Religion and Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Stephen Ellingson, M. Christian Green, Stephen Ellingson, M. Christian Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135375959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Issues of sexuality and gender are hotly contested in both religious communities and national cultures around the world. In the social sciences, religious traditions are often depicted as inherently conservative or even reactionary in their commitments to powerful patriarchal and pronatalist sexual norms and gender categories. In illuminating the practices of religious traditions in various cultures, these essays expose the diversity of religious rituals and mythologies pertaining to sexuality. In the process the contributors challenge conventional notions of what is normative in our sexual lives.

Part I

Fecundism, Ideologies of Reproduction, and Sexual Identity

1

Cultural Production and Reproductive Issues

The Significance of the Charismatic Movement in Nigeria

TOLA OLU PEARCE

Introduction

The Charismatic movement¹ which began in the 1970s in Southwestern Nigeria is the most recent wave of Christianity to sweep across the nation and is gaining converts at a phenomenal rate. Although it is still unclear just how many Charismatics there are in Nigeria, it is generally believed that growth rates within the past 20 years have been dramatic, especially among the middle and upper classes and within secondary and post-secondary educational institutions. Johnstone (1993) estimates that while 50% of Nigerians are Christians, about 27% of these are Protestants, and 13% Catholics. He reports that Pentecostals/Charismatics comprise about a third (9.2%) of all Protestants, but a smaller proportion (0.2%) of Catholics. From Yorubaland in the Southwest, the movement has spread to every region of the nation. Since the European missionary work of the nineteenth century, there have been several syncretic formations including the well-known Aladura movement of the 1930s. In this study, I examine how the religious ideology and practices of the Charismatics are being used to restructure other institutions. For instance, the institutions of marriage, the family, and health have been specifically targeted for change by these churches. Their aim is to build a prosperous church with a new type of family as the basic cell. According to one church leader, “The home is the basic unit of the church. There cannot be a perfect church without perfect homes.”² Yet the vision of the home is quite different from what exists within the surrounding cultural milieu. In drawing a line between religious ideologies, home and health practices, I will examine the impact these churches are having on beliefs and practices which deal with childbearing, sexual behavior, contraception, and infertility. I am therefore interested in the process of resocialization that is taking place within these churches and the structures, techniques and practices which have been developed to reach their growing membership.

I will briefly review the reproductive scene in Nigeria, introduce my theoretical framework and discuss my sources of data before analyzing the growing impact of the new doctrines on reproductive behavior.

The Charismatic Movement in Nigeria

The Charismatic conversion is an endogenous outgrowth of both the British missionary work of the nineteenth century and the American Pentecostal evangelism dating back to the 1960s. The movement in Nigeria grew out of transdenominational worship among Christian students in institutions of higher learning. In Nigeria, the older universities, beginning with the University of Ibadan (1948), were established as residential institutions where faculty, staff and students lived on campuses segregated from the surrounding population. Ojo reports that the movement began after a collective baptism of a group of student Christian leaders by the Holy Spirit at the University of Ibadan during the first week of January, 1970.³ The renewed Christians became known as Born-Again Christians, like similar converts around the world. Specific beliefs and practices soon spread to other campuses, other regions of the nation and the less educated. Nonetheless, Charismatic churches are generally founded and headed by well-educated pastors and, as Ojo argues, the leaders, planners and organizers tend to be better educated than those of other syncretic churches and belong to the “elite status generally in Nigerian society.”⁴

Many autonomous Charismatic churches are springing up all over Nigeria, and although there are some differences regarding local practices, what they have in common is the practice of evangelism, Pentecostalism, an emphasis on prayer, and faith healing. They believe in charisms, special gifts believed to be bestowed by the Holy Spirit. These include wisdom, knowledge, and the ability to speak in tongues, interpret tongues, prophesy, heal, and see visions. Unlike earlier movements, Charismatics believe these gifts are not the preserve of church leaders or pastors. Anyone who is diligent, faithful and spiritually mature can be so “blessed.” Similar to good health and prosperity, charisms are an indication that an individual has developed spiritually and maintained a strong personal relationship to God. Another important dimension of Charismatic ministries is literacy. The groups rely heavily on written material and advanced technology such as videos, musical cassettes, photocopying machines, television, and computers. English is the preferred language of worship, although indigenous language sections of ministries now exist.

