Why were Pagan religions which were local and relate-able replaced by Abrahamic religions which took place on the other side of the world?

by traional
musicninja91

To clarify- are we talking about in the Americas or Asia or where specificaly are you asking about?

Erezen

EDIT: /u/Steelcan909 touches on some things this post glosses over down below. Give their reply a read for a more complete picture.

So there's a couple of factors to consider here when asking about the process of Christianization and/or Islamization of polytheistic societies. However, your question gears towards one specific aspect, namely why polytheists adopted, in some cases with remarkable readiness, a foreign god with foreign prophets from a foreign land. On the surface, it seems bizarre, and indeed a great many modern pagan/heathen revivalists bring this up when discussing their motivations for reviving old religious practices.

However, in the ancient world, adoption of foreign gods was in fact not so unusual. Rome boasted several temples to Egyptian deities, including a double temple complex dedicated to Isis and Serapis; the cult of Isis gathered a considerable following among the Roman upper classes (though it was extensively Hellenized, which is an important point I'll get to further on).

In fact, there's considerable evidence that the Abrahamic God himself began this way. The name "Israel" suggests that the country's primary god was originally El (or El-Elyon), the chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon, but God in the Bible is generally referred to by the name of YHWH or Yahweh. The name "Yahweh" is not attested in any other Canaanite source, and the prevailing theory, at least according to the source linked below, is that Yahweh was originally the name of the primary god of some nomadic tribe or other from the south, who the Israelites co-opted for themselves and to whom they ascribed many attributes of El.

So now that we've established that appropriation of foreign gods was not uncommon in the ancient world, let's look at how Christianity was appropriated in a similar fashion. Christianity demands exclusive worship from its followers, and this was poorly understood by pagans first encountering the religion. Many polytheistic societies appropriated Jesus as they had countless other gods before. In Scandinavia, for instance, Jesus was adopted as the "White Christ" (Hvitakristr), a deity like any other to be prayed to and to ask favors from. As the lecture linked below puts it, the Norse were "pragmatic," and if someone came along and could show them that there was a new god to pray to to get certain benefits from, they'd adopt said god, much as the Greeks and Romans adopted Isis from Egypt. Jesus, then, was not special. Also much like Isis, Jesus changed depending on the culture he came into contact with. In the hard-nosed militaristic societies of the Norse, he took on attributes of an heroic, powerful warrior, much like Siegfried or Ragnar Lothbrok, and his pacifism and martyrdom were downplayed.

However, the theological differences between Christianity and indigenous polytheism eventually had the former eclipsing the latter, though usually with a substantial substratum of the indigenous religion. Christianity had a large institutional backing and, as I said earlier, demands exclusive adherence from its followers. This was a huge change from the understanding of religion up to this point. In pre-Christian Europe, gods were worshipped almost on an ad-hoc basis, based on whatever favor you were currently trying to obtain, and there was no contradiction in praying to a local god for one thing and a foreign god for another (or the same thing). In Christianity, this was no bueno, and its connection with Rome, power, prestige, influence, and not getting crusaded was generally enough to make people go to Christianity when the line was drawn in the sand. It also meant that each successive generation would be raised in an environment that was increasingly exclusively Christian. However, it should be noted that it took centuries in most places for Christianization to fully come to fruition. Jesus died around 30 AD; Iceland wasn't converted until almost a thousand years later.

TL;DR: Appropriation of foreign gods was a common practice in the ancient world, and similar things happened with Christianity, but Christianity demanded exclusive adherence and had the money and muscle to enforce it.

Sources: