Response to Reviewers' Commentary on The People's Zion

It is a great privilege to have three leading scholars of Christianity in Southern Africa engage so thoughtfully with my book, The People's Zion: Southern Africa, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith Healing Movement. There is much that is rich and interesting about their comments that I do not have space to dwell upon at length here. To single out just two points out of many more I could make. First, I was struck by Lauren Jarvis's observation regarding the overlap between the testimonial literature of the Zionist church appearing in its own periodical magazines, on the one hand, and the advertisements for popular patent medicines that ran in the twentieth-century South African press, on the other. Both types of publication featured confessional first-person narratives detailing the miraculous intervention of the “cure” (whether prayer or Dr. Williams' Pink Pills), and both created juxtapositions between narrators' old lives of illness and their new lives of health. Jarvis's comment opens the door to thinking about the interpenetration of religion and capitalism in African print worlds, the formation of genre in periodical literature of this period, and the fluid coexistence of oral and literate idioms of self-expression. Second, I was equally interested in Retief Muller's suggestion that I think more deeply about the South African apartheid state's policy of “Bantu Education” in shaping Zionists' increasingly hostile stance toward school-going. Bantu Education brought Black African education under the purview of apartheid officials (previously Christian missionaries had monopolized African education) in order to promulgate a racist inferior standard of education that prepared Black South Africans for their supposed lowly status in life. Muller is surely correct that we cannot understand Zionists' hostility toward education in the apartheid decades without taking stock of the fact that the education on offer to them was both dehumanizing and woefully inadequate. However, rather than picking up on more of these specific points, I'd like to highlight three themes that I hope will have wider resonance. These are issues that transcend the particularities of the Zionist case study and will thus be of interest to all engaged in the study of religion in Africa and even beyond. These are, in turn, the theme of agency in religious practice; the interplay between different modes of history-making; and finally, what it might mean to tell the religious histories of non-human actors. First, agency. Two of the respondents note that I make much of the egalitarian tendencies of Zion, both in the US and in its Southern African incarnation. As Jarvis puts it, “I show how people with less authority used the idea of Zion to challenge people with more authority.” Yet, as Jarvis also notes, I argue throughout the book that the egalitarianism of Zion existed in profound and continual tension with its authoritarianism. This is an example of the many contradictory impulses existing within the evangelical tradition (expanding upon this point, my book traces a series of interlocking paradoxes: not only between egalitarianism and authoritarianism but also between cosmopolitanism versus nativism). Yet for both Jarvis and Muller, their impression is that I perhaps make a bit too much of Zion's potential for eradicating hierarchy and its opportunities for believers to exercise their own agency in everyday contexts. As Muller writes, “the democratizing ideal received the brunt of the emphasis in Cabrita's analysis.” Jarvis is especially troubled by this tendency in my work. She rightly observes that populist types of religion should not be supposed to be intrinsically democratic—even if this is very much the self-positioning and booster-like rhetoric put out about the religion by its own adherents. She wishes I had “given more due to the undemocratic and inegalitarian tendencies of Zionist leaders” (of which one could say much), realizing that populist Zion could both be “authoritarian and exclusive.” For Jarvis (and perhaps implicitly for Muller), this is not merely a theoretical consideration: “Our current global moment of illiberal democracies and exclusionary populisms adds real urgency to Cabrita's questions about the past.” Christianity, in other words, should not be let off the hook by me quite as readily as I do, and its agency-generating properties should be carefully counterbalanced by its agency-negating tendencies. And in an era of demagogic leaders around the world—many of whom make an appeal to religion of one kind or another—this kind of critique of religion's authoritarian tendencies is especially important. Both Jarvis and Muller make valuable points with much substance. Muller observes that had I focused more on the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), the single largest Zionist denomination in Southern Africa, I would have perhaps had more to say about authoritarianism. Top-down governance is a hallmark of this particular denomination. It is characterized by a cast-iron hierarchy with a divinely identified leader who demands—and largely receives—total obedience from his followers. Yet part of the reason I did not make more of the ZCC in my book was precisely because its rigid hierarchy made it near impossible to break into; my experience was that most church members refused to speak with me and that church leaders were similarly cagey, feeding me only the authorized message in the most stilted way possible. Authoritarianism bred a culture of secrecy—or at any rate, guardedness with regard to outsiders—and that was ironically precisely what obscured my ability to pay more attention to such instances of authoritarianism. But this was not the only reason why I made more of egalitarianism than I did of authoritarianism. Implicitly at work (I did not make these points in the book) was my desire to push back against several negative stereotypes about Zionist Christianity in particular, and evangelicalism more broadly. In particular, I wanted to challenge a prevalent interpretation of believers' agency in these organizations. The existence