Adhesion, Conversion, Indians, and Missionaries

My previous post suggests that A. D. Nock's distinction between adhesion and conversion--a distinction rooted in traditional versus prophetic religion--provides a lens through which scholars might more clearly understand the interface between Indian religions and Christianity in American history. The difference points to a primary reason why there were, it seems, so few genuine conversions to Christianity among Native Americans. The following quotations from American Indian scholars tend to bear out this thesis. For whenever they describe the spiritual outlook of Native Americans, these writers clearly identify examples of what Nock labeled traditional religion.

Vine Deloria, Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux professor and attorney, was likely the most important American involved in Indian affairs during the twentieth century.[1] In his groundbreaking work of 1969 titled Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, Deloria wrote that Indians tended to accept only those traditions and customs "which were rooted in the tribes' distant past," and that a Native tribe's religious ordinances were "synonymous" with its customs.[2] Historically, Indian people made no distinction "between religion and life's other activities."[3]

1827 depiction of six Osage Indians

Along the same line, George E. Tinker, a member of the Osage Nation, has said that the "whole culture and social structure" of Indian people "was and still is infused with a spirituality that cannot be separated from the rest of the community's life at any point."[4] Native Americans "do not choose which tribal religious traditions they will practice. Rather, each of them is born into a community and its particular ceremonial life."[5] American Indian spirituality exemplifies traditional religion.

Following the pattern of adhesion, Native American religions tended to borrow from other traditions or imitate them in some way. Historian Roger L. Nichols writes that along the American frontier during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, religious reactions to new and always-changing conditions provoked varied responses. In some cases, shamans "incorporated Christian ideas and occasionally even Anglo-American practices into their teachings." And, it appears that when groups seemed to have given up their tribal beliefs, it was because they were "so thoroughly defeated that they saw acceptance of the white man's way as the only road to survival."[6] Those who were not so desperate occasionally borrowed religious ideas and ways. As Deloria put it, the influence of "Western religion" on Indian culture "was comparable to that of other trade goods. Where it was useful, it was used."[7]

Notes

[1] Kirk Johnson, "Vine Deloria Jr., Champion of Indian Rights, Dies at 72," New York Times, November 15, 2005, accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/us/vine-deloria-jr-champion-of-indian-rights-dies-at-72.html. 

[2] Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 103.

[3] Ibid., 105.

[4] George E. Tinker, "Religion," in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 537-38.

[5] Ibid., 540-41.  

[6] Roger L. Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 90-91.

[7] Custer Died for Your Sins, 109.

A. D. Nock on Adhesion and Conversion

Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963)

In his 1933 book, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo, the Harvard classicist A. D. Nock distinguished between two understandings of and approaches to religious initiation: adhesion versus conversion.

Adhesion, said Nock, involves the "acceptance of new worships as useful supplements" but "not as substitutes." It does not involve "the taking of a new way of life in place of the old."[1] Adhesion is an understandable, maybe even preferable practice whenever two non-exclusive religious traditions meet. It simply involves the adoption of whatever one finds useful in a tradition that is new to him. The tradition, or folkway, has no truth to tell. It has an outlook, accompanied by rituals or other practices, that might be attractive to the newcomer.

By contrast, Nock defined conversion as “a re-orientation of the soul, a deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right.”[2] Conversion takes place when the truth claims of a religion, which are thought to extend to all of humanity, require the hearer to make an either-or choice. It requires "either the renunciation of his past and entry into a kingdom, . . . or the refusal of this dream as chimerical."[3]

As this overview suggests, Nock explained these two distinct approaches as stemming from two separate types of religion. Adhesion correlates to religion that is merely traditional. It is common wherever one's religion has for him "the emotional value attaching to a thing in which he has grown up."[4] In this circumstance, religion amounts to a set of time-honored customs. The religion has been "hallowed by preceding generations."[5]

Again by contrast, conversion is not rooted in traditional religion, but rather in prophetic religion. According to this type of religious lifeway, at some point in the past, an individual received a non-mediated message from the deity. Because it is the deity who has spoken to him, the deity then speaks through him, for now the prophet "has a message which he feels an inward and instant impulse to deliver."[6] And conversion is "the positive response of a man to the choice set before him" through the claims of evangelists representing a prophetic religion."[7] Such a changeover, said Nock, depended on a common cultural matrix, one that enabled hearers to make sense of the truth claims they were called upon to accept and the commands they were expected to obey. Human beings are not likely to accept what to them is entirely new. Prophetic religion truly succeeds only where it "finds men's minds in a measure prepared," a critical distinction.[8]

As the subtitle of his book indicates, Nock used the lens of his theory in order to examine distinctions between paganism of the ancient world as compared to Judaism and Christianity. In short, to the extent that ancient paganism reached newcomers, the new condition was the result of adhesion. But Judaism and Christianity, with their claims issued by the only true and living God, claims communicated by the prophetic figures known as Moses and Jesus, demanded conversion.

My guess is that Nock's distinction between adhesion and conversion might go a long way in explaining the religious interface between the first peoples of North America and later Euro-Americans. More about that later.

Notes

[1] Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 7.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 5.

[4] Ibid., 2.

[5] Ibid., 3.

[6] Ibid. Here, many passages from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament come to mind. In Amos 3:8, for example, the prophet asked, "The lion has roared-- who will not fear? The Sovereign LORD has spoken-- who can but prophesy?" (New International Version).

[7] Ibid., 7.

[8] Ibid., 9.