cultural change. Conversion from one religion to another is, thus, never
simply a shift in belief; as Kraft reminds us, "Significant culture change is
always a matter of changes in the worldview.... [A]nything that affects a
people's worldview will affect the whole culture and, of course, the people
who operate in terms of that culture." 7
From my exposure to the anthropologically informed missiology (and there
are, no doubt, variations and exceptions), the Christian writers acknowledge that
Christianity and its diverse Christian cultures are not one and the same thing:
Christianity can take different shapes in different cultural contexts. In fact, the
point of these writings is that Christianity must take different shapes in different
contexts, so the writers urge missionaries to "recontextualize" Christianity in
such a way as to fit it into the local cultures without rejecting every aspect of
those local cultures but without losing the core of the religion. However, as far as
they do go in recognizing the cultural nature of their religion, they do not take
the final step toward seeing its own dependency and relativity, that Christianity,
too,
• is one way to regulate human lives, among many other ways;
• is a legacy from its own past, evolved over time and learned from its
predecessors but held to be absolute andpefect;
• makes sense to those inside it but no sense at all to those outside it;
• consists of its own assumptions and premises that underlie its norms,
values, allegiances, and institutions;
• grounds and informs a particular view of reality and possible responses to
that view;
• is not reasoned out, but assumed to be true without prior proof; and
• organizes the lives and experiences of its followers-literally provides the
terms in and through which they live and experience-and is seldom
questioned by them.
In other words, despite all the sensitive-sounding babble about culture and
worldview, and so on, the proselytizers still think (as they would have to think in
order to be motivated to proselytize) that their culture/worldview is the true
culture/worldview. "As divine revelations," Hiebert explains, "biblical norms ...
stand in judgment of all cultures.... Truth, in the end," by which he naturally
means his truth, Christian truth, "does not depend on what we think or say, but
on reality itself."s Other cultures are cultures, you see, but Christian culture is
"reality"-which betrays their actual intention and in so doing betrays the message
of anthropology.
CHRISTIANITY SPREADING OUT TO CULTURE
What these missiologists are describing is the central anthropological tenet of
"holism," that every aspect of culture-its religion, its economic system, its
kinship practices, its politics, its language, its gender roles, and so on-is
integrated and interdependent. The functioning of each part affects all of the
parts, and changes to one part lead to changes in other parts. Further, dominant
elements in a culture ripple through that culture, replicating themselves in
various institutions and practices. Ultimately, all of the aspects of culture
develop a kind of consonance, an overall consistent feel or theme.
The integration of culture is a two-way process. One of the directions is from
the religion out to the rest of culture, and Christian proselytizers have understood
this since what Michael Welton calls the "cunning peda gogues" among the first
Jesuit missionaries. As early as the 1600s, Jesuits in the Americas invaded native
societies with a "pedagogy," or teaching regimen, that was "motivated by an
interest in exercising a symbolic, cultural domination over their student
adversaries."9 This carefully developed and meticulously deployed pedagogy
was a concentrated and unyielding attack on the cultural foundations of native
religion and culture:
The Jesuit attack pedagogy was aimed primarily at undermining the
lifeworld foundations of Indian ways of life. The lifeworld is the taken-
forgranted source of meaning and action, and various spiritual-religious
practices (animism) were interwoven into everyday life.... The Jesuits
sought to dislodge [the shaman] from his place of lifeworld supremacy
through ridicule, mockery, and one-upmanship and to insert themselves in
his place. This was a brilliant, ruthless pedagogical strategy. They used their
scientific knowledge of solar and lunar eclipses, tides, and the magical
power of the printed word to de-authorize the shaman. They marshaled their
own lifeworld resources (now increasingly penetrated by scientific forms of
knowledge) to undermine the Amerindian cultural foundations and create a
native fifth column in the Devil's Empire.10
Among the tactics used then, and ever since, was study of the local language
so as to find ways to translate ideas and doctrines "from a hierarchical,
patriarchal, technological, status-ridden Christian Europe into the mental
universe of the Indians."11 Armed with knowledge of the language and culture
(much of which knowledge constituted the first "ethnological" materials created
in non-Western settings), the Jesuits launched a multipronged campaign against
the bases of native life and belief, especially not-specifically religious matters,
like gender roles. Precontact gender relations were so critical and such an
anathema to missionization because native women "had considerable power,
authority, and prestige in Amerindian tribal life. Although there was a sexual
division of labor, Indian cultures lacked the moral vocabulary to conceive of
women as `bad' or `evil."112 Another tool was the European-dominated fur
trade, which gradually achieved the incorporation of local groups into the
emergent global, colonial, economic system, teaching them disciplines and
values suitable to (the lower rungs of) the new Christian/capitalist way of life.
