Henry Imler September 20th, 2006

Savage Systems details a horrible loss at the hands of past comparative religionists. In the work, Chidester goes to great lengths to detail how the European comparative religionists’ results paralleled the cultural conflict that was going on in the region. The comparative religion studies denied religion to the South African natives when they were in conflict with the colonizers. After the people were subjugated they were suddenly found to actually have religion. At some point, the subjugated people would start to resist the colonizers again. Once that happened and the natives were once again seen as the enemy, they were found to have no religion. This cycle kept happening over and over again.

During the times that the comparative religionists declared to be without religion, this lack of religion was purported to show that there was a fundamental lack of humanity in the natives. This fundamental lacking was used to justify the idea that the natives had no claim to the land. Often they were compared to animals in the European system of rights. Even when the comparative religionists did think that the natives had religion, they kept dismissing it as a religion from ignorance or a degradation of a previous, more sophisticated religion, such as Judaism, or Islam. The degradation theories also served to justify the taking of the natives’ land. The idea was that since they had also come to the land from another place, they had equal claim to it as did the Europeans. The apparent fact that natives had failed to upkeep their religion and had allowed it to digress instead of progress was taken as evidence that they fundamentally lacked something that would have given them full human rights. Since they did not have full human rights, this meant that the European claim to the land was superior to the natives. Chidester also shows how the natives were active in comparative religions. They suddenly were invaded by these people that wielded a great power. They reinterpreted their myths to account for the existence of the whites. This is also evidenced by their reactions of laughter to the missionaries’ messages. Chidester uses this to show that the frontier border is really a place of cultural exchange where each culture goes through a sort of synthesis as a result of contact with another culture.

What is not clear from Savage Systems is if the European comparative religionists were conscious of what they were doing. This is a sort of chicken-and-the-egg question. Did the comparative religionists try to form the colonial mindset towards the natives, or did the colonial mindset influence the comparative religionists. This question is important because it is the key in the moral evaluation of the comparative religionists’ actions. Chidester seems to indicate that this was a natural by-product of the colonizing mindset and was not intentional, but a subconscious correlation. This is further evidenced by the Christian bias that seeped into everything. The only thing that could count as a true religion was Protestant Christianity. In this sense there could not ever be a real comparative religion study, for real comparative religion study does not presuppose a master religion that all others must be a degradation of, a perversion of, or an obstacle to conversion.

The real tragedy is that with all the back and forth of the comparative religionists on the natives’ religions the real religious nature of the natives before the coming of the colonialists is lost forever to history. One can argue for the war of ideas and along with that, the idea that it is morally permissible for one idea to supplant another. However, under that line of thinking the conflict of the ideas must be waged without compulsion if the war is to remain morally permissible. Also, it is hoped that the losing ideas be preserved in history in some form. The case of comparative religions in South Africa does not follow such a template. Subjugation happened on physically and ideally. Chidester says that one can salvage is the border contact between cultures and their interplay can be studied and learned from.

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