The second relationship between Christianity and world religions that I would like to reexamine is the conceptual one. The caution against applying, or imposing, the category of religion uncritically across time and space finds its boldest expression in the writings of the comparative historian of religions Wilfred Cantwell Smith. As early as 1962, Smith argued that the contingent roots of “religion” in early modern Europe distort the very things the word presumes to describe.⁸ Enlightenment epistemological critiques, Protestant disenchantment, and the scientific model of a mechanical universe combined to separate a newly necessitated supernatural realm from a newly secularized natural realm. This dramatically changed the nature of belief in the West: what was a performative gesture of trust in the axiomatic became an intellectual assent to the dubitable.⁹ Smith argues that this reformulation of belief served to systematize the otherwise fluid, ineffable, and existential dimensions of faith. Religion as a system, especially as a “belief system,” came to be “a concept of polemics and apologetics” premised on the essential incompatibility of one “belief system” and another.¹⁰ The anthropologist Talal Asad convincingly argues that the Reformation-inspired elevation of belief over practice is what made it possible to conceptualize religion “as a set of propositions to which believers gave assent, and which could therefore be judged and compared as between different religions.”¹¹ It reified the otherwise elusive and multiplex profundities of religion-as-lived, making it possible to speak of religions, in the plural, as discrete, hermetically sealed entities, the conditions for what the South Africanist David Chidester calls “apartheid comparative religion.”¹²

In the wake of these conceptual critiques of religion, what does it mean to speak, as scholars of world Christianity tend to do, of Christianity as a world religion? Enthusiastic accounts of Christianity’s newly global status are possible because of Christianity’s growth outside the West. There, however, post-Enlightenment and post-Reformation assumptions about religion have held less sway than they have in the West. Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci in China and Roberto de Nobili in India, by translating the gospel into Confucian and Tamil terms, respectively, long ago demonstrated the futility of compartmentalizing customs and cosmologies into non-overlapping systems.¹³ Enslaved Africans, when forcibly transported across the Atlantic, stealthily affiliated their deities with Catholic saints, maintaining continuity with their past despite tremendous pressure to erase it.¹⁴ Even Protestants, heirs to the Reformation emphasis on belief, have been shown to fuse Christian and non-Christian traditions in countries as diverse as Brazil, Sudan, and Thailand.¹⁵ These examples illustrate that in much of the world, particularly where Christianity is most rapidly spreading, religions are generally not lived as mutually exclusive entities or experienced as discrete “belief systems.” This suggests another question: if European Christianity is what, in part, gave systematic and bounded qualities to the modern category of religion, is world Christianity still a world religion? My presumption in posing such a question is that world Christianities can be used to diagnose the limits of European categories—religion being just one of them—and thereby contribute to the project of provincializing Europe itself.¹⁶

It would of course be wrong to assert that membership in a well-defined tradition has never mattered to people in postcolonial settings. As anthropologist Webb Keane put it, what Dutch Calvinist missionaries accomplished in Indonesia was not so much “the inculcation of a new religious doctrine” as “the introduction of a new category of religion altogether.”¹⁷ Even if religion was not a local concept before, this matters less than whether religion shapes self-understandings now. Still, Christianity’s greatest expansion today is precisely among those people whose behaviors and beliefs have never easily been translated by the word “religion,” a difficulty evidenced by the train of labels long used as alternatives: paganism, heathenism, and animism, to name a few. Ethnographic studies from places where such things are said to exist suggest that practitioners draw eclectically from the resources of Christianity and their “traditions,” more concerned with achieving some blessing, healing some ailment, or repaying some spiritual debt, than with heeding the arbitrary borderlines where one “religion” ends and another begins. These differences in how religion is understood highlight the need to refrain from universalizing one or another claim and to listen attentively to a variety of voices. But to whose voices are we listening? To whose do we remain deaf?

It concerns me that much work in world Christianity disproportionately privileges the missionary in the mission encounter. Sanneh, despite showing how translating the Bible creates conditions for what he calls “indigenous agency,”¹⁸ seems, on the whole, more intent on refuting the terrible caricature of the missionary-imperialist than on revealing how Christianity is received and refashioned in everyday practice. Since even the most context-sensitive missionary can never fully control the range of meanings of the local signs that get attached to Christian referents, translation almost inevitably destabilizes the gospel itself.¹⁹ This outcome Sanneh fails to consider, assuming as he does an unproblematic correspondence between local form and missionary content. My sense, however, is that “translating the message” frequently ends up transforming the message.