Other explicit and finely honed pedagogical techniques used on the native
peoples included ridicule and verbal attacks on traditional beliefs and practices
and on native etiquette. As "educational warriors," once missionaries "sensed
that the traditional lifeworld was eroding, they focused their attacks on the
inadequacy of the indigenous meaning system."13 Their weapons included the
scientific skill to make natural predictions (like eclipses), literacy to argue that
the written word was better and more authoritative than oral knowledge, and
visual images to represent and dramatize their messages. They exploited emotion
and melodrama and "studied the aesthetic preferences of their students to
increase the effectiveness of their pedagogy."14 Specifically, the Jesuits sought
to create a lavish, sensual, sacred pedagogical space to exert influence over their
followers. They conducted their services and rituals with flash and pomp to
provide the believers with a spiritual ambience that would awaken the senses and
cast a spell over them."1'
The anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff have discovered the same
processes in a later stage of colonialism
in Africa during the 1800s. Colonialism,
wherever and whenever conducted, involved changes to and domination of the
political and economic aspects of subject societies, together with religion and
other cultural habits, such as dress, speech, marriage, gender roles, and so on.
All these forms and practices, and not merely religious doctrines and rituals,
carried Christian messages about what is true, good, important, and possible.
Much of such cultural and even religious "knowledge" is implicit and informal,
embedded in the big and little things we do all day, every day-what Jean
Comaroff calls "the signs and structures of everyday life."16 Therefore, the
conversion process was designed to effect a change in these signs and structures,
a "revolution in habits," that is, "a quest to refurnish the mundane: to focus
human endeavor on the humble scapes of the everyday, of the `here-and-now' in
which the narrative of Protestant redemption took on its contemporary form."17
They have also labeled this struggle "an epic of the ordinary" and "the everyday
as epiphany": "it was precisely by means of the residual, naturalized quality of
habit that power takes up residence in culture, insinuating itself, apparently
without agency, in the texture of a lifeworld. This, we believe, is why recasting
mundane, routine practices has been so vital to all manner of social reformers,
colonial missionaries among them."18
An important nonreligious dimension of change was economics, literally
farming techniques. Missionaries offered a model for "civilized cultivation" in
the form of the "mission garden"; a major aspect of this new model was a
reversal of traditional gender roles, in which women had done the bulk of
horticultural work. The plow became a potent symbol, fences introduced
conceptions of "enclosure" and property, and inequality of output related to
intensity of labor-generated Western-style differences in wealth and status. But
economic change went beyond horticulture to new institutions, such as markets
and money. Modern labor and cash were part of a new "moral economy,"
stigmatizing idleness and "primitive production" and promoting "the kind of
upright industry and lifestyle that would dissolve [tradition's] dirt."19 Yet more
mundane habits, like cleanliness, clothing, and household practices, were valued
for their civilizing and Christianizing effects. Clothes not only meant covering
heathen nakedness but teaching locals the proper wear and care of these articles;
native clothing, it seemed to colonists, was dirty, too "natural," and lacked the
necessary markers of social-especially gender-distinctions. Home became a
"domestic" sphere, which became the woman's sphere, where she would literally
sit, sew, and serve. But the traditional native house would not do; the house and
the community had to be altered from what the Europeans perceived as "a wild
array of small, featureless huts scattered across the countryside."20 Missionary
houses and buildings again acted as the model: with right angles, specialized
spaces (e.g., a room for eating, a room for sleeping, etc.), doors and locks for
privacy, and modern furniture, the mission structures "became a diorama" for
how people should live.21 The collection of residences that became the "town"
differentiated public from private spaces, all set in a universe of square blocks
and broad streets. In these and many ways, the foreigners were doing much more
than bringing a new religion; they were "teaching [natives] to build a world,"22
one in which civilization itself was expressed "in squares and straight lines."23
Many people, atheists and rationalists among them, still think that unless they
are living in some primitive society, or unless they are being bludgeoned overtly
with religious "belief," that they are safe from the influence of religion. If the
presentation above has not awakened them to the multiple mundane ways in
which religion pervades their lives, then they should heed the warning of Kraft,
who assures his readers that religious colonization is not and cannot be a mere
frontal assault on "false" religion: for the cunning cultural converter,
"Christianity is to be directed at the worldview of a people so that it will
influence each of [the] subsystems from the very core of the culture. Truly
converted people (whether in America or overseas) need to manifest biblical
Christian attitudes and behavior in all of their cultural life, not just in their
religious practices."24 Accordingly, Christianity in American and other Western
societies, and other religions in other societies, actively and intentionally pursues
the same course, creating a pervasive and largely taken-for-granted religious
worldview that generally escapes criticism, since it escapes notice. As I have
tried to warn readers in my previous work,25 the United States and the wider
Western world are heavily saturated with Christianity throughout their many
large and small cultural arrangements. Whether or not they know it-and it is
more insidious if they do not know it-nonChristians living in Christian-
dominated societies live a life permeated with Christian assumptions and
premises. Christians and nonChristians alike are literally immersed in Christian
cultural waters, and like fish they usually take for granted the water they swim
in.
