Migration and the Making of Global Christianity

Jehu J. Hanciles

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467461450
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

A magisterial sweep through 1500 years of Christian history with a groundbreaking focus on the missionary role of migrants in its spread.

Human migration has long been identified as a driving force of historical change. Building on this understanding, Jehu Hanciles surveys the history of Christianity's global expansion from its origins through 1500 CE to show how migration—more than official missionary activity or imperial designs—played a vital role in making Christianity the world's largest religion.

Church history has tended to place a premium on political power and institutional forms, thus portraying Christianity as a religion disseminated through official representatives of church and state. But, as Hanciles illustrates, this "top-down perspective overlooks the multifarious array of social movements, cultural processes, ordinary experiences, and non-elite activities and decisions that contribute immensely to religious encounter and exchange."

Hanciles's socio-historical approach to understanding the growth of Christianity as a world religion disrupts the narrative of Western preeminence, while honoring and making sense of the diversity of religious expression that has characterized the world Christian movement for two millennia. In turning the focus of the story away from powerful empires and heroic missionaries, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity instead tells the more truthful story of how every Christian migrant is a vessel for the spread of the Christian faith in our deeply interconnected world.

Part One

CONCEPTUAL OVERVIEW

–CHAPTER ONE–

Migration in Human History: A Conceptual Overview

There comes a moment to the patient traveler (and there are many such that wander far afield) when the road ahead of him is clear and the distance so foreshortened that he has a vision of his home, he sees his way to it over land and sea, and in his fancy travels there and back so quickly that it seems to stand before his eager eyes.

—“Jason and the Voyage of the Argo”
(from Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica)

For many years, there were two competing hypotheses among scientists that explained the origins of modern humans.¹ The first, known as the “multiregionalist” theory or Candelabra model, maintained that modern humans have multiple origins or evolved from isolated groups in different regions. In this view, our most recent ancestors (Homo erectus, or “upright man”²) emerged and flourished in Africa about 2 million years ago and began to migrate into Asia and Europe about 1.9 million BCE.³ The dispersed groups developed independently but comparably in Africa, Europe, and Asia, adapted to their different environments over millions of years, and eventually evolved into modern humans (Homo sapiens, “knowing man”). Proponents theorize that present-day variations in skin color and facial differences reflect the impact of the disparate physical environments on regional heritage.

The alternative explanation, popularly known as the “Out of Africa” theory or the “Noah’s Ark” hypothesis, rejects the view that Homo erectus were our direct ancestors and contends that diverse populations living in disparate environments separated by considerable distances could not have evolved separately into the same species. Proponents claim that humans evolved in one place, as a single species, before they began to migrate and colonize the world. This happened long after Homo erectus, “the first intercontinental travelers,” had died out. In essence the homogeneity of modern humans (Homo sapiens)—all humans are 99.9 percent similar—indicates that global migration was a rather recent occurrence.

Neither of these competing views gained ascendancy until the 1980s when the development of DNA testing allowed geneticists to compare genetic differences among populations in different parts of the world and reconstruct the migration movement of their ancestors. In particular, cutting-edge analysis of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited only through the female line, revealed that the mother of all modern people lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. This is not to say that she was the only woman alive at the time, only that her progenies survived while the lines of descendants of the other women became extinct. This mitochondrial African Eve “is the 10,000th grandmother of every human on the planet.”⁴ Subsequent research also established that the Y chromosome, which determines male sex, also originated in Africa.

The evidence indicates that our ancestors first migrated to different parts of the African continent. Then, some 100,000–60,000 years ago, a small group of migrants, all of them Eve’s descendants, all closely related and sharing her mtDNA, migrated out of Africa. These African migrants numbered anywhere from 150 to 2,000 people, out of an estimated population of 10,000.⁵ In a process lasting around 50,000 years, their descendants “colonized every corner of the world except for Antarctica, the high Arctic, and some oceanic islands.”⁶ They successively occupied the Fertile Crescent and southern Eurasia (by 90,000 BCE), Australia (about 58,000 BCE⁷), Europe and northern Eurasia (ca. 40,000 BCE), and eventually the Americas as far as Chile in the southern tip (about 13,000 years ago).⁸ “One of the amazing things about this global journey,” notes Nayan Chanda, “is that it was undertaken almost entirely on foot, with occasional use of rafts or dugouts over waters.”⁹

The dating of this global migration shows that for at least half our history modern humans lived exclusively in Africa, and that variations in skin color (derived from a minuscule particle of our DNA) emerged within the last 60,000 years, or very recently in evolutionary terms.¹⁰ Most important for our discussion, the “Out of Africa” account establishes that the tremendous diversification of the human race is fundamentally rooted in migration, an understanding that is unequivocally endorsed by the Hebrew Bible.

Human migration is a fact of history; and the history of humans is one of migration. In a quite literal sense, “humans are born migrants.”¹¹ When our ancestors first became fully human, writes historian William H. McNeill, “they were already migratory, moving about in pursuit of big game.”¹² Archeological remains of human ancestors like the iconic “Lucy” (who supposedly walked the earth 3.2 million years ago¹³) highlight the critical role of mobility for our species: her remains indicate that Lucy was on the move when she died! For good reason, migration has been described as “an irrepressible human urge.”¹⁴ The migrant impulse aided human evolution and has played an indispensable role in human development throughout the ages. The various forms of migration “provide one of the major forces for historical change.”¹⁵ In other words, migration is not just a prominent feature of one stage or the other of human history. Migration has been a constant feature of human existence, embedded in the complex transformations that shape our world.

