University Of California Los Angeles Modern African Christianities Concept Map

David Maxwell presents the majority of early Modern African Christians as being former slaves who –as a result of their time as slaves—were both insiders and outsiders in their own home communities. Maxwell explains that this combined insider-outsider position set up the need to engage Christian mission work, Christianity itself, and indigeneity in specific ways that he organizes into the following themes:

• Experience of slavery and return
• Respectability
• Modernity

All three of these themes set up conflicts that African Christians had to navigate with their non-enslaved neighbors and Western Christian missionaries.

1. Map these three themes.
2. For each theme, provide:

• one example of how African Christians retained features of their indigenous religio-culture.
• one example of how African Christians adopted features of new Euro-American Christian religio-culture.
• One example of a tension caused by these hybrid solutions.