Is Africa Incurably Religious?

Benno van den Toren

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781913363857
• eBook ISBN: 9781913363864
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The contributions in the volume question the widespread thesis that Africa is 'incurably religious' by studying both the presence and meaning of secularization in sub-Saharan Africa and among the African diaspora. This exercise requires sustained interest in the notion of secularization itself. It explores whether the understanding of secularization will need to be challenged and enlarged to properly detect and understand the secularization processes in this continent that is known for its religious fervour. The essays in the first part focus on Africa's cultural and religious traditions. Though the modern term of secularization cannot be uncritically applied here, the different authors argue that there are both signs and seeds of secularization present in Africa's traditional worldview and practices. Essays in the second part study secularization in contemporary Africa, in for example, the world of higher education and the rise of neo-Pentecostalism. It also contains regional reports from both Africa and the African Diaspora. The final section explores what the reality of secularization in its various expressions means for Christian discipleship in contemporary Africa.

1. Introduction
Can God Die in Africa?

Benno van den Toren and Joseph Bosco Bangura

Competing Stories of Secularization and Religiosity

Although several exploratory studies have suggested that sub-Saharan Africa is not immune to secularization processes in various forms,¹ the theme is, however, remarkably under-researched. Two factors explain the reasons for this claim. First, from a northern Atlantic perspective, Africans seem to have a deeply enchanted worldview. This claim can easily distract attention from other aspects of the multi-faceted nature of Africa’s secularization processes. Secondly, when discussing secularization, we need to distinguish between sociological processes of secularization on the one hand and secularization stories on the other. Herman Paul has pointed out that the West tells its own secularization stories that may themselves become a motor of secularizing, yet that can also hide from view sociological realities that resist secularization.² For this reason, when looking at Africa, however, we discover that counter-secularization stories are much more important. Africans, whether situated in Africa or scattered among the African diaspora, tend to tell stories which contain descriptions of the continent and its peoples as being not only “incurably religious,”³ but a place where God could be said to neither die nor be marginalized from the various spheres of life.⁴ This reading celebrates Africa’s self-perceived calling as the safe haven – where religion finds immunity from a hostile secular world. Accordingly, it is Africa’s desire that she should be recognized as the launching-pad for reversed Christian mission to the secular West where Christian witness has progressively ebbed away.⁵

Nevertheless, this hypothesis of Africa’s “incurable religiosity” should be critically tested because there are important indications of a growing influence of several aspects of the secularization processes that have arisen in the African public and private spheres. Such an endeavor requires careful and critical study of the notion of secularization itself, because in comparison with expressions of this phenomenon elsewhere, in certain respects it takes on particular forms in sub-Saharan Africa. In the quest to fulfill this crucial enterprise, researchers must exercise caution and steer clear of the temptation of simply reviving highly westernized forms of the secularization thesis on African soil. This call is especially necessary at a time when North Atlantic sociologists are noting processes of de-secularization and re-enchantment in the northern hemisphere itself.⁶

As Christian theologians, we are not only interested in secularization as a sociological process but are also intent on exploring its requisite theological significance to help us understand better the multi-faceted challenges it raises for contextual Christian discipleship in contemporary Africa. We are aware that the Christian faith has a complex relationship with secularization and that the Judeo-Christian belief in God as Creator is itself one of the roots of this process.⁷ For this reason, rather than subscribing to Africa’s notorious religiosity (if it ever really existed), Christian theology is challenged to explore what constitutes an appropriate Christian analysis of this situation. This then informs the shape of Christian discipleship to be developed and practiced in the African environment.

There have been numerous calls for contextual Christian discipleship in Africa. So far, critical reflection on such contextual discipleship has mainly concentrated on how discipleship in Africa is possible only if it responds adequately to an African worldview that is deeply influenced by Africa’s traditional cultures and religions. It is rightly argued that this worldview has not been sufficiently considered in the earlier efforts of missionary proclamation and discipleship formation. Discipleship formation in Africa should respond to the challenges of living in a world in which understandings of blessing and curse, of healing and illness, presuppose a worldview in which the material and spiritual worlds are deeply intertwined.⁸ Contextual discipleship can, however, not only concentrate on the challenges inherited from Africa’s past, but will equally need to address the new challenges of living out the Christian faith in a context characterized by rapid urbanization and globalization leading to new African modernities. This is a context in which the different cultural streams, worldviews, practices and social structures – of African Traditional Religion, the Christian faith (and often also Islam) and secular modernity – encounter each other and form all sorts of new hybrid cultural expressions that either enrich, challenge, refine or rupture any affinity with the African religious experience of the world. In pursuit of this aim, this volume combines sociological description and analysis with critical theological reflection and practical theological proposals for Christian practice and mission in today’s Africa. This exercise recognizes that Africa is already integrated in an increasingly globalizing world, while retaining its own specific and complex cultural context.