The tendency to associate human migration exclusively with crises perhaps helps to explain why its influential role in human history and development is often overlooked or greatly underestimated. Conversely, the pervasiveness and near ubiquity of migration in the present era can foster the view that the centrality of the phenomenon to human existence and world affairs is a recent development. There are good grounds for calling the last six to seven decades “the age of migration”;¹⁶ such is the extraordinary volume and diversity of migration since the mid-twentieth century. But such a claim also belies the new constraints or paradoxes that mark current migratory flows.¹⁷ Due to advancements in technologies of travel, the reach and rate of migrant movement have never been greater; at the same time, efforts to control or regulate cross-border movement have expanded tremendously. Consequently, compared to a hundred years ago, people are generally less free to migrate, as the increasing measures by Western governments to regulate or stem the unremitting tide of unauthorized (or “illegal”) migrants indicate. Even more important, while it is true that there are more migrants in the world than ever before, the transformative impact of migration on human development is perennial, and the past offers important lessons for the present. This is particularly true of the role that migration plays in the globalization of religion.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CHALLENGES: CONTEXTS, SOURCES, AND MODELS

It is only in recent decades that historians have begun to give detailed attention to migration as a fundamental feature of human development. Even so, historical treatments of migration are beset by major limitations:¹⁸ these include a primary focus on Europe and the Atlantic region, the dominance of the bipolar analytical approach (“voluntary” vs. “involuntary,” “free” vs. “forced,” “legal” vs. “illegal,” etc.), the centrality of the nation-state in the research methodology, a preoccupation (notably among American immigration scholars) with particular ethnic groups, and the fact that the period of study is seldom longer than five hundred years. Dirk Hoerder’s landmark study of human migrations in world history from 1000 to 2000 CE, titled Cultures in Contact (2002), represents a major breakthrough; but a fixation with European movements and initiatives is detectable in his analysis. However, there is now a small but growing list of historical treatments of migration from a global perspective, including Jerry Bentley’s Old World Encounters (1998); Richard Foltz’s Religions on the Silk Road (2010, 2nd ed.); Stephen Gosch and Peter Stearns’s Premodern Travel in World History (2008); Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder’s What Is Migration History? (2009); and Patrick Manning’s Migration in World History (2005), which among other things offers a much-needed typology of migration.

To be sure, the study of human migration in history presents particular challenges to historians.¹⁹ Historical studies, notes Hasia Diner, place great stress on “context” as marker of a particular time and place. Since “contexts differ from place to place, and change over time” historians generally eschew typologies and models that account for variations over long periods of time and across regions. Also, she adds, the “sources” that historians depend on for assessment “have been grounded in particular moments in time, anchored to particular spots on the globe, and embodied in the experiences of particular people even as they moved from one of those settings to other new ones.” This limits the study of the human experience to “periods and places for which [historians] have written records.”²⁰ Dependence on written texts becomes a major impediment for the historical exploration of migration, which encompasses periods, places, and persons (nonelite men and women) that are not represented in recorded history. Migration is “one of the defining characteristics of the human race”;²¹ but for many epochs and periods, the scantiness of the historical record and the necessity of extracting important conclusions from fragmentary and inconclusive material are an ever-present dilemma.

The problem is compounded when there is interest in specific dimensions of human migration, such as its links to religious or cultural expansion. Foltz warns that the tendency to depend on key texts as the authoritative representation of a particular tradition or belief system reinforces artificial boundaries and elevates particular voices or experiences. “We should recognize,” he warns, “that an overly text-centered approach not only tacitly supports elite, often hegemonic views at the expense of the nonliterate majority, it also does little to help us reconstruct what it is that the majority actually did and believed.”²² The modern preoccupation with periodization and categorization can also impose rigid boundaries on major movements, enforce distinctions (based on preconceived notions of religious adherence, for instance) that overlook the fluidity of religious allegiance and expression in local contexts, or misrepresent religious transformation. Additionally, the dense fog that often inhibits full grasp of the dynamics and extent of migrant movements in some contexts can also impede efforts to probe complex issues like the nature and direction of cross-cultural change or, for that matter, the extent of religious conversion and pluralism. These challenges underscore the interdisciplinary nature of migration studies and inspire increased calls for historians to incorporate or learn from the approaches of other scientific disciplines in the study of migration.²³

In this regard, the sociohistorical approach adopted in this study is quite germane to an assessment of the historical impact and contribution of migrants, because of its distinctly “bottom-up” perspective.²⁴ Peter Stearns identifies three interrelated features of social history:²⁵ first, “substantial focus on groups out of power, with the concomitant belief that these groups display some capacity to change and therefore some capacity to influence wider historical processes”; second, “a fascination with aspects of life and society in addition to politics, which entails a belief … that non-political activities and beliefs warrant serious analysis in their own right as part of understanding the past”; and third, an emphasis on “patterns or processes of culture, power relationships and behavior rather than a series of events.” The conscious effort to integrate the experiences of ordinary people or neglected social groups in the historical account has obvious advantages for exploring the migrant experience and cross-cultural religious encounters.

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