Freedom's Distant Shores: American Protestants and Post-Colonial Alliances with Africa

Conclusion

223 Conclusion The volume speaks to important cultural, ideological, organizational, and historical dimensions of contemporary U.S. Protestant involvements with Africa. What serves as a common subtext from chapter to chapter is the degree of emphasis American Protestants placed on social policy in their engagement with African affairs and contexts—with social policy understood both in terms of U.S. and local African policy frameworks. Although chapter contributors varied (as did the Protestant actors detailed in the chapters), in the extent to which they explicitly considered social policy, the American Protestants described in the volume generally approached complexities related to the broader political and social policy contexts of their Africa involvements in one of four ways. First, some American Protestants acted out of presumed political neutrality . The idea that Christian institutions and individuals are able to operate within an historical context while they remain innocent of its politics has endured throughout much of Christian history. This idea also has dominated contemporary American Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism and their involvement in Africa. One example covered within the volume was the aloofness American Evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries maintained from the struggle against apartheid and the oppressions heaped upon the R. Drew Smith 224 Conclusion South African population. Another example was Evangelical and Pentecostal ideological complicity with massive economic and social inequalities in countries such as Nigeria, Liberia, Zaire, and Zambia. To the extent that these Protestant actors attempted to ignore rather than challenge the social framework within these contexts, they acquiesced to and, in some respects, enabled the problematic social arrangements and configurations prevailing within these African contexts. Secondly, there were those who entered into conscious alignment and alliance with certain of these problematic social frameworks. Siding with power and privilege is by no means unique to the subset of Protestants this volume cast in that light—in fact, this association generally has been more the rule than the exception for church alignments. Still, one is left wondering why mid-twentieth century American Protestants—in the face of a swirl of early twentieth century “social gospel” critiques of social inequality— remained so prone to concessions toward white colonial rule in Africa through the 1950s (as described in the chapters by Hulsether, and Sarkela and Mazzeo). A partial explanation (though an unsatisfactory justification) has claimed that theological cautions emerging in the post-World War II context about political tyranny contributed to these concessions, which combined readily with a larger American Protestant suspicion of communism and a susceptibility to arguments about colonialism and white minority rule as antidotes to communist expansion (see Hulsether, especially p. 29) American Protestants were not always able to transcend the Cold War logic defining the involvement of the United States with Africa during the mid- to late twentieth century; but mainline Protestants, at least, grew increasingly more sensitized from the 1960s through the1980s (likely as a result of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States) to the highly problematic nature of protracted white minority rule in southern Africa—which endured long after most of the Africa continent (and most of the rest of the world) had been decolonized. Nevertheless, the moral potency of black freedom struggles (as embodied in the successful decolonization movements across Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s, and in the American Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement in the 1950s and 1960s), still proved insufficient in convincing many American Evangelicals to emphasize black freedom rather than anticommunism as the basis for engagement with Africa. As chapters in this volume point out, certain American Evangelicals made what should have appeared as morally unconscionable and historically out-of-step concessions to racist regimes in southern Africa during the 1970s and 1980s (Smith, “Racial Politics”) and to African dictators in contexts such as Zaire and Liberia during the 1990s (Smith, “Church-State Dilemmas”). Equally troubling is that even after the collapse of white minority rule throughout southern Africa and the fall of the dictators with whom American Evangelicals were allied in Zaire and Liberia, the Evangelical leaders who took up these mistaken causes still seem unre- R. Drew Smith 225 pentant about their choices. This lack of repentance raises concerns about the possibilities for similarly unfortunate political alignments by American churches in the future. Thirdly, there were those who engaged in direct resistance to structures, policies, and ideologies that contributed to African oppression. Throughout at least the last...