Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel

2. Love and Violence

2 Love and Violence And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? [Jesus] said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour? And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves. . . . —Luke 10:25–30 The bori spirits aren’t Satan; Satan is the evil that humans do to one another. —Bori practitioner commenting on the violence done to bori members by Islamists during the November 8, 2000, riot After my experience in the riot, I found myself haunted by the question posed to me in the street that day by the insouciant gentleman with the cell phone: “Madame, est-ce que vous nous aimez?”—Madame , do you love us? I needed to understand why, of all the things he 62 / Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel might have chosen to say to me at such a moment, he chose to ask whether people like me (Christians? missionaries? westerners? whites?) were truly capable of love. Nothing in my experience of the riot led me to feel that love was at the heart of it, and yet clearly, in some perverse way, it was. Prior to the riot I had gathered sermons from the Vie Abondante radio show, Muryar Ceto (The Voice of Salvation) in an effort to begin to understand the recent explosion of the Pentecostal movement in Maradi . After the riot, I tried to listen to them not simply to understand the history of recent conversion but also (with an awareness that these were some of the very sermons that had fed the violence that day) to understand the sense of injury among some Muslims. What were the arguments resurgent Christians (in this case, charismatic Pentecostal Christians ) were using to convince their Muslim neighbors to convert? And why might these arguments be experienced by some as hurtful and violent ? Even before the riot, some traditionally evangelical Christians had a sense that there was a kind of violence to the preaching parvenu Pentecostal Christians were delivering. After the first round of planned violence against the Vie Abondante church in 1999 was successfully prevented by the state, an unnamed Christian pastor denounced the virulence of the radio program to reporter Illia Djadi, commenting, “You can’t hope to share the Good News to someone by making comments that are hurtful [blessants] in the local context” (Djadi 1999a). This chapter will set out some of the characteristic tensions and impasses Christians and Muslims of a literalist stripe in this region are likely to encounter in debating the nature of monotheism with one another. While the Pentecostal ministers have been extremely aggressive in evangelizing in recent years, the older evangelical church and SIM mission often took the same kind of injurious approach in the early days of missionization in the region. Indeed, one virtue in reflecting on this rather rich contemporary material from the recorded radio shows is that it helps shed light on the less easily documented preaching done by SIM missionaries in marketplaces I will be discussing in the chapters that follow; the repertoire of scriptural passages preferred by broadly evangelical missionaries has remained relatively constant over many years. While there are differences of style and emphasis between Pentecostal preachers and the conservative evangelical SIM preachers of the early years, those differences have largely to do with SIM’s abandonment of faith healing early in its experience in Africa as the heavy toll tropical diseases took on its personnel brought home the limitations of that theology. SIM Love and Violence / 63 missionaries at the inception of the mission could readily have declared, as Pentecostal preachers do today, that Christians needed to return to the simple prayer and faith of the early Christian church: “In the early church, they didn’t have time for orphanages, gathering offerings for the poor. In the early church there were no hospitals for the sick. They went everywhere preaching and praying and in every city they...