Over the past 50 years, many groups of non-Western migrants have settled in Europe. Among these groups of migrants are several Christian communities. 'From Copts from Egypt, Armenians and Syriac Orthodox, to Christians from Ethiopia and Eritrea,' says Heleen Murre-van den Berg, professor of Global Christianity at Radboud University. 'These groups all have their own local and cultural customs. How do they keep those alive in a very new environment?'
An important part of the religious practices of these communities is their emphasis on writing and publishing texts. In doing so, they try to transmit their religious heritage to a new generation in a new context. For the Rewriting Global Orthodoxy project, Murre-van den Berg and her colleagues collected a large amount of online and offline documents that these groups of Christians published after their migration. 'Our database contains all kinds of sources: children's books, educational materials, liturgical texts, poems and much more,' Murre-van den Berg says. 'These texts have been underexposed for a long time, but they are an important source to visualise and better understand how non-Western Christians shape their position in European society.'
Different ways
To collect the sources, the researchers got in touch not only with groups of Oriental Christians in the Netherlands, but also with communities in countries such as Germany, England, France, Sweden and Italy.
'It is very interesting to see how these groups maintain and spread their stories in different ways in their new homes,' says Murre-van den Berg. 'Some groups, like the Copts from Egypt, still have close ties to their homeland. Therefore, they can import their texts from Egypt. These are sometimes already translated into French and English there. Armenian Christians, on the other hand, are more focused on France, where Armenians have been settling since the 18th century and where even more Armenians emigrated to after the Armenian genocide in 1915. Many of these sources are also included in our database.'
'For the Syriac Orthodox community, on the other hand, there is little to fall back on in the region they come from,' Murre-van den Berg explains. 'That is why they have set up their own publishing house with a web shop in the Netherlands.' This publisher offers traditional publications such as texts for church services, religious books and hagiographies (lives of saints), but also innovative publications such as dictionaries and books for children.
Moving with the times
According to Murre-van den Berg, mapping these sources also shows that communities are moving with the times, digitising more and more documents and offering them online.
This is also one of the conclusions from research conducted by Murre-van den Berg's colleague, PhD student Habtom Yohannes, on Orthodox Tewahdo Christians from Eritrea and Ethiopia. Parishes of their church, including in Rotterdam, Amstelveen, Amersfoort, Glasgow and London, are very active on social media. Priests to an advanced age manage Whatsapp and Telegram groups in which they answer questions from their supporters. They also populate YouTube and Facebook. Moreover, the transnational community ensures that people still living in Ethiopia and Eritrea also benefit from globalisation and digitalisation, including by sending money and digital devices.
While modern technology helps make information more accessible, certain documents are still deliberately printed on paper. Educational books, for example, but also the scriptures used during church services. Murre-van den Berg points to the practice during Orthodox Christian services to the Gospel Lectionary is passed around. 'For that, they still use a physical copy, not an iPad. At the same time, making the texts of the liturgy in the original language and in translations accessible via screens is no problem at all.'
The database also provides insight into how a community adapts to its environment. 'Take the translation of texts. This is done on the one hand so that descendants of migrants can also understand the texts and on the other hand so that people from outside the faith community can learn something.’ Murre-van den Berg shows a children's book written in Modern Syriac that contains drawings of Dutch landscapes. 'In Germany, you see textbooks appearing that combine Syriac Orthodox history and customs with stories from Western Christianity. For example, you can also find information about Catholicism or Martin Luther.'
Crucial source
The database is a crucial resource for studying these non-Western communities and their integration in Europe. 'There is so much to learn from this material, which few scholars have dealt with yet. The database is accessible to everyone, so we hope researchers will make use of it,' says Murre-van den Berg. 'And it is also interesting for people from the faith communities themselves. They were amazed by the large amount of material in the database.'