then became a common trope in Western Christianity.⁶² Second, the agency of salvation shifted. As Kwame Bediako and Andrew Walls have noted, Christianity often appeared the saving agent rather than Christ himself.⁶³ While Christian intellectuals of the time would surely have claimed that it is Jesus who saves, it was a culturally particular Jesus, one who unquestioningly resembles the Jesus as known and portrayed in Europe.

One of the clearest indicators of this perception of salvation is ecclesial art produced during the colonial and postcolonial eras in Africa and elsewhere in the global South. In Catholic and Protestant churches alike—though more often in Catholic churches given their greater comfort with images—Jesus is consistently represented as a white man with blond or brown hair and pale skin. While darker images of Jesus have grown substantially in recent decades, they remain relatively scarce, especially in rural areas. The effect is stark. In a church filled with African Christians, the one white person is Jesus himself. The one being adored as the source of human salvation does not look African—nor Palestinian for that matter.⁶⁴

Thus Christianity’s perceived center and periphery were not simply geographical but also racial. The racial aspect allowed this center and periphery to be exportable to any geography, so that whiteness did not change as people were born elsewhere in colonies. Indeed, even the origins of the Christian terminology “mission” and “missiology” follow this same model of center and periphery. The terms themselves emerged in European languages at the two most significant expansions of European empire and Christian evangelism. The former emerged alongside fifteenth-century Iberian colonialism, probably first used by Ignatius of Loyola, while the latter emerged alongside northern Europe’s colonization and Protestant mission fervor in the nineteenth century.⁶⁵

Christian literature on syncretism closely followed this center-and-periphery thinking—the literature emerged within these conceptual waters that saw pure Christianity as European Christianity. In Warneck’s discussion of syncretism, for example, recall his fear of “a Christianity different from Western, i.e. from historical Christianity,” with its pairing of “historical,” implying standard, with “Western.” The very title of the 1910 conference proceedings operated from that same center-periphery thinking, World Missionary Conference 1910: To Consider Missionary Problems in Relation to the Non-Christian World. In the proceedings, the “non-Christian world” is that beyond Europe and North America, the nonwhite world. The title similarly indicates a theological evaluation of “the world,” that is, as a space not inherently filled with Christ’s presence. When speaking specifically of syncretism, the only references to contemporary syncretism in confessional Christian literature before and during the 1910 missionary conference referred to beliefs and practices beyond the West. In the 1910 conference, representatives spoke of syncretism in only three geographic contexts of their own time—Japan, Africa, and India. The one reference to syncretism in Europe was that of ancient Greece.⁶⁶

At this point it is useful once again to contrast theology’s use of syncretism in this period with religious studies’. European theologians’ lack of self-referential syncretism is quite noticeable, especially given that religious studies literature of the early twentieth century was moving toward recognizing the ubiquity of syncretism in all religions. Mission literature exhibited thorough familiarity with this material, given its references to syncretism in ancient Greece and some missionaries’ neutral usage of the term until the 1920s. Religious studies literature provided a clear opportunity for Western Christians to recognize their own syncretism, but this is precisely what they did not do. This lacuna proved a key moment in syncretism’s shifting usage: after religious studies scholars employed syncretism as a neutral descriptor, just when they identified syncretism as universal among religions, syncretism became an epithet for theologians. European theologians applied insights from religious studies to others rather than themselves. Comparing Christian mission literature’s usage of syncretism to Herskovits is also salient. Just when Christian missionaries were deriding syncretism in Africa, Herskovits was employing it to recognize indigenous African personhood.

By the 1928 Jerusalem conference, syncretism had become consistently pejorative. Recall conference attendees expressing fear about syncretism in “younger,” that is, non-Western, churches, as well as Jones and Hocking speaking positively about religious mixture while denigrating syncretism. This pattern extended well beyond these missionary conferences. In literature written between 1900 and 1950, outside of religious studies literature, one struggles to find any reference to syncretism that is not about perceived threats to Christianity outside Europe and North America or about religious traditions beyond the West.⁶⁷ Syncretism was a marker not simply for mixing Christianity with non-Christian culture, but for mixing white Christianity with nonwhite cultures.

Race proved so insidious to syncretism’s pejorative turn because it had moved from the overt racism of categorizations of Zurara or Valignano or Kant to a subtle but still persistent racial logic. When designating syncretism, early twentieth-century Christian writers followed this pattern of center and periphery with its racial associations. They often operated under unstated assumptions that Christianity was, in Carter’s words, “the cultural property of Western civilization.”⁶⁸ My argument is not to ignore the ways in which many Western missionaries intended to uphold indigenous agency in their missions, for just because the colonial enterprise enabled and often supported Christian mission does not mean that missionaries did not in turn challenge European imperialism. It is to say, though, that even missionaries who strove to uphold indigenous agency struggled to escape the cultural logics of race that surrounded them. Bishop John Colenso, the British-born first Anglican bishop of Natal, known for upholding the dignity of native South Africans, still often used South Africans as tools for his own Western theology and still imagined indigenous South African Christianity within a Western nationalistic framework.⁶⁹ These cultural logics were so embedded in Westerners’ imaginings of the world that they were difficult to avoid. As H. Richard Niebuhr notes, because the human self is by nature a responsive being, responding to stimuli in the world around itself, even its most active and original agency is still inscribed with the marks of its own past and its own context.⁷⁰ Such cultural logics had seeped so deeply into the Western imagination that many hardly noticed them, and thus they were all the more difficult to overcome.

“Syncretism” has come a long way since Plutarch. This history shows that the shift toward an epithet was not a foregone conclusion. Theological challenges indicated by syncretism’s use—from ahistorical doctrine of the Syncretism Controversy to concerns about the findings of the History of Religions school—did not necessitate its pejorative turn even if they contributed to it. It was fear that turned syncretism into an epithet during the early twentieth century. The shift first involved the fears of pluralism and historicism. Taken together, these demonstrate ongoing uncertainties regarding Christianity’s understanding of divine revelation and its interaction with human culture. Syncretism brought up a perpetually vexing theological question: if any reception of divine revelation is mingled with human culture, then how can humans distinguish the eternal from the contingent? Theology’s troubles only become more difficult once race becomes recognized as part of this picture. Without Western Christians necessarily noticing, “pure” Christianity, unsyncretized Christianity, became white Christianity. As the challenges of pluralism and historicism put many Christians in a defensive stance, they looked back toward the familiar—and the familiar was white. This white Christianity seemed to float free of culture, as if able to be exported wholesale. What many Western Christians did not recognize, however, was that the Christian gospel cannot be removed from culture because the human bearers of the gospel cannot be removed from culture.

At the precise moment when Christianity was expanding exponentially across the world in the twentieth century, Western Christians became increasingly yoked to a white Christianity. Thus as new questions about theology and culture emerged amid this rapid growth, the Western Christian imagination lacked the resources to address these questions on the terms that Latin American, African, and Asian Christians were asking them. Instead, many such questions became refracted through the existing concerns of Western theology. The two theologians I examine in the next chapter, Adolf von Harnack and Hendrik Kraemer, sought to avoid this tendency to refract others’ questions through Western preoccupations, but did not avoid it entirely. Their struggles with these issues of race and revelation typified some of the most careful Western responses to syncretism up to the present day.