ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights a couple of events in the career of Christianity in a plural society where traditional religions, Islam and Christianity, co-exist and have come to find accommodation and mutuality. Through micro-history, the chapter explores historical contexts and processes that demonstrate the centrality of personhood and indigenous cultures in understanding the career of Christianity in a multicultural society. It also seeks to analyze, through empirical enrichment, the constitutive dynamics of how indigenous cultural practices and beliefs can impact Christian spirituality in a deeply indigenous milieu. The detour from static essentialism into rationalism becomes significant as important markers of religious syncretism in several Nigerian communities. The vistas it opens up make it possible to view the natural tendencies of people to move beyond religious parochialism. This work confines its efforts to what Geertz has referred to as the “cultural dimension of religious analysis”. It will give two examples of the ability of religion to rescript the relationship between adherents of indigenous religion and Christianity to construct an emergent modern society. The work offers an alternative to the geopolitical, transnational understanding of Christianity. The two examples provided here lend themselves to observations and critique. One is anecdotal (and comes from Yorubaland as the story of a former Sango devotee) and the other more empirically verifiable display of a Masquerade in the Church in Northeast Nigeria. The work blends ethnographic, secondary, and media sources to critique the centrality of traditional religion in the scholarly analysis of the career of Christian gospel in the negotiation of religious co-existence in Nigeria.