Intercultural Explorations

The studies in this book are not only an exploration in “contextual theology” in view of understanding and evaluating secularization processes in Africa and reflection on forms of Christian discipleship that can thrive in such rapidly changing environments. These explorations reflect the fact that the different regions of the world and of the church worldwide are more and more intertwined and that therefore both allow for and demand intercultural approaches to theology.⁹ Intercultural theology is interested in how dialogue between different contextual theologies and between Christian communities facing different contextual challenges can be mutually enriching and allow for a deeper and richer understanding of the Gospel, our contexts and our calling as followers of Jesus in these particular contexts.¹⁰ As explained further below, this volume grew out of two consecutive conferences on secularization and discipleship – in Cairo, Egypt, and Yaoundé, Cameroon. Intercultural encounters between Africa and the North Atlantic world take place frequently, but such encounters between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa (in Cairo) and between French-speaking Africa and English-speaking Africa (in Yaoundé) are much rarer. The conferences were relatively small gatherings with only plenary meetings allowing for a sustained constructive and critical conversation. We arrived at a growing understanding across these boundaries, but also discovered serious misunderstandings and sometimes even suspicion: “Aren’t all European societies, unlike Africa, deeply alienated from God?” “Is this interest in secularization not just a western agenda imposed on the Global South?” “Isn’t the vibrant Christianity in Africa very shallow?” Whether such questions exist, hidden in the background or, rather, are stated up front, their relative value can be assessed only if we take time for patient and engaged dialogue.

We feel that the question of discipleship in the context of secularization is one of the areas in which intercultural theological conversation is particularly complex, yet also potentially insightful and constructive. The exchange is complex because of the very different expressions and appreciations of secularization processes in different part of the world. Yet it is potentially a deeply insightful exchange precisely because northern cultures have been so profoundly shaped by secularization that it becomes hard to take some critical distance. On the other hand, the perception that Africa is deeply religious does of course have some basis but can be so alluring that secularization processes and the challenges they raise for Christian discipleship can easily go unnoticed. It is our hope and expectation that the papers resulting from these intercultural encounters will prove valuable among readers from both the North and the Global South.

Two Conferences on Secularization and Discipleship in Africa

In December 2014, a group of Christian theologians and mission practitioners from Europe met with their counterparts from sub-Saharan and North Africa at the campus of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt. The conference was convened to examine whether, how and to what degree secularization processes were a reality across Africa, whether they were comparable with western experiences, how they should be evaluated theologically, and what they would mean for contextual Christian discipleship. The theme chosen for this conference was “Declining Religious Participation: Secularization and Discipleship in Africa.” The question sought both to analyze Africa’s secularization and discipleship stories in the light of the continent’s present modernization strides, and contrast those from western prescriptions so that a moment of learning and understanding could occur for all participants represented at the conference.¹¹ Even though it is not our intention in this introductory section to provide a comprehensive report of the conference,¹² suffice it to be noted that the deliberations at Cairo did offer a unique perspective on the rising interface between secularization processes and narratives, and the challenges for discipleship they pose in Africa. The gathering in Cairo facilitated a twofold framing that helps understanding of Africa’s secularization narratives.

First, though there are some earlier publications on secularization in Africa, much of the discussion is dated and other studies remain exploratory and of limited scope (or both).¹³ Studies on secularization processes in Africa have only recently begun to address the challenges of the growth of new mega-cities, the implications of secularization for Christian discipleship in the contexts of today’s hybrid cultures, and the ambiguous role of newer Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in these urban settings. It was clear that there was no admission that secularization was indeed an issue to be grappled with despite what has been said of the religiosity of the African continent. The Cairo deliberations were undertaken with a view to deepening dialogue around the precise texture of Africa’s emerging secularization processes and narratives.

