David Frankfurter: Christianization as Syncretism: Restoring a Complex Term to Highlight Religious Agency in History

The term “syncretism” has been roundly rejected in multiple disciplines for presupposing pure traditions that then become mixed haphazardly and even monstrously.  “Syncretistic” Christianity must thus be awash in “pagan survivals.”  But Christianization is itself an ongoing process of appropriation, interpretation, indigenization, and creative juxtaposition, involving (on the one hand) local, even domestic agents appropriating the materials of a Christian institution and (on the other hand) a diverse array of agents of Christianity itself, from holy men to scribes and even craftsmen, who interpret the religion’s stories and authority in local terms.  From iconographic and hagiographic sources to amulets and other archaeological materials, the data for Christianization in late antiquity, both east and west, shows a perennial syncretism through the medieval period (as well as momentary “anti-syncretistic,” or reformist/purist, movements to assert boundaries of religious practice). Based on my 2017 study Christianizing Egypt, I will argue for the rectification and restoration of the category syncretism for the proper understanding of religious change.