By: Professor Gerald West (Ujamaa Centre, University of KwaZulu-Natal)
Following allegations of abuse of their members by some churches, the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities recently submitted its report entitled “The Commercialisation of Religion and Abuse of People’s Belief Systems.” In this piece, Professor Gerald West reflects on the role of religion in the “new” South Africa. Professor West has also written about similar themes earlier this month here and as part of the Ujamaa Centre newsletter available here.
In 1985, the Kairos Document offered a theological analysis of South African Christianity, identifying three distinctive theological perspectives. The most prevalent was what the Kairos Document called “Church Theology,” the predominant form of Christianity across South African churches. This was an individually focused version of Christian piety that advocated prayer rather than political engagement. To the right of Church Theology was “State Theology,” the theology of the apartheid state, a form of ‘national’ Christianity that legitimated White Afrikaner rule through apartheid. To the left was “Prophetic Theology,” a form of theology that was overtly political, articulating and advocating a spirituality of liberation that required active participation in the struggle for systemic justice.
Since political and legal (though not yet economic) liberation in 1994, the Christian theological terrain in South Africa has shifted. Prophetic Theology has been co-opted by the post-apartheid state, which has gone on to reconfigure it as a variant form of Church Theology. Prophetic Theology has all but dissipated. Forms of Church Theology therefore dominate the South African contemporary Christian landscape, being advocated by both the state and the churches.
As noted, the key characteristic of Church Theology is its individual emphasis. Christian faith is about the individual’s relationship with God. Individual conversion is the central tenet of Church Theology, and the social realm is constituted by individuals in need of conversion. There is little or no systemic analysis. Individual repentance and conversion is required, even when it came to apartheid. The systemic evil – sin – of apartheid was not the focus of theological reflection and action within Church Theology. Similarly, in our post-apartheid contemporary context, Church Theology emphasises the individual not the social systems that constitute South African reality.
However, within Church Theology itself, there has been a notable shift post-apartheid. The emphasis remains on the individual, but the kind of world the individual inhabits has undergone a change. In the 1970s and 1980s Church Theology inhabited a dualistic world, with the emphasis being on the world to come rather than the present world. Heaven, not earth, was the true terrain of the “evangelical” and “charismatic” forms of Church Theology that were the most pervasive forms of Christianity in South Africa (and the rest of the African continent). But in the same year as the Kairos Document was published, Rhema Bible Church set up shop in its 5 000-seat auditorium in Randburg. The neo-evangelical and neo-charismatic form of Church Theology proclaimed by this church and others like it offered a more world-affirming theology than the traditional forms of evangelical and charismatic theology it supplanted. This world, it was proclaimed, and not only heaven was the site of God’s blessing.
This-worldly material blessing became the emphasis in much of post-apartheid Church Theology Christianity, with some of the newly emerging Black middle class joining their White middle class Christian compatriots in Rhema-type neo-evangelical and neo-charismatic churches. The theological assumption of such forms of Christian faith is that wealth and health are direct blessings in this world from God. Biblical and theological retributive theology – “what you sow you will reap” – is the basis of this form of Church Theology. The orientation is always personal and individual. Questions are not asked about how wealth and health are obtained, as it is assumed that they are the material signs of God’s blessing. The social systems that generate wealth and health or poverty and disease are not interrogated.
Theologies of retribution are pervasive in the many forms of African Christianity, with notions of “retribution” inhabiting both colonial forms of Christianity and African Religion. Just as colonial and African forms of patriarchy have formed an alliance within African Christianity, so too have notions of retribution. Significantly, modern forms of retributive theology invert the logic of “what you sow you will reap,” preferring “what you have reaped is a clear indication of what you have sowed”! The presence of wealth and health, no matter how acquired, are signs of God’s blessing. The absence of wealth and health, no matter the social systems that generate poverty and disease, are conversely signs of God’s curse. No wonder that HIV and AIDS are seen as punishments from God, the “wages of sin.”
