Conviction of Sin, Hope for Redemption

There are two big questions for anthropologists examining widespread conversion to Christianity: why and how? Why do people abandon coherent religious systems they have practiced for centuries in favor of a new—often radically new—way of thought? Then, even after people decide to accept the new religious framework, how does that happen? How do people apprehend these entirely new forms of thought if, as so many anthropologists argue, new concepts can only be grasped in terms of a pre-existing cultural framework? And for Christian anthropologists, there may be a third question: how might our interaction with these questions within the disciplinary framework of anthropology be distinctively informed by a theological understanding of the human person and the overarching story of creation, sin, and redemption?

Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Volume 4) (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity)

Joel Robbins (Author)

University of California Press

410 pages

$36.34

In answer to the first question, some have pointed to social disruption—colonialism, capitalism and globalization—as the reason people are abandoning traditional beliefs on a massive scale and turning toward Christianity or other non-local religions. Others argue that there are clear material advantages for those who adopt these widespread religions. Both these explanations falter, however, in the face of ethnographic evidence. First, traditional religions are often very capable of adapting to contemporary capitalism and modern citizenship. Just look at what Shirley MacLaine and New Age spirituality did for old-fashioned animism. Second, people frequently sacrifice material or social benefits in joining non-local religions such as Christianity. There is little economic or political incentive for Chinese citizens to join the house church movement, yet it is thought that 100 million may have done so.

Answers to the second question—how people convert—have been even more elusive and unsatisfying. One popular anthropological answer is that, in truth, traditionalists don’t really convert at all. Instances of “conversion” are largely cosmetic changes in form, while the “real” cultural structures remain unchanged. Christianity, in this view, is a thin veneer; scratch an African Anglican and you make a traditionalist bleed. Another view puts Christianity within the power structures of capitalism and the modern state; Christianity is part of a hegemonic cultural system, sometimes resisted with more or less success, but always seeking to supplant traditional systems through the powerful mechanisms of capitalist institutions, discourse, and social formation. Again, these explanations make sense of some cases, but certainly not all. To paint non-Western Christians as either clever imitators of Christianity or victims of a global hegemony is to dismiss all those who would say that they really have become Christians because they want to, or to tell them that they aren’t really Christians anyway. As Christianity spreads throughout much of the world without the assistance of Western missionaries or other “foreign” agents, these depictions of global Christianity ring increasingly hollow.

The best analyses come from scholars who take Christians seriously enough to actually believe them when they say that they are Christians, while finding theoretically satisfying ways of exploring what that entails in both the why and how of their conversion. One of the best studies to come out of this select group is Joel Robbins’ recent ethnographic work on the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. Robbins seeks to do more than simply describe Christianity among an out-of-the-way people; he explores the largest questions of cultural change:

How does a traditional culture come to motivate change? How can it direct that change without losing its own shape? How can people who start with traditional motivations quickly come to understand a new cultural logic? What kind of culture does this process of cultural doubling produce? And finally, how do people coordinate the two logics that result, and how is the relation between them made livable?

These are fundamental questions for anyone seeking to understand the rapidly changing, globalizing world of traditional peoples anywhere, but they are particularly pertinent for an understanding of worldwide Christianity.

The case of the Urapmin is brilliantly chosen for addressing these questions. Unlike many of their neighbors in the Papuan highlands, the Urapmin were never directly “missionized.” Starting in the 1950s, several young men from the area traveled to neighboring groups (the larger Telefomin) to learn at the Baptist schools there. But the tiny Urapmin community (numbering 396 people in 1990) was never part of the missionary or colonial project. As “development” passed them by, the Urapmin brought Christianity to themselves, and, by the mid-1970s, there was a viable, though minority, church in the Urapmin village. Then, in 1977, a Pentecostal revival swept through their area and the entire population confessed Christian belief. Again, without “outside” influence, the Urapmin radically reorganized their cosmology, “throwing out” their traditional religion, literally and figuratively, as the bones of ancestors and other traditional fetishes were destroyed.

Knowing that many will see this conversion as a consequence of colonial disruption and intrusions of the state, Robbins spends the first part of the book providing a detailed history of the Urapmin to challenge the view that “social disruption” is the best explanation for their desire to embrace Christianity. Instead, he convincingly argues for a cultural cause, in which the leadership sought to reclaim a position within the ritual structure between groups. With the development of other groups, ripples in the ritual arrangement of the whole area caused the Urapmin to feel “cultural humiliation.” Trying to rectify this unease, the Urapmin turned to a religion that did not promise material or social benefit but did seem to offer a new place in the changing ritual world of the Papuan Highlands and new access to spiritual power. The conversions, which by testimony and observation Robbins argues to be culturally authentic and profound, did bring a form of ritual life that addressed much of the anxiety the Urapmin felt.

As Robbins moves from the “why” of conversion to the “how,” he shows how this Pentecostal Christianity demanded a kind of moral reorganization that was both welcome and unsettling. It is the resulting “moral torment” that provides the focus for the second half of the book. Robbins skillfully draws together a complex but accessible conceptual framework to provide a satisfying theoretical structure for his data. He argues that the translation of Christian moral concepts into the Urapmin world was neither “syncretic” nor seamless, but represented subtle cultural shifts and reinterpretation (“hybridity”) producing a recognizable Christianity and a uniquely Urapmin predicament. For example, while “sin” seemed to map easily on the category of taboo (i.e., things which cannot be done), the translation became troublesome, providing a sense of internal sinfulness without the traditional ritual world that would have cleansed the community. The promised redemption of Jesus looms large, but sin hangs over the community like a troubling and ominous cloud.

This leads the Christian reader to reflect on her own spiritual world. When Robbins asks, “What, as [the Urapmin] see it, is the nature of their sinfulness, and how have they become convinced that they possess it as a quality?”, he moves us into familiar Christian territory. How do Christians anywhere come to see “sinfulness” as something that we have “inside”? Working through the details of Urapmin Pentecostalism—some of which seem quite mundane, while others (notably the kind of group Holy Spirit possessions called Spirit Diskos) have the exoticism that is the stuff of anthropologists’ dreams—Robbins holds up a view of Christianity that is both familiar and strange, providing what good anthropology always does, a window into our own experience through the lives of “exotic Others.”

The Urapmin also reveal some of the surprising—and, at times, disturbing—ways in which global Christianity is actually global. Through examinations of such religio-cultural features of Urapmin Christianity as their racial ideology (many Urapmin are convinced that once Jesus returns they will become white people) and a fixation on signs of the Second Coming carried through every conceivable form of communication with the “outside” world (what Robbins calls their “everyday millennialism”), we learn how these Christians reconcile a theology of spiritual equality with the reality of economic and political marginality.

I recently taught this book in an upper-division anthropology seminar. Students worked through the theoretical arguments, rich historical detail, and ethnographic narrative to come out, almost universally, in praise of the work. Not only did it supply answers to some big questions of global Pentecostalism and cultural change, many gained insights into their own spiritual lives. When starting the book, I doubt that many Americans would expect to find themselves reflected in the lives of a remote tribal society only recently introduced to many innovations of the 20th century. Yet it was without irony that, by the end of the course, one of my students enthused, “It is easy to see the similarities between the Urapmin and Wheaton College students!”

The explosive growth of Christianity outside the West should be more than a cause for celebration or concern. It should be an opportunity to delve deeply into these processes of change and conversion, drawing on the experiences of others to understand ourselves. Robbins’ book provides a perfect opportunity to do just that.

Brian Howell is assistant professor of anthropology at Wheaton College.