How Does Syncretism Work?

In current theories of globalization, Creole and creolization are often mentioned as synonyms of hybridity and syncretism. “All these terms, currently used in positive senses to describe the resilience, creativity, and inevitability of cultural mixture, had extremely pejorative meanings in the past. In the cases of syncretism and hybridity, various writers have examined these pasts and re-appropriated the terms through a positive reevaluation of the political significance of mixture” (Stewart 2007: 4). The strategies of religious syncretism—the active transformation through renegotiation, reorganization, and redefinition of clashing belief systems—are consistent with the creolization process.

In African Civilizations in the New World, Roger Bastide differentiated between various categories of religious syncretism in the Caribbean, among them morphological or mosaic syncretism based on the juxtaposition and coexistence of African-derived elements and Catholic symbols—the Vodou pé, or altars, with stones, wax candles, crosses, the statues of saints, and pots containing souls of the dead, for example—and institutional syncretism, which combines prescribed religious observances by reconciling Christian and African liturgical calendars (1971: 154–156).

The most common, however, is syncretism by correspondence, or what Leslie Desmangles calls a “symbiosis by identity,” through which an African deity and a Catholic saint became one on the basis of mythical or symbolic similarities. 8 Syncretism has been a polemical term for centuries. In the seventeenth century, it was used to defend “true” religion against heresy and referred to the “illegitimate reconciliation of opposing theological views” (Droogers 1989: 9). The term was later applied by scholars to the early forms of Christianity that were perceived to be syncretic as well and was later broadened to apply to all religions when a review of religious history revealed syncretic elements at the foundation of all major religions.

However, syncretism is not a value-free concept. The identification of Creole religions as “syncretic” is problematical and disparaging: a Eurocentric bias limits the definition to non-European religions, negating their full legitimacy. Creole religions are frequently identified with and “legitimized” by accentuating their Roman Catholic elements, for example, but are not always afforded an equivalent status. The term “syncretism” first appeared in Plutarch’s Moralia in reference to the behavior of the Cretan peoples who “mixed together,” came to an agreement, or closed ranks when confronted by a mutual enemy; it was later used to describe the integration of two or more separate beliefs into a new religion. Thus, from its origins, the term presupposes encounter and confrontation between systems: “Syncretism is in the first place contested religious interpenetration” (Droogers 1989: 20).

Though all definitions of syncretism are thorny, Michael Pye recognizes the term’s dynamism when he describes it as “the temporary ambiguous coexistence of elements from diverse religions and other contexts within a coherent religious pattern” and considers that the process should be understood as “a natural moving aspect of major religious traditions . . . a part of the dynamics of a religion which works its way along in the ongoing transplantation of these religious traditions from one cultural context to another whether geographically or in time” (1971: 92).

However, despite the existence of historical interactions, borrowings, and modifications based on contact and context that have occurred among all the major religions, the rhetorical division between so-called pure faiths and illicit or “contaminated” syncretic belief systems persist, often mentioned with the related concepts of “hybridization and creolization as a means of portraying the dynamics of global social developments” (Stewart 2007: 40). Syncretism in the Creole context is not the description of a static condition or result but of a dynamic process.

Roman Catholic missionaries adopted a policy of “guided syncretism” during the conquest of the Americas and the colonial period, tolerating the existence of polytheistic idolatry that could be identified with Catholic saints and considering it a necessary evil— a transitional state that would eventually lead the conquered peoples to the “true” faith and the elimination of such beliefs. However, the policy never fully realized its goals. The old gods refused to disappear (and still, do).

Whether to avoid further oppression in a type of “defensive syncretism” or to gain legitimacy, the conquered peoples embraced Christian forms but with new meanings, they themselves had refashioned, at times appropriating them as tools of resistance. According to Mosquera, syncretism should designate “something that corresponds more to the concept of ‘appropriation,’ in the sense of taking over for one’s own use and on one’s own initiative the diverse and even the hegemonic or imposed elements, in contrast to assuming an attitude of passive eclecticism or synthesis,” strategies that he claims are clearer now thanks to the evolution of a “postmodern” contemporary consciousness (1996: 227).

The stress on syncretism and such terms as “syncretic cults” emphasizes the “accessory syncretic elements to the detriment of the essence: the truly effective evolutions of African religions in America” (Mosquera 1992: 30).

In an interesting example of the historical revision of the definition of cultural and religious “legitimacy,” Stephen Palmié notes in “Against Syncretism: ‘Africanizing’ and ‘Cubanizing’ Discourses in North American òrìsà Worship,” that the American Yoruba movement created in the United States in the 1960s, also known as Yoruba-Reversionism or the Oyotunji Movement, has attempted to purge all European elements from Cuban and Cuban-American Santería/Regla de Ocha in order to regain a more “pure” form of worship and cultural “legitimacy.”

The re-Africanization of “syncretistically adulterated” Cuban beliefs and practices “runs counter to an understanding of ‘tradition’ still at the very heart of North American variants of Afro-Cuban religious practices” (1995: 77). A movement to eliminate any vestiges of European religions from Santería and other Creole religions, led by so-called “African revisionists,” and return to a more “pure” and “authentic” African-centered religion has led to African-centered movements in Cuba as well where some advocate for a “religión Yoruba” to replace Regla de Ocha/Santería.

For Andrew Apter, religious syncretism is yet another form of empowerment, another modality of revision and popular resistance: The syncretic revision of dominant discourses sought to transform the authority that these discourses upheld . . . the power and violence mobilized by slave revolts and revolution were built into the logic of New World syncretism itself.

The Catholicism of Vodou, Candomblé, and Santería was not an ecumenical screen, hiding the worship of African deities from official persecution. It was the religion of the masters, revised, transformed, and appropriated by slaves to harness its power within their universes of discourse. In this way, the slaves took possession of Catholicism and thereby repossessed themselves as active spiritual subjects. (1991: 254) And, according to Laura E. Pérez in “Hybrid Spiritualities and Chicana Altar-Based Art,” U.S. Latina/o artists and intellectuals in the fields of religion and visual arts are radically redefining the understanding of religious and cultural syncretism beyond the Eurocentric notion “that vestiges of the precolonial survive as largely incoherent fragments within the engulfing colonial culture” and are replacing it with the realization that globalization has restructured religious beliefs and practices and given birth to “altogether new forms” (2008: 344–345).