Fast growing African Christianity, both evangelical and Catholic,
is transforming global religion and affecting American
Christianity, particularly its debates over homosexuality. The
U.S. Episcopal Church, of course, has been prominently roiled by
controversy since its 2003 election of an openly homosexual
bishop, now joined by a newly elected openly lesbian bishop.
African Anglican bishops, overwhelmingly conservative, have
steadfastly encouraged the global Anglican Communion to sanction
U.S. Episcopalians for their heterodoxy. But the Anglican
Communion’s authority is mostly symbolic, and the Episcopal
Church governs itself. A new communion, the Anglican Church in
North America, is largely for orthodox former Episcopalians, many
of whom have placed themselves under the authority of African
bishops.
Considerably less publicized but no less significant is the
United Methodist Church, which now almost uniquely among
liberal-led, old-line denominations continues to affirm orthodox
teachings on marriage and sexual ethics. The traditionalist
stance, dismaying to its liberal elites, is thanks partly to the
denomination’s growing African membership. Unlike the U.S.
Episcopal Church, which is almost entirely U.S. members plus some
small dioceses from Latin America and Taiwan, United Methodism is
more fully international, with about one third of its members in
Africa. Amid growing United Methodist churches in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, among others, and a U.S.
church losing about a 1,000 members weekly, the 11.4 million
denomination likely will soon be majority African. At the
church’s next governing General Conference in 2012, probably 40
percent of the delegates will come from outside the U.S., even
further diminishing liberal hopes.
Liberal church activists are reluctant to acknowledge that
African Christianity has a firm mind of its own, preferring
condescendingly to portray it as primitive and easily manipulated
by conservative U.S. religionists. It is true that much of
African Christianity is new, somewhat similar to fast growing,
early American frontier revivalism in its earnest faith,
populism, and strong sense of the supernatural. According to the
World Christian Encyclopedia of 2001, Africa was less
than 10 percent Christian in 1900 but was over 45 percent
Christian by 2000. (This compares to Islam’s growth in African
from 32 percent to 40 percent.) About 20 percent of the world’s
Christians now live in Africa, and rates of active church
attendance are higher in Africa than in much of old Christendom.
One Congolese bishop estimated that more Congolese are in a
United Methodist Church on a typical Sunday than in all the
United States.
But liberal U.S. church activists usually sorely
underestimate the depth and richness of African Christianity,
including its intellectual traditions, some of which date to the
early Church Fathers. Infamously, revisionist retired U.S.
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong once derided African Anglicans
for having “moved out of animism into a very
superstitious kind of Christianity,” while condemning Third World
“religious extremism” and “Pentecostal hysteria.” In the
patronizing spirit of Bishop Spong, some liberal activists claim
African church leaders, in their opposition to liberal U.S.
church trends, especially about sex, are merely U.S. pawns. A
recent example comes from a Massachusetts watchdog of
conservative groups called Political Research Associates, which
commissioned a Zambian clergyman from the Episcopal Diocese of
Massachusetts to expose the supposed manipulation of African
churches. His
report of last year, “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S.
Conservatives, African Churches and Homophobia,” outlines the
conspiracy, which claims more or less that African Christianity’s
opposition to homosexual causes essentially originated in
America. California mega-church pastor Rick Warren is one of the
identified conspirators, as is my own Institute on Religion and
Democracy.
“Just as the United States and other northern societies
routinely dump our outlawed or expired chemicals,
pharmaceuticals, machinery, and cultural detritus on African and
other Third World countries, we now export a political discourse
and public policies our own society has discarded as outdated and
dangerous,” breathlessly intoned the report’s introduction.
“Africa’s antigay campaigns are to a substantial degree made in
the U.S.A.” The report views debates over homosexuality through
the American and Western left’s own secular political prism and
its preoccupation with endless diversity, obsessive individualism
and resistance to transcendent authority. It does not even try to
understand African Christianity’s own worldview, rooted in
Scripture, orthodox church teaching, and responsibilities beyond
the self.
Condescension towards African Christianity guided a recent
United Methodist attempt to sideline growing African churches by
creating a new, U.S. only regional conference that would
potentially create its own rules while excluding the Africans.
Ostensibly this exclusion would empower the Africans by releasing
them from concerns about the U.S. church. Endorsed by the
church’s Council of Bishops and a two-thirds vote at the
denomination’s governing General Conference in 2008, the
restructuring required ratification by two thirds of the voters
at local annual conferences last year. Mournfully, the bishops
released the voting results early this month. (See my assistant
Connor Ewing’s article.)
Almost without precedent, over 60 percent of the nearly 50,000
United Methodist voters at conferences around the world rejected
the bishops’ plan. Most revealingly, over 94 percent of African
voters, evidently not wanting this kind of “empowerment” by
exclusion, voted no.
Undoubtedly United Methodist liberals will craft new
attempts to marginalize the growing African churches. And U.S.
Episcopalians will largely ignore the protests of the nearly 80
million member Communion, now dominated by large African churches
that increasingly dwarf the dwindling U.S. denomination’s 2
million in both numbers and vitality. How persuasive will the
emptying old-line churches of New England and California be
against the arguments of hundreds of millions of African
Christians?
