Christianity without Fetishes

...While in Africa myself for many years, I saw only one such "practice" (conscientization) among the victims of systemic injustice...

...As in the West, this leads to "post Christianity" after which there is no religion at all...

...Eugene Hillman AGAINST the fetishism of the "missionary religions" in Africa, which social scientists might discuss under the heading of ethnocentrism, Professor Boulaga offers a profoundly searching and sharply critical effort to "recapture Christianity...

...Nor does he show much sympathy for those who, sharing his views and feelings, continue the struggle, from the inside, against the chronic ethnocentrism of ecclesiastical bureaucrats, careerists, and "living saints...

...For servants of the Christian churches in Africa, its impact could be something like that of Bishop Robinson's Honest to God...

...But this responsible project was abruptly terminated by the national episcopal conference after the national security authorities judged it inappropriate, if not seditious...

...Ignatius...

...This aim of the author, a former Jesuit professor of theology, now teaching philosophy at the Ivory Coast National University, is reminiscent of Vincent Donovan's Christianity Rediscovered, and Joseph Donders's NonBourgeois Theology (both from Orbis...

...The prepackaged Christianity presented to Africans, with only negative references to their traditional and socially integrated ways of being human and religious, is that of Western bourgeois society with all of its inherited fetishes, notably its excessive and disintegrating individualism...

...The current situation in Africa did not develop overnight — nor was it induced by the weather alone, much less by the victims themselves — in which one hundred and fifty million human persons were set on a path of chronic hunger, with hundreds of thousands right now in the agonies of epidemic starvation...

...No quarter is given for the sake of the minority of foreign missionaries and African pastors who stood firmly on the side of African cultures and religions, and paid a price for this stand when it was less popular than it is today, while Boulaga himself was still following the Spiritual Exercises of St...

...Christianity without Fetishes offers many more timely and profoundly provocative topics for Christians to meditate upon, if we care to, and if we dare to...

...The final death toll for the 1984 calendar year was said to reach five million, with probably another five million permanently disabled by severe malnutrition...

...Fetishism confuses reality with local myths and symbols, limping analogies and lisping metaphors, imaginatively endowing these ephemeral cultural inventions with powers they can barely signify or represent, much less contain...

...In contrast to this religion of imported forms, structures, conceptions, rules, and abstractions, the author speaks poignantly of the African tradition that was scorned when not simply ignored: "It was being born, living, and dying in the most empirical manner that ever could be, that furnished the framework, the matter, and the experience of God's sacrality and sovereign immanence...

...We are showered with massive, lyrical assertions," replies Boulaga, "but not favored with a theoretical presentation of the practice already under way...

...After long and dark ages of acquiescence in the socio-economic systems of slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism, ecclesiastical officialdom now proclaims emancipation for the victims and integral human development for all...

...Even Christianity's "preferential option for the poor," the recently reaffirmed commitment to social justice for the world's disinherited masses, evokes only a sneer from the author, this is ' 'too sudden not to shock...

...A Christianity of empire," says Boulaga, "imposes itself only by tearing up its converts by the roots, out of where-theylive, out of their being-in-the-world, presenting them with the faith only at the price of depriving them of their capacity to generate the material and spiritual conditions of their existence...

...For a welldocumented example of a specifically American contribution to human misery in just one African country, Zaire, see the early chapters of Jonathan Kv/itny'sEndless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (Congdon & Weed, 1984...

...As in the West also, in spite of everything, a faithful remnant remains...

...Commonweal: 348...

...Such literalism, especially when universalized, prepares the way for idolatry, ultimately for atheism...

...Boulaga is himself an African with a recently renewed appreciation of his own historico-cultural and religious roots which had been all but cut away by the resocialization processes of the mission schools, churches, and seminaries...

...This pious chopping of roots continues today, although now under the direction of Africans who have, more successfully than Boulaga, repudiated the "paganism" of their parents and grandparents, while diligently internalizing the ways and views and values of the West...

...His feelings are certainly understandable...

...It is predictable that this book will soon be listed as required reading for courses in seminaries, schools of theology, and departments of religion...

...After the ventilation of anger in the first two chapters, the work becomes more 31 May 1985: 347 readable, even-handed, and convincing...

...But the writing is sometimes overly sardonic and the argument overstated...

...This limits religious orthodoxy to the cultural symbols of one small segment of humankind, and confines orthopractice to their ways of doing things — as though the historico-cultural and religious experiences of the vast majority in other times and different places had little validity for themselves, and no relevance at all for that small segment...

...An example given by the author: "An immediate, 'personal' rapport with Jesus and God by psychic acts transpiring within our intentionality is what we rightly call paganism, fetishism.'' This is so, argues Boulaga, because we human beings can relate to God, the unfathomable mystery and ground of all reality, only through the historically and culturally created "mediations and processes that really constitute us as persons...

...The author's criticism of what he calls, among other things,' 'neocolonial Christianity" in Africa is well-founded, richly deserved, and relentless...

...As the mystery of the Incarnation suggests, our real encounters with the living God are always and only through our encounters with other living persons during our own brief historical moment within a circumscribed cultural situation...

...Fetishism localizes "the holy," "the sacred," "the divine...

...Is this rhetoric to be taken more seriously than their perennial proclamations of esteem for African cultures...

...it encapsulates ' 'the truth'' in the terms of one historical moment...

...But there are increasing numbers of believers who do not ' 'practice the faith" — and practicers who do not believe...

...This is why the Christian churches in Africa still resemble nothing so much as Western spiritual colonies...