What “prosperity” and “healing” churches offer is a theological formula or rationale for securing God’s blessing. A common component is individual giving to the “man of God.” With very few exceptions the recipient of faithful, even sacrificial, giving/tithing is male. Just as the economic systems that generate wealth and poverty are invisible in such forms of Christianity, so too is the system of hetero-patriarchy. Indeed, conformity to hetero-patriarchal patterns is a self-evident component of “righteous” living and thus a precondition for God’s blessing. By giving/sowing to the man of God an individual Christian is promised a hundredfold return, whether in wealth or health. Those who have much are assumed to have given generously, and those who have little are exhorted to give yet more. Such is the economic hardship of so many South Africans that they are prepared to try this formula: give to the man of God and you will receive a hundredfold return.
Such is the pervasiveness of this variant form of neo-evangelical, neo-charismatic Christian faith that millions of South Africans, struggling with poverty or disease, seek out the ever increasing numbers of churches of what has become a commercial religious business. The transaction includes individual prayer to God (mediated by the man of God) and an “offering” to the man of God in exchange for this-worldly blessings of wealth and health. The man of God has become the necessary mediator between the supplicant and God.
“Those who have much are assumed to have given generously, and those who have little are exhorted to give yet more.”
Such is the commercial potential for this kind of economic enterprise that men of God compete with each other for clientele. Each strives to find a way of demonstrating their superior power, whether it the claim that they can cure HIV or homosexuality (Bishop Hamilton Nala) or that such is the power of man of God that his followers will not be harmed by ingesting poisonous substances or eating grass (Pastor Daniel Lesego). Superior power means superior economic resources from those (desperately) willing to give to the man of God in hope of God’s blessing.
The remedy for poverty or disease is not the supermarket churches on offer but a rejection of a privatised form of religion. While individual and personal faith is an important aspect of the life of religious faith it should not be the sole basis. The quest for individual health and wealth is blasphemous, denying as it does recognition of how particular social systems generate and sustain or denigrate and deny wealth and health. The recovery of a material dimension to evangelical and charismatic faith by their neo-evangelical and neo-charismatic cousins is commendable. Economic prosperity and abundant health should be features of the “new” South Africa, but not only for the few who are “blessed” by the man of God.
In the conclusion of my recent book, The Stolen Bible: From Tool of Imperialism to African Icon, I reflect on how biblical scholarship, my discipline, offers potential resources for a more communal and systemic engagement with Christian faith. Biblical scholarship, as is the case with South African Black Theology, offers access to the contending voices of the Bible and theology, making it clear that there is more than one biblical-theological “voice.” The availability of such resources is potentially useful amidst the clamour of men of God to represent the voice of God.
“Economic prosperity and abundant health should be features of the ‘new’ South Africa, but not only for the few who are ‘blessed’ by the man of God.”
This point is made somewhat provocatively by Xola Skosana, a Christian minister from Cape Town. He called, in the period before the 2011 local elections, for the Black preacher to “exhume the black body of Jesus from the grave”… “The Black preacher must point to the cross and remind Black people that their cross on the ballot paper on May 18, 2011 should not be to legitimise and perpetuate the corruption and political hegemony that keep Black people in servitude and in modernised slavery.” But, said Mail & Guardian writer Percy Zvomuya, having interviewed and cited Skosana, “today’s Black preacher is incapable of that, Skosana believes,” going on to cite phrases from Skosana’s analysis: “He lacks the necessary tools, skills and the gift to place scripture in its context. The Black preacher is unwilling to submit ‘to the discipline of study’ and is given to the ‘gimmicks’ first sold to him by ‘the American TV evangelist.’” Amen. And what holds for the Black preacher is also true for the White preacher, captured as they both are by neo-evangelical and neo-charismatic privatised religion.
Please find the link to the UKZN InTouch version here:
https://www.ukzn.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/UKZNTouch2017.pdf
Featured image source: Photo courtesy: Neuestock