Towards an Indigenous African Orthodoxy

The amazingly prolific Fr Dn Steve Hayes writes about inculturation, interculturality, cross-fertilization, and the indigenization of Christianity in Africa on his Khanya blog, which I sometimes keep an eye on. His thoughts there evoke some of my own regarding this issue and Orthodoxy in particular, so I submit them with a good deal of trepidation (you might see why) here. I invite comments!

In my experience, some people in Africa actually seem interested in Orthodoxy on some level, almost despite what we're actually doing. I have a godson in Uganda who stumbled across our church on his own, and for some considerable time before I came there, had been attending our services because "liked the way we worship". He didn't (and doesn't) have much sense of any differences between us and the "Protestant" (Anglican) church he'd grown up in, nor between us and the Catholics down the road; he just likes our services and has decided that he "wants to worship in that way." But he wasn't from the same tribe as everyone else there, so it never occurred to him, much less to anyone in the church that he might ever want to join, even after he'd very faithfully attended for several years. (So much for our "mission"!) But I think he was kind of unusual. Now, it's important to realize that he's a serious guy, and I have tremendous respect for him, but he's never struck me as a particularly pious sort of person— he's never shown any interest in the priesthood, for example; his aspirations are rather what we might characterize as "solidly middle class". But he's quite sure he wants to be Orthodox.

Well, his brother had some trouble last year in school. As he put it, "[a] guy who is his classmate comes from a family that practices witchcraft. [My brother] was always the best performer in class [but] because of jealousy and envy [that guy] applied some kind of charm/witchcraft on him.... at times when he goes to read, he sees like 4 to 5 books in front of him and yet he carries only one book to read. Those weird things disturb him at night and he is not in peace at school. He was in tears while elaborating for me the story; it was like he didn’t like to remember those funny things that were happening to him." And he failed his exams.

So I wrote back and urged him not to take his brother to a traditional healer ("witch doctor", one who deals with witchcraft-caused issues) to solve the problem, and offered some suggestions about prayer etc. He wrote back, "I DON’T at all believe in witchcraft/traditional healer NEITHER have I ever visited a traditional doctor since I was born. Family/clan, my culture, tribe and I DON’T at all believe in witchcraft. I am a Christian who does not believe in such backward ideology. I have two physicians in my life one is JESUS CHRIST and the second is a scientist who prescribes for me what medicines to take. Anyway the guy who tried to harm him is not in fact [from our tribe but from another] known for such acts, who also do things like wizards. [My brother] got sick from school by a wicked classmate who was not hardworking and wanted to ruin his future with his barbaric act because of his intelligence."

So... interesting: witchcraft is a "backward ideology"— but it's definitely real, and it's powerful. I have come not to doubt this, even though I find myself instictively wanting to argue that magic really "doesn't exist", that it's "just superstition", and that his brother just needs to just "get tough" and "get over it". Well, I've been around long enough to know that's not quite the answer but, after all, my long training in Western Rationalism isn't going to disappear any faster than someone else's fear of witchcraft!

But my point is this: Here is an "African worldview" that Orthodoxy actually traditionally has a good deal to say about, but most of us Orthodox Western Rationalists aren't too aware of what that is, and are simply not equipped to say it. Sooo... what does the Orthodoxy we are bringing to Africa actually represent, in a world where witchcraft is real, and we can say almost nothing about it except to offer the solace of Enlightened rationalism? We're not really dealing with the problem; we're offering mostly another bridge to the world of "scientists who prescribes what medicines to take".

Well, not everyone is as clear as my godson about not wanting to get involved in traditional witch doctoring. There were instances of "possession" in the church's secondary school in Kampala, and the bishop's own driver, it turns out, was particulary skilled at talking to the spirits and finding out what they wanted and how to make them go away. It might need a white chicken, or a goat, or some other sacrifice.... So... what is "Orthodoxy" when it exists quite apart from that world and doesn't really even challenge it?

