Chris Mann: CROSSFIRE
Melvyn Bragg’s sketch of Christianity (“Onward Christian soldiers”, April 30 to May 6) is so culture-bound it needs challenging. How can a lapsed pre-war Church of England choirboy have any idea of what is happening to the inner lives of a million or so African Zionists celebrating Easter together in South Africa, or a million born-again South Koreans praying on a square in Seoul?
What understanding could he, or in fact any single person, have of a prosperity church service in Nigeria, a passion play in the mountains of the Philippines, an adult baptism in the shacklands of Bogota or a syncretic ritual by black Mexicans mixing Christian and West African beliefs?
Contemporary Christianity is bigger (nearly two billion) and more diversified than any one point of view can encompass and has been so for centuries. By concentrating on its astonishing impact on the Roman Empire and Europe, Bragg seriously misrepresents Christianity as a predominantly Western religion and ignores its multicultural branches and foliage, and its African roots.
Christianity began among a tiny group of rural people on the edge of the Roman Empire in the Middle East. The first non-Jewish convert was an African, a senior civil servant attached to the court of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Church is older than the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches.
St Anthony, the founder of the monastic tradition, was an Egyptian. This tradition, with its male and female orders, made an enormous contribution to what today could be called the reconstruction and development of Europe after the fall of Rome. Monasteries and nunneries were dotted all over Europe in an era of social turmoil and nation-building and, like NGOs today, were centres of education and philanthropy, and imperfect management.
The greatest early theologian, St Augustine of Hippo, was also an African. He was the founding architect of Western theology. His influence was second only to the Bible until the Middle Ages with an intellectual depth and range that was not to be matched until Thomas Aquinas. Any talk of an “African renaissance” in this country that omits mention of such figures is in some sort of denial.
Numbers are no guide to the integrity of believers, but Bragg should have mentioned the enormous growth of Christianity in Africa, East Asia and Eurasia during the past 40 years. The main growth spurt in Africa began in the 1960s following the departure of the colonial powers and the subsequent fire-cracker spread of indigenous churches.
Globally, Islam is growing more quickly than Christianity. The growth rate of Protestant evangelicals is much bigger than that of Islam, however, and three times higher than the world population growth rate. Most of this growth is in the south. There are now more evangelicals in Brazil than in the whole of Europe, where the decline in the number of adherents continues. By the year 2000, non- Western evangelicals will outnumber Western evangelicals by four to one. This has lead to surprising results: some scholars believe there have been more Christian martyrs in this century than in any other.
Bragg wonders whether the soul or spirit exists, and confesses embarrassment in kneeling beside his bed as a boy to say his prayers. This is fairly typical of a world- view where the analytical or right brain, as a result of a materialist education and acculturation, dominates an increasingly withered left brain. The result is the loss of awe, poetry and a religious sensibility in later life.
Bragg is much too soft on the complicity of Christians in the persecution of others. We have seen a variety of Christians in South Africa, from the saintly Shembe, Mama Paul, Trevor Huddlestone and Desmond Tutu, to the corrupted Allan Boesak and the murderous Gideon Niewoudt. The latter would sit in the front pew of his church in Port Elizabeth on a Sunday, and torture his victims without a qualm during the week. Non-believers are right to expect ethical and humane behaviour from Christians, but the sad fact is that, through the ages, they have been as cruel when persecuting others as those who persecute them.
Bragg ends by saying that the survival of Christianity in the face of its own manifest failings and the intellectual attacks of Franois-Marie Voltaire, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud is miraculous.
Others might say he has right-brained Christianity into an abstraction and missed the human point completely. More miraculously, surely, is the continuing global influence, after 2 000 years, of a wandering small-town idealist who wrote nothing, preached love to a motley band of artisans and got crucified for challenging the local establishment.
The Horn of Plenty by Chris Mann is published by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University