The subsystems to which Kraft refers include essentially every aspect of
culture, including language, critical life events, everyday habits, bodily habits,
institutions, and even understandings of time and space.
LANGUAGE
A society's language is the first but hardly the only place to look for the subtle
power of religion. Even atheists talk the language of religion, which in American
society means "speaking Christian." Every religion not only infiltrates the local
language but is a language in its own right, with its own vocabulary that has no
meaning outside of that religion. For example, Christianity is rich with
terminology that often has no correlate in other religions, such as "god,"
"heaven," "hell," "sin," "angel," "devil," "bless," "soul," "saint," "pray," "sacred,"
"divine," "baptism," "purgatory" "gospel," and so on. These are not neutral,
universal notions but are specific to this one religion. A religion like Hinduism
has its own unique lexicon, with dharma and karma and samsara and moksha
and yuga and so on. Christians cannot "say" these things, since they do not occur
in Christianity, and Hindus cannot say "Christian things" since those things do
not occur in Hinduism.
But there is much more to a religion than its vocabulary; religions, like other
areas of culture, include specific things to say. Some of these conventional things
to say are propositional, that is, truth claims like "God exists" or "Jesus was the
son of God." Many are not propositional, however. They may be utterances of
power, meant to have an effect on the world, from "God bless America" to
Navajo prayers for health to phrases like "abracadabra." Much of religious talk
consists of scripts, routines that people perform just as surely as saying "Hello,
how are you?" or "Have a nice day"; at the extreme, these scripts become
liturgi
es, like a Catholic mass or a wed ding ceremony. Religion also provides
stories (which are usually intended to apply to and organize our own lives in
some way) and metaphors for thinking about the world and our behavior in it.
And we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that religious language can
also keep secrets, obfuscate the truth, manipulate hearers, and sometimes tell
out-and-out lies. A religion like Christianity also supplies images, stories, and
metaphors that pervade the culture's speech and thought. Even a short list of such
ideas and illustrations highlights how Christian-soaked our speechcommunity is:
Mark of Cain, Garden of Eden, David versus Goliath, Jacob's ladder, patience of
job, "my cross to bear," "spare the rod and spoil the child," "beat swords into
plowshares," "voice crying in the wilderness," "Can the leopard change his
spots?" "hide your light under a bushel," "wolf in sheep's clothing," "wars and
rumors of wars," "Physician heal thyself," "lost sheep," "grapes of wrath," "cast
the first stone," "through a glass darkly," and many, many more. Most atheists
use most of these phrases without any thought for their source-and how the use
serves the source.
CRITICAL LIFE EVENTS
Religion invades the major moments in individual and collective life. The two
most obvious are birth and death. Religion does not create birth or death-
although many religions like to assert that they do-but religion typically
demands a role in, or even authority over, both. Many religions maintain that a
person cannot be born or die "well" or "successfully" without a religious
officiate and a religious ceremony on the occasion. The same is true with
marriage, a social and civil bond that religion often attempts to claim as its own
(one must marry "in the church"). In times of illness or misfortune, religion may
barge in and insist on a role, either as reason or remedy. In times of shared alarm,
such as war or natural disasters or other tragedies, religion is almost certain to
show up. And religion may simply invent its own occasions and events, such as
baptisms or confirmations or bar mitzvahs or the "christening" (Christening) of a
baby, a ship, or anything else that religion wants to lay its mitts on.
EVERrDAYHABITS
Religion is not satisfied to show up at the big occasions; promoters of religion
know instinctively that it is the little things that matter most, since they occur
most often and constitute the bulk of our lives. Religion thus insinuates itself
into the mundane, like the food we eat: religions often carry dietary restrictions
on what foods we can eat and when (in this religion no pork, in that religion no
beef, in the other religion no meat on Friday or no meat at all, etc.). It also adds
practices of fasting and feasting, like the Muslim fast of Ramadan or Catholic
feast days. Every time you eat you may be expected to "say grace." For that
matter, every time you go to sleep you may be expected to say a bedtime prayer.
Religion may even show up when you sneeze ("God bless you"). And religion
may shape the everyday more energetically, with regular services and
ceremonies, "confessions," prayers, and so on.
One of the most overlooked ways that religion replicates itself in the everyday
is in personal names. In many religions, humans are given names from the
mythology of the local religion-in Judeo-Christianity: for males, Matthew, Mark,
Luke, ,john, Adam, .7oshua, ,Yoseph, Daniel, Michael, David, and for females,
Mary, Ruth, Rachel, Eve, and on and on. In Islam, Muhammad is probably the
most common male name, followed by All and Hussein. Hindus often name their
sons Krishna or Ram/Rama. A few Scandinavians are still named Thor.
BODILY HABITS
Christianity's disdain for the physical and the bodily does not mean that
Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion Page 3
