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Constantine Msisiri Manda (UCI): Gods, Kings, and Missionaries: Legacies of Ancient States and Christian Missionaries on Religion in Africa
 
Abstract: Abstract: African Christians who hold indigenous religious beliefs are more tolerant of other religions. I argue that syncretic Africans are more likely to descend from ethnicities that were more politically centralized, relative to acephalous ethnicities, in the ancient period. Exposure to Christian missionaries interacted with ancient political institutions to produce relatively greater syncretism among the former. Ruling elites helped translate the new and foreign Christian ideas and helped map them onto existing and indigenous religious ideas. They had incentives to convert to Christianity to secure their ability to retain power and protect and expand their territories. Christianity replaced indigenous deities that previously legitimized elites’ political authority. Missionaries exploited greater economies of scale among centralized than acephalous groups to more easily convert the former than the latter. Using OLS regressions on data from various sources, I show that centralization and missionary exposure positively associates with syncretism. Later, centralized Africans created African Initiated Churches (AICs) which continued to indigenize Christianity, allowing syncretic legacies of ancient political and religious institutions to persist. This paper shows that ancient indigenous institutions in Africa have important legacies on religion.