of an undoubtedly narcissistic figure like John Alexander Dowie would have made it easy to dismiss the Zionist movement as a top-heavy racket that fed off the vulnerabilities of ordinary members. Yet to read Zionism in this way would have also reiterated a common trope about evangelicalism past and present. This is the notion—in circulation both in Dowie's time and today, promulgated both by the public and by academics - that fraudulent charlatan-esque “prophets” mislead, exploit, and even abuse gullible believers. The problem with this interpretation, of course, is that it negates religious agency on the part of the congregation, imbuing them with naivete and lack of discernment. One of my lodestars in the study of religion has been my long-term conviction that strategic self-interest is almost always at play in religious practice. That is to say, adherents find good cause to believe what they do—no matter how repugnant it might seem to outsiders. And on the topic of repugnancy. We might think here of the critique of the anthropologist Susan Harding, who wrote of Western anthropologists' penchant for studying the religions of remote, far-off peoples rather than garden-variety American Protestants, especially fundamentalists portrayed as “the opponents of modernity, progress, enlightenment, truth, and reason” (Harding 1991). There is the sanctioned cultural other (remote, non-Western) and then the close-to-home “repugnant cultural other.” In a non-Western context, the cultural other is interesting to scholars—even laudable. In a Western context, the cultural other is repugnant, an offensive rebut of modern Enlightenment values.1 Studying Zionists seemed an interesting route into addressing the stigmatization of evangelical Christianity as authoritarian and the still overwhelming tendency to portray a certain style of divinely ordained leadership as “hucksters, Elmer Gantrys, preying on the poor, the elderly, the female” (Harding 1991, 373). For one, given their transatlantic presence, Zionists are both familiar and unfamiliar to Western scholars; they are both part of the much-studied American religious landscape and the supposedly more exotic world of African religion. And second, via their challenge of modernist values in both regions of the world (eschewing medicine and democratic structures), Zionists remind us of the censure placed upon religious groups that do not conform to a liberal-democratic mold and of the expectations that faith healing is legible to modernist scholars. Yet even as I have tried to push back against what I believe to be overly negative portrayals of authority and leadership in the Zionist church, I have also paid heed to Harding's own dilemma: her “own incessant struggle not to ally with fundamentalists even as I collaborate with them in disrupting modern representations of them” (Harding 1991, 375). Perhaps Jarvis is correct that I am too easy on authoritarians in the church. Where precisely does the line lie between allyship and collaboration, between reverence and sympathy? Second, despite my avowedly sympathetic approach to Zionism, another reviewer picks up on the fact that I have inadvertently defied an orthodoxy that most within the movement would take as a given—that Zionism is African. The People's Zion argues that this supposedly most quintessentially “African” of religious expressions—long hailed by scholars of religion in Africa as a form of indigenization and inculturation of Christianity—in fact has deep roots in the American Midwest. I spend the first chapters of the book showing that Zion City, Illinois, emerged as a missionary-minded movement that sent emissaries and print literature across the globe in the first years of the twentieth century, having particular success in South Africa. But far from arguing this is an “American” religion, I show how Zion emerged from the global milieu of industrializing cities in the Pacific and Atlantic worlds (Dowie's time in Australia was key), taking diverse forms according to local pressures and the specific contingencies of geographical regions. My point was not only to push back against simplistic reductions of Zionism in South Africa to “African” Christianity but also to underscore the saliency of a global evangelical repertoire of salvation, healing, and empowerment amidst the transforming circumstances of a global industrialized working class. Muller—himself an important scholar of Zionism in Southern Africa—notes that this interpretation could potentially give rise to tensions within the Southern African context. As he notes, “in the context of Africanization and the decolonization of curricula [in South Africa], one wonders whether an interconnected global narrative of Zion would be seen as a good thing.” He goes on to highlight the tension between scholarly interpretations and popular opinion: “above and beyond the whims of scholars, there are the perceptions of the general populace. For the vast majority of Southern Africans, Zion is quintessentially ‘African.’ This is a matter of pride.” I certainly agree with Muller that the revisionary history made in my most recent book would not always be welcome in Southern Africa. There is a long investment - both scholarly and popular - in churches such as the Zionists as indigenous. As I observed in my first book on the South African Nazareth Church (another supposedly “indigenous” organization), this dates to the “1960s ... shaped by the save of political independence sweeping the continent, and the corresponding search for authentic African identities, scholars of the 1960s seized upon the independent churches as evidence of the resilience of African religiosity against a ‘foreign’ European Christianity” (Cabrita 2014, 5) These concerns have only strengthened in the intervening sixty years. South Africa's institutions of higher education are currently undergoing a turbulent decolonization of the curriculum. As was the case in the 1960s, foremost on the agenda for many South African academics are issues of African independence from Western intellectual and material influence. We might also think here of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, based at the University