Illustrative of this is a story told to me by Vinny Stanzione, a friend who has lived for more than 20 years among the Tz’utujil-speaking Maya in the Guatemalan highlands. He has written movingly about the local trickster deity MaXimón, beloved honoree at festivals, recipient of sacrifices, and granter of blessings.²⁰ The Maya have given him a variety of names, indicative of his multiple guises and the multiple reasons they have for keeping him close. They most frequently refer to him as the Mam, an affectionate form of Rilaj Mam, the great-grandfather. Other designations include (in translation) Saint Simon, the skunk, the last born of the rain angels, lust boy-lust man, the Lord of Death, and—in recognition of his bold fashion sense—the Lord of Looking Good.

Listening to Vinny talk, I could not help but wonder about the impact of Pentecostalism, booming as it is in Guatemala. Surely the pastors and missionaries of these churches have made it to the countryside and condemned people’s devotion to the Mam. Indeed they have, Vinny confirmed. They come and say, “You have these illnesses, you’re unemployed, your relationships are in trouble. Want to know the source of these problems? The devil! Want to know who the devil is? MaXimón!”

I imagined how offensive this must be, an affront to authentic Maya religiosity. Is it not an outrage that these missionaries come from afar and, completely disregarding how dear the deity is, denounce him as the devil? MaXimón, the devil? MaXimón, the devil?!

Vinny laughed and revealed how unperturbed his friends in fact remain. “The devil?” they ask. “Well, okay—just another name for the Mam.”

At the discursive level, such Pentecostal demonization provides a paradigmatic case of a patently unsympathetic approach to other religions. But how is this discourse experienced by the Maya themselves? Rather than the demonization of MaXimón, might it be the “Mayanization” of the devil? Campaigns of spiritual warfare may change the meaning of local deities, but just as plausibly they may change the meaning of the devil.²¹ How can studies of missions account for such subversions?

They would need to start by refusing to privilege what the philosopher Michel de Certeau calls the top-down strategies of knowledge-producers (whether foreign missionaries, indigenous missionaries, or contextual theologians) over the bottom-up tactics of knowledge-consumers—those who “make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules.”²² Accounting for the lifeworlds of ordinary converts would reveal the limits of conversion conceived according to the Pauline ideal: renunciation of all that came before in exchange for the supposedly stable content of the Christian “belief system.” In the micropolitics of everyday practice, where existential commitments and social relations matter most, academic and ecclesiastic anxieties about the borders of traditions and the limits of orthodoxy fade in importance.

Even in the seemingly least accommodating, least flexible Christian expression—Pentecostalism—porous borders conducive to overlapping traditions are evident. Demonization need not be abnegation. The creative bricolage of the Maya suggests that it need not even be condemnation. To avoid missing such dialogical dynamics and the indeterminacies of religious change, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff suggest that a better word for conversion may be conversation.²³ I in turn suggest that a better word for missiology may be conversiology: not the study of missions, but of conversions; not the study of missionaries, but of their targets—those who convert, those who resist converting, and the many who find themselves in between.

Christianity has long haunted the study of world religions, but today Christianities no longer lurk in the shadows of the world or of world religions. In response to Christianity’s new demography, the field of world Christianity has arisen. Its most engaging studies attend to the ways in which the everyday experiences of nonelites defy conventional understandings of religion, conversion, and identity. By focusing attention there, the academic study of religion can go beyond positing Christianity in opposition to, or as prototype for, world religions. It can also go beyond merely reasserting Christianity, in its new global expanse, as one among the world religions. For, my argument has been, religions as lived are always intersecting and interpenetrating. Instead of worrying about how to include Christianity among world religions, perhaps we can simply recognize that it already exists within them, and they within it.

Devaka Premawardhana is a PhD candidate in religion and anthropology at Harvard University, whose dissertation on the rise of Pentecostalism will be based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique. These words are adapted from remarks given as part of the Center for the Study of World Religions’ 50th anniversary symposium held at HDS on April 15–16, 2010.