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Religious Conversion in Africa Religious Conversion in Africa in Religious Conversion • Jason Bruner and Dmitri David Hurlbut Religious Conversion in Africa Edited by Jason Bruner and David Dmitri Hurlbut Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religious Conversion in Africa Religious Conversion in Africa Editors Jason Bruner David Dmitri Hurlbut MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade • Manchester • Tokyo • Cluj • Tianjin Editors Jason Bruner David Dmitri Hurlbut Arizona State University Boston University USA USA Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special issues/religious conversion). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03943-034-5 (Hbk) ISBN 978-3-03943-035-2 (PDF) c 2020 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Editors .............................................. vii Jason Bruner and David Dmitri Hurlbut Moving beyond Discontinuity in Religious Conversion in Africa: A Preface to the Special Issue Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 395, doi:10.3390/rel11080395 ................... 1 Jason Bruner and David Dmitri Hurlbut New Approaches to ‘Converts’ and ‘Conversion’ in Africa: An Introduction to the Special Issue Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 389, doi:10.3390/rel11080389 ................... 5 Kimberly Marshall and Andreana Prichard Spiritual Warfare in Circulation Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 327, doi:10.3390/rel11070327 ................... 15 Devaka Premawardhana Reconversion and Retrieval: Nonlinear Change in African Catholic Practice Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 353, doi:10.3390/rel11070353 ................... 33 Shamara Wyllie Alhassan “We Stand for Black Livity!”: Trodding the Path of Rastafari in Ghana Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 374, doi:10.3390/rel11070374 ................... 47 Dmitri M. Bondarenko and Andrey V. Tutorskiy Conversion to Orthodox Christianity in Uganda: A Hundred Years of Spiritual Encounter with Modernity, 1919–2019 Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 223, doi:10.3390/rel11050223 ................... 57 Anna Redhair Wells Hagiography as Source: Gender and Conversion Narratives in The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 307, doi:10.3390/rel11060307 ................... 75 David Dmitri Hurlbut The “Conversion” of Anthony Obinna to Mormonism: Elective Affinities, Socio-Economic Factors, and Religious Change in Postcolonial Southeastern Nigeria Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 358, doi:10.3390/rel11070358 ................... 85 Katrin Langewiesche Conversion as Negotiation. Converts as Actors of Civil Society Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 322, doi:10.3390/rel11070322 ................... 99 v About the Editors Jason Bruner is an associate professor of Global Christianity in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Living Salvation in the East African Revival in Uganda (2017), and his articles have appeared in journals such as Material Religion, the Journal of Religion in Africa, Studies in World Christianity, and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. David Dmitri Hurlbut earned both his PhD and his MA in history from Boston University, where he was a Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellow in Igbo. He received his BA from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He currently serves as the managing editor of the African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review and as a book review editor for H-Africa. He was the 2018–2019 Graduate Research Fellow in Mormon Studies at the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah. His scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and the Journal of Mormon History. vii religions Editorial Moving beyond Discontinuity in Religious Conversion in Africa: A Preface to the Special Issue Jason Bruner 1,* and David Dmitri Hurlbut 2,* 1 School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA 2 Department of History, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA * Correspondence: [email protected] (J.B.); [email protected] (D.D.H.) Received: 24 July 2020; Accepted: 30 July 2020; Published: 31 July 2020 This Special Issue emerged through a conversation about how to foster new lines of analysis with respect to religious, cultural, and social change on the African continent. More to the point, we recognized that priming discontinuity in studies of “conversion” captures important dynamics with respect to certain types of Christian churches—namely, Pentecostal and charismatic ones. But what other processes of religious change have been occluded by the predominance of this line of (Christian) analysis in the literature on “conversion” in Africa? Attending to this question is not merely theoretical but also epistemological and methodological. Whose categories, experiences, and mentalities are privileged to be deemed analytically important when it comes to shifts in religious adherence, belief, identity, tradition, and community? Furthermore, scholarly examinations of religious change are often caught in a challenging methodological bind. On the one hand, they can purport to be about an experience of inner transformation. On the other, the historian or even ethnographer often only has access to these interior states through extant written documents or the language that the person uses to convey the change or transformation. These inclinations have made studies of this phenomenon quite dependent upon the category of belief, locating “conversion” in the process of changing a person’s belief, or with respect to communities defined primarily by religious belief or doctrine. Scholars who study African Christian communities that value discontinuity in “conversion” focus on why converts seek rupture in their religious lives—a stark contrast between their past and present selves. Many studies have answered that question by pointing to the dysfunctions of postcolonial governance in Sub-Saharan Africa, combined with the challenges of “millennial capitalism”. That is, there have been clear, socio-political reasons that account for why many African Christians want to make a break with the past. Though these studies have addressed what had been a lacuna in studies of African Christianity, there is much that the present interest with this form of “conversion” omits from analytical view. This approach is deeply tied to not only Christian, but specifically Pentecostal, categories and theologies. It is often quite dependent upon verbal testimony as its foundation. It likewise tends to portray a linear development and trajectory (away from a past and towards a future), which does not always reflect the complex ways in which adherents engage with those churches. It has difficulty capturing the sensibilities of Christian traditions and communities other than charismatic and Pentecostal ones, to say nothing of communities that are not Christian, and it cannot easily account for processes by which the past is seen as a desirable resource in the present. “Conversion” in pre-colonial Africa is likewise largely out of its purview. As a result, we wanted to convene a wide range of scholars, including historians of pre-colonial, colonial, and contemporary Africa, along with anthropologists, who would be able to offer fresh arguments and reassessments of religious change pertaining to Africa. The result is comprised of fascinating analyses and interventions that offer critical, creative, and constructive analyses of religious change on the African continent from the medieval period to the present. Religions 2020, 11, 395; doi:10.3390/rel110803951 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2020, 11, 395 We open the issue with a critical introduction to the topic of religious “conversion” in Africa. This article summarizes the concept’s indebtedness to Christian categories and assumptions, and addresses the limitations of this approach with respect to religious change, belief, and practice, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. While acknowledging the term’s biases and limitations, we also note the fact that some Africans have used (and continue to use) the term to describe their own transformations, meaning that “conversion” exists in the scholarship as both an etic and emic category. While Andreana Pritchard and Kimberly Marshall examine charismatic Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, they do so with transatlantic sensibilities. They utilize two case studies to good effect in order to show unexpected religious and theological exchanges among North American (a Navajo evangelist and an Oklahoman short-term missionary, respectively) and Sub-Saharan African charismatic Christians. They muddy the issue of continuity in “conversion”
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