Lamin Sanneh, pioneering historian who studied spread of Christianity, 76
Lamin Sanneh, a Yale Divinity School professor who was raised a Muslim, converted to Christianity and became a leading scholar of both religions, most notably as a pioneer in the study of Christianity’s transformation from a Western institution into a world-spanning faith, died Jan. 6 at a hospital in New Haven, Conn. He was 76.
The cause was complications from a stroke, said his son, Kelefa Sanneh, a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Raised in the tiny West African nation of the Gambia, Sanneh had a dignified, even regal bearing that betrayed his royal lineage. He traced his ancestry to the rulers of Kaabu, a successor state of the Mali Empire, although by the time he was born, that empire had given way to years of British colonial rule.
While his father made a modest living working for the British government, Sanneh was “summoned from the margin,” as he put it in the title of his 2012 autobiography, pulled by God or fate or sheer force of will from a Gambian backwater to college in the United States, and later to graduate school in Britain and teaching posts at Harvard and Yale.
The author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles, he focused primarily on Christian missions and missionaries, and on the faith’s development into a diverse, international religion with a majority of members scattered throughout Africa, Latin America and Asia.
He also offered a convincing explanation for its explosive growth, arguing in “Translating the Message” (1989) that Christianity was defined in large part by its inherent translatability. While Arabic and Hebrew play central roles in Islam and Judaism, no single language holds theological significance within the Christian church.
“What he did was point toward a view of Christianity that reflected the demographic changes going on,” said Dana Robert, director of Boston University’s Center for Global Christianity and Mission. “It was not obvious then. The colonial guilt was so huge that Westerners were completely bogged down in self-flagellation about colonialism, rather than seeing the growth of the church in other ways and other places.”
“The fact that he was a distinguished African scholar saying this blew the lid off mission studies,” she added, “and opened the way to what we now call world Christianity, which is looking at local cultures in dialogue with a world tradition.”
For Sanneh, the idea that Christianity in Africa was a result of Western imperialism was nothing short of caricature. Local missionaries, he said, played as great a role in spreading the faith across West Africa as did white missionaries from the West. He also argued that the translation of the Bible into indigenous languages was an act of affirmation, a sign that local cultures had no less dignity than those of Europe.
A Catholic who served on two pontifical commissions, Sanneh also worked to explore connections between Christianity and Islam, tracing their spread across West Africa. But he initially faced opposition from peers who dismissed his focus on African religion.
“The pews of Christianity had relocated to the global South, but the pulpits were still located in the global North,” said John Azumah, a world Christianity and Islam professor at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga.
“A few scholars, like Andrew Walls, paid attention to his calls, but there were quite a number who dismissed him, saying African Christianity is 1 mile wide and 1 inch deep — that it’s superficial, with a lot of corruption, and mixed with traditional African religions,” Azumah added.
Sanneh’s work was all the more remarkable given his difficult path to academia. He had been “thwarted” in his original plan to “study theology and be ordained,” he wrote in an email to Azumah shortly before his death, and instead “went through a terrible period of confusion and doubt. It was like a sickness in which I wondered whether God really wanted me. I started to emerge out of that hole when I saw that I could offer my training and scholarship as a small tribute to the God of Jesus, with Muslims within hearing distance.”
Lamin Ousman Sanneh was born in Georgetown (now known as Janjanbureh), 150 miles upriver from the mouth of the Gambia River, on May 24, 1942. He attended a government-run Islamic boarding school before moving to the capital city of Banjul, where he eventually returned to high school and, in 1963, received a scholarship to attend college in the United States.