Syncretism may not be dead, but it should be. What is it? Well, in my field it means a religion that has been “corrupted” by the adoption of some element(s) of another religion. The term was all the rage while I was working on my doctorate which involved, of course, comparative religions. By the time I was being edged out of academia, there was a recognition afoot that the concept of syncretism was itself corrupt. It depends on the idea that there is a “pure” form of a religion and that foreign elements debase it. There is no pure form of any religion, and the more we learn of the history of religions the more obvious it is that religions influence each other, and have always done so.
What prompts this post is that I increasingly see clergy using the term “syncretism.” Now, clergy tend to run behind scholars by a fair pace. Those of us out there trying to figure out what religion is and how it works have a daily duty to analyze and reassess and theorize. Clergy have many other things to do and read scholarly tomes as time permits. Syncretism is now only used by conservative scholars who believe a religion (usually the form of their religion that they personally happen to believe) is pure. Other religions are corruptions. Ironically, I once heard a Unitarian Universalist minister use the term. For a religion that accepts all other religions as valid, it struck me as odd.
As I used to tell my students, nobody knowingly believes “the wrong religion.” By far the majority of people accept the religion that their parents taught them. Often without question. I know I did. Then I studied religion. I began to realize things weren’t as simple as “that old time religion” pretended they were. Fundamentalism borrows from other religions just as much as any other tradition does. Religions don’t have sharp boundaries. There are fuzzy edges between them. Those edges are permeable and quite wide. Syncretism was a concept that religion scholars used, often in the context of monotheistic religions, to show where impurities entered. The thing is, impurities were there from the conception on. If one religion were born fully grown from the head of Yahweh, it would be obvious, wouldn’t it? The Bible describes the religion of Israel and how it borrowed and adapted from other traditions. Thus it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. The world would be a much better place if we made our peace with this and buried syncretism in the graveyard of obsolete ideas.