Secondly, the Cairo deliberations stimulated another and more focussed conference whose objective was to investigate in greater detail the question of Africa’s counter-secularization discourses, with an emphasis on how those nuances would impact upon the nature of African Christian discipleship. Thus, in November 2016, another group of scholars met in Yaoundé, Cameroon, on the same theme: “Is Africa Incurably Religious? Secularization and Discipleship in Africa II.” The Yaoundé conference brought together a wider pool of scholars from both French-speaking and English-speaking sub-Saharan Africa, in dialogue with their western counterparts. The conference allowed wide-ranging discussions surrounding issues of secularization and the effect they had on intercultural Christian discipleship in Africa. In doing so, the choice of the city of Yaoundé (which is itself an African metropolis in a bilingual country at the crossroads of African and global influences), provided ample opportunities for a healthy exchange of ideas among scholars who represented ecumenical, evangelical, Roman Catholic and Pentecostal theological perspectives. Further, regional reports from across Africa and among the African diaspora in Europe, were also presented. The findings contained in these reports were carefully discussed to ascertain how the traces of secularization were functioning among both the poorer sectors of society and the African élite in their respective regions and in the African diaspora.

Structure of this Volume

Considering ongoing contestations against the thesis of an incurably and profusely religious African continent, this volume reflects upon issues on the borderline between secularization and contextual Christian discipleship in present-day Africa. To do so, the volume brings together a fine crop of internationally acclaimed scholars whose work engenders a rigorous pedigree of robust inquiry grounded in western and non-western perspectives on issues of secularization and discipleship in Africa. Organized in three parts, each contribution opens new perspectives on the future of secularization discourses and how they dialogue with and affect intercultural Christian discipleship in contemporary Africa.

After this introduction, which locates the project within the field of intercultural theology, the volume’s first three chapters in Part I discuss secularization and Africa’s cultural, religious and traditional heritage. These contributions provide an analysis of African traditions that moves beyond the popular narrative that these traditions were deeply religious and presented a worldview in which religion penetrates every aspect of life. Eloi Messi-Metogo from Cameroon points to several aspects of African traditional culture that are not immune to religious indifference and might even promote such indifference. The paper argues against the narrative of Africa being incurably religious. Eloi Messi-Metogo, a Dominican priest, sadly died within a year of the conference on 15 October 2017 at the age of 65. The title of this introduction, “God, can He die in Africa?,” is homage to his influential book in 1997: Dieu peut-il mourir en Afrique? Essai sur l’indifférence religieuse et l’incroyance en Afrique noire (“Can God Die in Africa? A paper on religious indifference and unbelief in sub-Saharan Africa”).¹⁴ Metogo was himself deeply worried about the presence of religious indifference and processes of secularization in sub-Saharan Africa that are generally not taken seriously, and was strongly in favor of this conference in Yaoundé, where he himself taught at the Catholic University of Central Africa. It is one of the sad consequences of the lack of interaction between theological discourse in French-speaking Africa, on the one hand, and English-speaking Africa, on the other, that his book never came to be well known in the English-speaking world. We are grateful and delighted that a summary of his daring, yet important, thesis was presented at this conference and for the first time became accessible in English.

Metogo’s reading is buttressed by Abel Ngarsouledé from Chad whose paper reviews the inherent factors that are entrenched in African Traditional Religion that do in fact lead to secularization. In that contribution, Ngarsouledé contends that, by falling back on idolatry, traditional education weaved into rites of passage and invulnerability rites during times of crises and personal need, African Christians have yielded to the forces of secularization that arise from their dependence on African tradition rather than the power of Christ. Whereas Metogo argues from a religious studies perspective, Ngarsouledé opts for a theological analysis – as is clear from the central role of the notion of idolatry as the exchange of the divine for created realities.

Instructive are the parallels drawn between western and African forms of secularization. To contextually locate this claim, the South African/British theological educator Dick Seed offers a contribution entitled, “Western secularization, African worldviews and the church.” In this paper, Seed assesses how western conceptions of secularization could interact with African worldviews and how they both affect the nature of church ministry across Africa.

In Part II, entitled “Secularization, modernization and globalization in today’s Africa,” six papers assess the impact of the recent socio-economic and political changes sweeping across Africa to ascertain whether they reveal any processes related to secularization. To facilitate dialogue with western models of secularization, Henk van den Bosch, a Dutch theologian, asks the question: “What do we mean when we talk about secularization in Africa?” To help answer this question, the paper offers a thoughtful survey of classical western understandings of secularization as a starting-point for a critical reflection concerning their value for understanding similar processes in Africa. Presenting the results of a three-year research project on science and religion in the French-speaking African cities of Abidjan, Yaoundé and Kinshasa, the Dutch theologian Klaas Bom summarizes the secularizing influence of university education on professors and students at institutions of highe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• 1. Introduction Can God Die in Africa?
• Part I - Secularization and Africa’s Cultural and Religious Traditions
• Part II - Secularization, Modernization & Globalization in Today’s Africa
• Part III - Christian Discipleship in the Context of Modernity
• A Selection of Bibliographic Sources on Secularization in Africa
• List of Contributors