John Thornton on Religious Syncretism

Thornton presumes that traditional methods simplified religious amalgamation, and then he proclaims a new perspective to reinterpret it. Thornton suggests a modified view of the development of New World religions that blended African and Christian elements. Instead of looking solely at the New World situation, Thornton focuses on the religious developments in the New World as an outgrowth of the prior conversion of a portion of Africa, and the development there of an African variant of Christianity. He argues that the development of an African Catholic Church not only took place especially in the Central African Kingdom of Kongo, but also in a number of other places along the West African coast. Then he points out they provided the philosophical underpinnings which clergy in the African ports and the New World largely took whole and disseminated among those slaves who were not already cognizant of African Christianity. The clergy in America, overworked and lacking opportunities to engage in substantial teaching in any case, found African Christianity acceptable, while Africans who came from non-Christian parts of Africa found it comprehensible and adapted it easily. Much of the philosophy that underlies the syncretic or mixed religious cults of the New World could be traced to African Christianity, and even much of the action taken by American clergy to suppress some types of religious practice among slaves came from African Christianity.