Variations among the churches span the spectrum from those who embrace the type of indigenous rituals accepted by the old Pentecostal or Aladura churches, to those who denounce such behavior. The focus of my study is the latter group, which tend to reject the doctrine of strict dress codes, or prohibition of jewelry and cosmetics, and consider themselves less fundamentalist in this regard. Examples of such churches: Grace Family International Church (GFIC), Rhema Chapel, the Stone Church, the Fountain of Life Church, Power Pentecostal Church, and the Redeemed Christian Church of God. They distance themselves from groups like the Shalom Christian Mission and the Church of God Mission. These are approximate divisions, as the Charismatic scene entails a lot of movement of people and ideas from one church to another. In a country as ethnically diverse as Nigeria, with over 300 different groups, subcultural diversity will no doubt influence the way in which the movement is absorbed into local communities.

The movement began and spread rapidly during a period of economic and social upheavals in Nigeria. 1970 brought the end of the postindependence civil war, which had shattered any complacency about the inevitability of development and national unity. This was quickly followed by the oil boom with the expansion of education, rapid urbanization, and rising corruption. Fortunes were made, but prosperity was uneven, and inequalities grew. Literacy was on the increase and a middle class struggled to emerge in the urban centers where infrastructures (roads, electricity, water, waste disposal services) were grossly inadequate. By the early 1980s, the boom was over and an economic recession descended. A succession of military coups and civilian regimes brought increasing political instability and economic chaos. In 1986, the military government inaugurated a Structural Adjustment Program in the face of popular opposition. SAP resulted in the devaluation of the national currency, inflation and reduced public spending on education and health. Basically, political power has been used for the personal accumulation of wealth. The state has become repressive, exploitative and manipulative and the general public has turned increasingly to “ethnic, religious and philanthropic organizations for hope, leadership, self expression and support.”⁵ Ihonvbere describes the State as increasingly irrelevant to people’s consciousness and their everyday “existential conditions.” Rather loyalty, support, skills and money are used to build alternative methods of survival: ethnic associations, secret societies/cults, Mafia-type economic networks, community development associations, and religious organizations, including Charismatic churches. There is little or no faith that the state will ensure economic development and political rights. Churches, like many other groups, help members with unemployment, skills development, health, information, hope, and emotional support.

Reproductive Health in Nigeria

International attention regarding fertility began to focus on Africa in the 1960s. Much of the concern of scholars and policymakers was with the issues of high fertility and population growth rates. By the 1970s it was assumed that both were responsible for the lack of development in African countries and the poor maternal and child health statistics. Data for 1980–1984 revealed that Africa had the highest maternal mortality rate in the world with 640 deaths per 100,000 live births. West Africa had the highest rate with 700 per 100,000, and Nigeria stood out as one of the few nations with over 1,500 per 100,000 (ECA 1989). Particularly vulnerable were women who became pregnant before the age of fifteen, those who no longer observed the two-to-three-year indigenous child-spacing patterns, those with more than four children, and women who continued childbearing after the age of thirty-five.⁶ The total fertility rate (TFR) in Nigeria was 6.3 in 1981, and the average desired family size was 8.2 at that time (ECA 1989). The immediate causes of death were stated as hemorrhage, obstructed labor, infection, eclampsia, and abortion. At a conference organized by the Society of Gynecology and Obstetrics of Nigeria (SOGON) in 1990, Dr. Lucas reported that ten percent of all maternal deaths in the world occurred in Nigeria.⁷ Dr. Chukudebelu, then president of SOGON also noted that a Nigerian woman had “a one-in-twenty-four chance of dying during pregnancy or childbirth … Her Western counterpart has a one-in-seventeen-thousand chance …”⁸

