ABSTRACT
Syncretism became a term of abuse often applied to castigate colonial local churches which had burst out from the sphere of mission control and begun to illegitimately indigenize Christianity instead of properly reproducing the European form of Christianity which had originally been offered. On the other side of the Atlantic a much more positive attitude towards the concept of syncretism has prevailed among social scientists. In Africa, it was the European Churches' negative view of syncretism that swayed anthropological usage, while in the New World sociologically-grounded state visions of ethnic synthesis and integration imbued syncretism with positive overtones. An example of syncretic cultural reinterpretation was African polygamy which he identified as being transformed in the New World environment into a recognizable social phenomenon which he labelled 'progressive monogamy'. Syncretisms not only contained survivals of the Negroes' past, but offered a mode of uniting the past and the present.
