Cross- Cultural Manipulation of Christianity

This blog is in response to an idea that was brought up in class today by Daniel-- the comparison of manifest destiny to the Kebra Negast, and more generally--how people tend to change the origins of Christianity to make them relevant to their particular culture. The Queen of Shiba is used to make a connection between Christianity and Ethiopia—“And our lord Jesus Christ, in condemning the Jewish people, the crucifiers, who lived at the time, spake, saying “The queen of the South will rise up on the Day of Judgment and shall dispute with, and condemn and overcome this generation who would not hearken unto the preaching of my word.”(16-17) This quotation illustrates how the origins of Christianity are linked to a specific individual in Ethiopian culture. More importantly, the development of early Christianity foreshadows why future cultures acted they way they did in terms of religion and economic expansion. Many cultures, including the Ethiopians, create links between their culture and Christianity to make their own culture seem divine. Similarly, Eastern Europeans developed the idea of Manifest Destiny, which gave them a reason to expand and conquer without regretting the countless American Indians they killed in the process. Egocentrism, (the idea that the norms in one culture are the same in all cultures- or ego about ones culture) tends to fuel a uniform idea in almost all Christian cultures—that their version of the Christian religion is undoubtedly correct. Even if many cultures do not express this idea forthright, the changes made in each culture in order to better mesh with the origins of Christianity illustrate how egocentrism is a driving cross-cultural force.