Christianity and Public Culture in Africa

Introduction: Rethinking African Christianities

1 I N T R O D U C T I O N Rethinking African Christianities Beyond the Religion-Politics Conundrum H A r r i e n g l u n d AT T h E dawn of the twenty-first century, human tragedy and subsequent surveillance were not the only consequences of epoch-making terrorist attacks in the united States. they also heralded a public outcry over the impact of religion on the hearts and minds of apparently gullible believers. not only was one religion in particular the target of the public outcry, it also attributed to islam such powers of inspiration that contextual factors—planetary inequalities, the frustrations of muslim immigrants in the West, the plight of Palestine, new media and communication technologies—often fell outside the purview.1 moreover,such an analysis tended to overlook the persistently motivating and constraining impact a related religion, Christianity, continued to have on political competition in the West, particularly in the united States. by marveling at the “return” of religion as an all-consuming force, the outcry did little else than reframe the assumptions of secularization whose passing it ostensibly mourned. following the founding figures of sociology, the thesis of secularization had assumed that modernizing societies would become functionally differentiated, with increasing rationalization spelling the decline of the public significance of religion.2 What the public concern in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks shared with this thesis was the idea of religion as a subsystem that was separate from others in the structure of society. its return to the public realm made it imperative to put the lid back on Pandora’s box before religious passions would infuse the domains of public life.3 2 hARRI ENglUND recent anthropological studies of islamic movements in egypt and the rest of the middle east have, quite appropriately, been at the forefront of devising ways out of the impasse with the secularization thesis.4 Concerned less with theorizing an abstract society than with reflecting on actual, observable practices, these studies have shaken the very foundations of progressive politics among euro-American academics. the movements, popular among women and young men, have engaged in the redefinition of piety and commitment in which moral and social improvement is as important as technological progress. their predilections are, therefore, compatible with social activism,5 and the sounds of mass-mediated sermons that fill the air of public places shape private lives. “Within this context,” Charles Hirschkind writes, “public speech results not in policy but in pious dispositions, the embodied sensibilities and modes of expression understood to facilitate the development and practice of islamic virtues and therefore of . . . ethical comportment.”6 Progressive sensibilities are challenged by this prioritization of personal conduct over public policy. they are also confronted by the need to rethink the concept of freedom when submission to external authority would seem to be a condition for achieving the subject’s potentiality. far from dismissing adherents engaged in ethical self-formation as belligerent fundamentalists, these anthropologists urge us to “hold open the possibility that we may come to ask of politics a whole series of questions that seemed settled when we first embarked upon the inquiry.”7 note how, in this quote, a new understanding of religious formation holds the potential for a fresh appreciation of political practice. the domains of religion and politics are not easily kept separate for analytical purposes once the underlying view of society in the secularization thesis is rejected. ideas expressed in, and actions taken within, apparently different domains and institutions feed into each other, and what belongs to the public sphere or the private sphere is to be investigated and not assumed. much as this basic insight informs the chapters in this book, a note of caution must be struck. the appreciation of hybrid and complex forms has long since displaced dichotomous thought in social sciences and humanities, but it has given rise to new problems, notably the question of what the analyst can hope to keep constant when everything is understood to be in flux.8 for some students of Africa, the ways in which religion and politics can get conflated on the continent become little else than a pretext to assert the primacy of the former over the latter. While admitting that Africans are not 3 introduction busy with religion all the time, Stephen ellis and gerrie ter Haar, for example, maintain that...