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 absolute 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," which is 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.

Taking the Land It Claimed

1929 U.S. postage stamp
marking the 135th anniversary
of the Battle of Fallen Timbers

After winning its War for Independence, the new United States of America claimed all of the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.[1] But claiming land is not the same as controlling it. So, how did the nation take charge of the territories west of the Appalachians, then inhabited by tens of thousands of Indians?

According to archivist and author Carl Waldman, American citizens and the U.S. government tended to follow a pattern that ultimately achieved the displacement of many indigenous peoples. Typically, the cycle began with trade and the making of treaties. These often provided for Indian land cessions in exchange for money or goods, or the promise of such. Sometime after the new boundaries were established, white settlers, new to an area, would appropriate land on the native side of the line. When one or more tribes retaliated, Americans issued dire warnings about "savages" along the frontier. Not accidentally, the Declaration of Independence had complained that King George III of Great Britain had "endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."[2] Fear, resentment, and the prospect of acquiring land generated military action against Indians. These campaigns often led to the establishment of wilderness forts whose presence offered security for prospective settlers. Overwhelmed, native peoples would sue for peace, negotiate a new treaty--which routinely included a new land cession--and move.[3]

The American conquest of the Ohio Valley region matches the pattern Waldman describes. In 1785, U.S. negotiators demanded and won treaty concessions from several tribal leaders gathered at Fort McIntosh on the western edge of Pennsylvania. The westward push by American settlers, encouraged by their government, inevitably led to clashes. In 1787, Delawares, Mingos, Miamis, Wyandots, and Shawnees sometimes fought pioneers in present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. As the 1790s unfolded, the United States, under the leadership of President George Washington, increased the size and strength of its army. In August 1794, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in far northern Ohio near the western end of Lake Erie, federal troops proved they were able to defeat the Indians of the Old Northwest. The next year, representatives of several tribal groups signed the Treaty of Greenville by which they ceded much of present-day Ohio as well as parts of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.[4]

Monument to the Battle of Fallen Timbers in Ohio

As white pioneers entered the Old Southwest, news of the Battle of Fallen Timbers signaled to Indian leaders that the United States was both able and determined to defeat native resistance. This led to a number of new treaties like the one signed by thirty-nine Cherokee leaders at Tellico, Tennessee, in 1798. Due to anxieties about warfare, and by means of tough deliberations, the U.S. and southern Indians were able to avoid major battles like those fought in the Ohio Valley.[5]

Finally, during the decade that followed the War of 1812, as white settlers continued move west, some Native Americans simply moved further west. Others, assuming that they were or would be accepted by the United States, continued to acculturate.[6] By that point, the United States had come to truly dominate the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.[7] It was also around this time that Americans began to adopt the view that Indians were both unchanged and unchangeable. In the eyes of many U.S. citizens, the first Americans had not sufficiently conformed, and it was not likely they ever would.

Notes

[1] Roger L. Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 81.

[2] "Declaration of Independence: A Transcription," National Archives, accessed May 9, 2020, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

[3] Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, 3rd ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 213. Waldman's assertion that relations between U.S. citizens and American Indians began with trade finds corroboration in Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846-1890, Rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 15-18. Utley indicates that in the mid-nineteenth century, the first white person an Indian ever saw was likely a trader. For a good discussion of Indian "voluntary removal," see Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History, 102-104.

[4] Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History, 82-86.

[5] Ibid., 86-88. For the treaty between the United States and the Cherokee Indians signed at Tellico, Tennessee, in 1798, see Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, ed. Richard Peters, vol 7, Treaties between the United States and the Indian Tribes (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846), 62-65.

[6] Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History, 102-104.

[7] Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7.