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.