of Cape Town but extending across the country. While in my first book, I thought mainly of scholars' interest in indigenization, I am now striving to be more sensitive to what Muller dubs the “perceptions of the general populace.” Why should not their interpretations of this religious movement matter just as much as the theories of academics? In fact, shortly after my book came out, I had first-hand experience of my own academic research rubbing up against the self-representations of Zionists. In 2018, I collaborated with the South African photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni (himself a Zionist member), to organize an exhibition of his images of Zionist Christians from his own hometowns of Driefontein and Johannesburg. The issue of the American origins of Zion—highlighted throughout my book—became quite contentious in the public history sphere of the gallery. I was advised by the Johannesburg gallery where we were exhibiting to avoid mentioning the North American connection in any exhibition text. This was because it might give the wrong impression that I was affording outside forces too much influence in what was—after all, wasn't it?—one of Southern Africa's most quintessentially local movements. During the course of the exhibition, Mlangeni and I invited a number of Zionist churches to view the photographs and recorded their responses to the images. On the point of the “foreign” origins of Zionism, attitudes ranged from incredulous to hostile. Some Zionists were already vaguely aware—although disinterested—that their church's history was intertwined with a worldwide church in the American Midwest. For others, it was their first time to hear this, and they strongly expressed their sense that this was fundamentally irrelevant. One of our interviewees retorted, “Well, maybe it's true that this thing [Zionism] began in America. But so what, even if it's the case? What matters is what Zion became here in South Africa.” I may have produced a new transnational history of the movement, but it is not one that Zionists themselves welcome, for it does not fit with their own narratives of their origins. In this case, the gulf between the historian and her subjects is a yawning chasm. Muller's observation thus raises important questions about the limits and nature and scope of professional versus lay history. I would be reluctant to assert that the claims of the “professional” historian—authorized via reference to archival documents—outweigh the arguments of lay historians who enjoy insider status and who make appeal to different kinds of source material, including oral tradition circulating within the church community. At the risk of opening myself to criticism of relativism, my own feeling is that there are different modes of history-making, and that these different modes open the door to the possibility of weighing up and sifting different kinds of evidence. The kind of history a Black African religious movement tells about itself matters as much as—some might say even more than - the history told about the movement by a white outsider historian. Context matters too. Sensitivity to competing historical claims is especially relevant in the fraught political context of present-day South Africa, a country defining itself as an African nation two decades after the end of apartheid. History-making on the part of African religious communities subvert my own ambitions to present an authoritative history of Zionism—and this is a process that I welcome. Finally, while Muller underscores the different constituencies at play in the dynamic process of history-making, Mukonyora's essay offers a radical critique of some my most basic premises. She calls me up for being overly anthropocentric in my approach (noting too that much scholarship on Christianity is guilty of a similar bias). I find this intriguing. Mukonyora is certainly right that The People's Zion focuses almost entirely on human players. My book is, first and foremost, a history of people—of church founders and leaders, of self-proclaimed prophets, of laity, of dissenters, of loyalists, of institution builders, of reformists, and of schismatics. Yet Mukonyora's own work (I am thinking here of her important book Wandering a Gendered Wilderness: Suffering and Healing in an African Initiated Church) considers the natural world as carefully as she does the human one. In fact, for Mukonyora, the cosmos is a seamless synthesis of nature and human, and God's agency is discernible just as much in the landscape as it is via human actions. There is much to consider here regarding the paths I did not take with my book and could have—or should have—done. The People's Zion argues that Zionism lay in a critique of industrialization—white capital's exploitation of workers in the service of profit. In this context, faith healing was an idiom of resistance and a way to contest exploitation by focusing on the bodily harm caused by mineral capitalism. Zion's healing techniques equipped ordinary women and men with self-made tools to heal their bodies. But what if we took this analysis even further? Why stop with the harm caused to human bodies by mineral capitalism? Echoing recent scholarship on the Anthropocene (our current-day is being by human not always in why not think about bodily harm also in of Why only think about the bodies of Why not also think about the landscape of the including the of and that to this present due to the of In fact, in the of transnational Zion are the in which non-human at the of the of both African and North American on and and theories from and we might think as scholars of religion about the of nature itself some kind of agency. In the this could take the form of the of within the movement, the of Zion as a religious by like and space to around were as important as the more of is also the of this kind of with a of and In Southern African Zion, the of the throughout its and and in bodies of This is an and the are all with While Zion is also the of in and (I would be to this as a it is certainly also the of natural and It thus to end my with Mukonyora's with other on is the of

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