The aetiological fallacy, contamination theory, and deficit readings of culture
when you read everything through the suspicion of syncretism
In this post I attempt to put together a picture of a certain set of interpretive practices which I see operative in various conservative strands of protestant theology and practice, especially at a popular level but not restricted to it.
Let’s begin with Yoga.
A quick google of yoga and Christianity will yield a vast number of pages talking about the dangers of yoga. This is because properly speaking yoga is a set of practices associated with Hindu and some related religions. But that’s not what yoga is in the West. Yoga in the West is basically asanas, physical postures, drawn from Hatha yoga. It’s exercise with a slight side-line in breathing and meditation. It has very little to do with traditional yoga.
And yet, you will still find many Christians very concerned about a fellow believer doing warrior pose, or regulating their breathing, or practising any form of mindfulness or meditation. Why? Why is this form of westernised yoga so suspect, but Pilates is not?
To my second example - Martial Arts. I practised eastern martial arts in my teens and twenties, and would occasionally be questioned about whether this involved any spiritual concepts related to Qi, Chinese medicine, spiritual practices. Certainly not in the backyard shed where I learnt from an Italian immigrant. And yet, for these Christians, there was a lingering disquiet that never left them.
There are a few facets that hold those kinds of concerns together. It has to do with a view of spirits and spirituality that sees demonic activity as prevalent, an ever present danger, and ideas of things like “footholds” and gateways and slippery slopes.
And yet, I want to suggest that, while those explanations are true, there is something else going on. It’s the idea that something’s origin always and ever determines its purity. Anything that comes from another culture, that is bound up in that culture’s practices and beliefs, is always suspect. There’s an inability to assess things on their face value, to accept what they say about themselves, and to detach something from its sources.
You see this work itself out in a few ways. It’s there in the logic of, “well, they don’t say this, but if you look deeper into the origins of this, you’ll see it’s actually…” This is a pervasive hermeneutic of suspicion that reads everything non-western as basically deceptive and leading you astray from true religion.
The same logic is present in evaluating a range of intellectual practices - if some historical connection to Marxism can be shown, then the idea is tainted. Poisoned source, poisoned stream. “Yes, they say it’s about x, y, z, but can’t you see that it comes from Marxism, and therefore it’s really anti-Christian and godless atheism.”
I call this an aetiological fallacy. Which is a fancy way of saying that if you can show the root cause (aitia) is not-Christian-(enough), then everything derived from it must be rejected. It’s guilt by association, aka contamination. And more often than not it baptises the culture and practices of the majority culture as being neutral, non-religious, not suspect, and treats all non-majority cultural practices as non-neutral, spiritual, and un-Christian.
To put it another way, I think this is a deficit reading of other cultures - they fundamentally lack and we fundamentally have, and what they need is to become like us, and what we need is to stay pure. Theologically, it’s the view that we perfectly worked everything out in the 16th century, and everything else since then is just footnotes and tinkering.
Let’s backtrack and tackle this another way. How do you determine the difference between syncretism and cultural accommodation? Those can be thought of as, perhaps, two sides of the same coin. The Christian faith is always culturally embodied - you can’t extract some ‘pure essence of Christianity’ out of the cultures it inhabits, there’s no abstraction like that. So whether it’s 1st century Palestinian Judaism, or 4th century Hellenistic Mediterranean, or Persian, or Ethiopian, or 16th century Germanic, or 21st century pan-Western Anglophone cultures, it’s always culturally embedded. And yet, every time the gospel encounters a culture, there’s this question - what practices and cultural elements will it interact with? And how do you guard against syncretism, where the spiritual beliefs of a culture and people group that are fundamentally incompatible with the belief system of the Triune God and its incarnate saviour?
What I’m ultimately complaining about here is that there’s a way at looking at this issue that sees almost everything as syncretistic, except it’s own culture, and refuses to listen in good faith to Christians of other cultural backgrounds as to what they themselves say1. Let me draw one final example. In Mongolia there was (and is) a split over translation terms. The majority of Mongolian Christians use vocabulary for God and other associated concepts that are repurposed from Buddhism. A vocal and staunch majority reject this, preferring paraphrases that avoid these terms, e.g. “Lord of the universe” rather than “God”. It is this very kind of fundamentalism that says, “No, you cannot use that word for God because its origin is Buddhist, and so it’s syncretistic and always-and-ever pagan” when overwhelmingly the Christian believers of the country are saying, “We have repurposed this word and filled it with this meaning so that it is fit for purpose and expresses the identity of the God of the Bible.”
There has to be a better way, a way to see the wealth of the nations brought into the garden city, while everything unclean stays outside. To recognise all that is good and noble and beautiful in the rich diversity of cultures and peoples under heaven, and recognise equally how sin infects and involutes every aspect of our cultures. So that all of us need redemption, and all of culture(s) need redeeming.
I’m adding a little addendum to this post. I’ve had a few quite good conversations in response to this about yoga in particular, and how we might approach that practice with discernment and nuance. Where yoga simply means “postural exercise with breathing practices”, as it often does in western exercise contexts, I see nothing inherently spiritual about that, and if you rebranded it, would it make a whiff of difference? But where yoga means something closer to its origins as a spiritual practice related to Hinduism or other belief systems, this is in substance and appearance quite distinct. And in differing cultural contexts, one’s willingness to embrace, avoid, participate, or condone various activities requires exactly such consideration. Is this not what Paul is advocating for in both 1 Corinthians and Romans, in discussing food issues, and weaker consciences?
This cuts both ways, let me say. Just as western Christians find syncretism and spiritual meanings hiding behind all sorts of other cultures’ practices and beliefs, at other times they are clearly insistent that for other things, nothing of the sort is happening, when their own Christian brothers and sisters from those cultures are saying quite clearly “No, we consider this a problem”