The Failure of Christianity in Africa

According to the African Catholic priest/scholar Emmanuel Katongole (The Sacrifice of Africa, 2011), Westernized Christianity has, in many ways, failed in Africa.  "Christianity continues to grow and thrive in Africa, but so too grow the realities of poverty, violence, and civil war."

I, Lowell Noble, see a tragic parallel with Mississippi.  At one time, nearly everyone in the white community went to church; the same in the black community.  But at the very same time, oppression, racism and poverty continued on largely untouched by the dysfunctional brand of Mississippi Christianity.  Aptly summed up by Mississippian Lee Harper: "For injustice ran deep and cloaked itself well among those things that appeared just."

In his critique of Christian social ethics, Katongole asserts "they do not explain why war, tribalism, poverty, corruption and violence have been endemic to Africa's social history."  I assert that theology has been inadequate, incomplete; missing has been biblical teaching on oppression, ethnocentrism and justice in the NT and one the trinity of the Holy Spirit, the kingdom of God and justice.

Katongole, a Catholic, declares that Catholic social teaching has failed in Africa.  "None of this seemed to have deeply challenged or offered a viable and concrete alternative to the endless cycle of violence, plunder, and poverty."

Katongole, a Ugandan, went to Rwanda which had been torn asunder by a civil war.  He reports: "And as I listened to the stories of what had happened during the genocide and visited some of the sites of genocide, I was led to see that Christianity was part and parcel of the political imagination of the Tutsi and Hutu as distinct races or tribes and that Christianity had been unable to resist or interrupt that story and its effects.  I began to see Rwanda not only as a mirror to Africa, but to the church in general."

"I began to see that ideals like "democracy," "development," civilization," and "progress" have become such tantalizing but misleading notions, forming the basic imaginative canvas yet obscuring reality.   They have become lies that both African leaders and social ethicists desperately want to believe."

In essence, Christianity has been a spiritual religion devoid of justice; oppression and poverty fill the social vacuum;  a disembodied spirituality.