From the mid-1970s, pressure was put on Nigeria to develop a population control program. The government remained lukewarm to this suggestion and resisted until the mid-1980s, after a continent-wide economic recession was well underway.⁹ With the assistance of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other experts from the population establishment, a national policy was developed in 1988. It was presented as a health measure to address the problems of maternal and infant mortality and health development in general. The policy is voluntary and aims to reduce population growth rate from 3.3% to 2% per annum. The total fertility rate is targeted to fall from 6.3 to 4 per female and women are encouraged to have all offspring between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. All this was to be accomplished between 1989 and 2000. The distribution of modern contraceptives was the main program developed to achieve these goals. In 1982, the contraceptive prevalence rate was estimated at 4%. This rose to 6% in 1990 and 12% in 1994, but remains low even for Africa. The government now aims at 25% by 2001. Although the TFR dropped to about 5.5 in 1995, there is the suggestion that the decline is driven by the economic crisis and not by reversals in pronatalist attitudes (UNFPA 1996, 14–15). Much of the socialization occurring within Charismatic churches addresses fertility, and attitudinal changes are precisely their objective.

Although the government has accepted the need to shift its focus from maternal health to the broader concerns of reproductive health, those in the forefront of such activities are nongovernment organizations, grassroots associations, and international agencies. Regarding the broader issue of reproduction, Nigeria is still overwhelmed by the problems of malnutrition, sexual abuse, STDs, HIV/AIDS, vesico/recto vaginal fistula, and genital surgeries. Reproductive health, rights, and freedoms are concepts that have scarcely made a dent, since the narrow focus on maternal health, pregnancy and contraceptive prevalence are still on the front burner.

Agency within Context: Multicausality

The spread of Christianity in Africa, the construction of religious doctrines and their impact on reproductive behavior cannot be understood within a monocausal theoretical framework. Religious expressions are not timeless, but constructed within specific sociohistorical contexts by specific human actors. Incoming cultural phenomena (such as religious ideas) interact with the host environment: agents and structures. Sanneh further argues that the encounter will favor the host environment which mediates changes.¹⁰ Thus, for example, Brown chronicles changes in the construction and worship of Ogun, a Yoruba deity, as he traveled from Southwestern Nigeria to Haiti and later to New York City.¹¹ Ogun in New York dons characteristics that are significantly different from his place of origin.

A number of scholars have worked with the two concepts of agent and structure in understanding social change in human societies.¹² For instance, in their discussion of developments in everyday knowledge and competencies, Berger and Luckmann argue that individuals are culture-producing agents.¹³ Through the roles they occupy, people internalize incoming material and interpret, reorder, reject or synthesize it. The final product is returned to the environment often as new knowledge. Giddens points out that agents remake social structures and institutions which in turn remake the agents.¹⁴ Human beings coproduce structures and themselves. In the present discussion of coproduction, I will use Messer-Davidow’s distinction between individualistic and collectivist models of agency.¹⁵ I will look at how both as individuals and as groups, the Charismatic churches are in the process of altering crucial aspects of family life and reproductive behavior. I intend to use a Yoruba model of agency and social change as discussed by Akiwowo and Drewal.¹⁶ I do not propose that there is only one model of change theorized by the Yoruba people. In any culture there are contending models held by different subgroups or rival camps. There are, as is well known, different schools of thought within America and no one would presume to talk about the model of social change.

In her study of Yoruba rituals, Drewal outlines a critique of the modernization perspective on change, which (i.e., modernization) poses that static “traditional” societies would be altered by modern incoming cultural items. Life would evolve from the traditional to the modern and this process would favor the imported cultural traits. In opposition to this, Drewal’s study of rituals reveals that the Yoruba never perceived their society as static. Yoruba ritual behavior is marked by extensiv...