Saturday, June 1, 2019
Is Christian Conversion a Poltical Act for the American Indian? :: Essays Papers
Is Christian Conversion a Poltical Act for the American Indian? In Southeastern Alaska, Indian changeover to Pentecostalism generally removes indigenous identity from a mooring of value, and with this exclusion, removes a native cultural context for politically addressing behaviors that spend a penny developed within the Indian community as a result of the political parsimony in Southeastern Alaska. In the larger processes of political economy and identity in the late twentieth century, the native community is marginal and impoverished (195), and necessitates the social framework for native collective identity projects (5) and symbolic representations of nativism (7). parsimoniousness and native identity are inextricably connected, as subsistence living comes under direct threat from the stinting opportunities foisted upon Indians and destructive behaviors, including alcohol abuse, physical and sexual abuse, and suicide, are intrinsic to the native life experience of many peopl e. As virtually all Indian converts to fundamental Christianity root their own church experience in an escape from alcohol addiction, religious conversion influences how society redresses socioeconomic realities, and thus political realties (164). To many marginal people, the collective nature of salvation creates a sociality of rely that offers them relief from the economic realities around them. Converting to another system of hope and faith presents a special appeal among those made marginal by the history of compound expansion and by the continuing ebb and flow of capital penetration (181). By advocating a strategy of collectivity over one rooted in end(182), church converts reflect a desire to convert into a new economic life of the American middle class and escape their own economic realities (178). In the practice of Pentecostal religion, overcoming addiction through dedication to the teachings of the church means giving up on trying to do anything about addiction yourself (142), and shaking loose of an institutional focuson social or political order that addresses non-Christian means of rehabilitation or political change (178). Indian conversions to radical Christianity in Southeastern Alaska are thus not only spiritual changes, but political as well, in two significant ways. First, Pentecostal conversion is political because it transforms the collective structure of human values and accepted sociopolitical thought, principally in ones perception of cultural relativism. When the entire possibility of similitude and equivalence between groups of people is utterly rejected, culture-group members are unjustly denied any basis for defense or justification for their differences in values and practices (154). Moreover, the political involvement of church groups in society invariably react against any political situation in which resource development and cultural revival take place over issues of salvation, and in this opposition, conversion becomes a po litical act of social separation (173).
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