I don't know how things are in South Africa, but again, in my own experience in Uganda, perhaps a great percentage of people had become Orthodox because they hoped to get school fees or some other kinds of assistance from Greece or America. And certainly, there are priests who induce people to join by holding out such promises to them. One priest friend of mine once told his brothers, 'You will all take off your collars when the money dries up.' They just kept quiet; they knew what he was saying. Ambitious young men perceive the church as a means of getting "out" (out of poverty; out of Africa). Yes, they will likely remain "members of the Orthodox Church" when they succeed, but we can wonder what they have understood about the body of Christ and the need to build up their local community. But whether people have hopes of gain or not— to be honest, no one is being catechized, and church life is effectively nil. When even the service books are not yet translated, certainly they are not yet explained, or really even understood, by the priests themselves. What is Orthodoxy when there are almost no services, no teaching, and no community? What are we spreading, when we go for numbers but not for quality?

"Orthodoxy" sometimes seems to have more to do with institutional allegiance (one that turns out to be quite flexible, when you probe it a bit), than with any deep conviction of Truth, much less with any deep commitment to a particular practice discipline. In actual fact, we subscribe to, and teach, the same civic and religious platitudes that the other churches have jointly and ecumenically authored into the government-issued Christian Religious Education (CRE) program that's taught in all the schools.

In other words, among Africans, Orthodoxy largely strikes me as simply a choice, often if not usually for one or more of a number of extraneous reasons, to attend a Greek-style church. That church typically stands near a village of grass huts, and is perhaps attractive because it's more conveniently located than its competitors. It was built with Greek or American money, often by a Greek or American team; it bears the name of an obscure local Greek saint, and was consecrated by a Greek bishop who came one day with a Greek entourage, in a Greek-language ceremony at which the people were passive observers or, to be honest, mostly only props. The whole thing seems strangely naive and even narcissistic. What services we offer are effectively the same as those of other churches— baptisms, "prayers", burials. To be sure, this Greek entity represents... well, they always tell me, "original Christianity". And they actually believe it to be so, and we are happy to let them believe it; in fact, this is the main point of what minimal catechesis we do— not them; us! We're the original church! —But really, this 20th century institutional Orthodoxy isn't quite the same as "original Christianity", is it? And what we're actually doing in Africa isn't really what the original church did in Greece, is it? And we don't quite (!) talk to the Africans about their own culture, do we?

I was very puzzled by the whole phenomenon. After a couple of years, my seminarians began to relax with me and I discovered that their religious and spiritual viewpoint was formed by the "deep structures" of their native traditions, far more than by any kind of Christianity they'd encountered, much less by Orthodoxy, which was rather new to most of them anyway. Of course, much of that "deep structure" was quite inarticulate and vague, since colonialism has largely wiped out the practice of their traditional culture, and aids and malaria and whatnot have mostly wiped out what few storytellers are left. But what they had were strong attitudes and assumptions and orientations, largely without "doctrinal" or explicit mythic content— in fact, they were often articulated in quasi christian terms that were actually unrelated to anything in the Bible. One has only to look at attitudes regarding death and the dead to see this. I think that's why pentecostalism is so attractive in Africa— it saddles people with few dogmatic demands, but interlocks quite well with practical local concerns about health and prosperity— and life after death (a concern imported from 19th-20th century Christianity more than anything else, and grafted on to notions about the ancestors).

Isn't our approach to "mission" (how I hate that word!) quite as colonialist as that of the 19th-century Europeans? To be sure, we "Greeks" are not in a position to conquer and exploit, like western Europe did. Our very lack of colonial history and power makes us attractive to Africans who have connected in some way with Jesus— even if it's not quite clear that we wouldn't have exploited them, if we'd had the chance. But seriously, isn't it still colonialism when America's Ocmc seeks to send "an army of missionaries" into the world to "gain converts" and "expand" the Church into new territories hitherto "unconquered" by "Christ"? Does the fact that Byzantium, the empire in whose name we come, is already over and done with make our 'Byzantine' missionary endeavors any less imperialistic (even if they're virtual rather than economic) than those of the 19th century Anglicans and French?

The customs and compromises that have grown up in all the churches regarding marriage provide another glimpse of the issues. In Africa, marriage seems first of all to be a union of families and of clans, rather than of individuals (although this is changing). People are poor and families are hard-pressed, but young men are still obligated to pay a pretty hefty bride-price when they want to get married. But because the price is so hefty, the couple usually lives together without marriage for a number of years, and may even have several children, before the traditional wedding can take place. Now, by custom, the church wedding (both betrothal and crowning) is not celebrated till after the bride-price has been paid, the union accepted, and the traditional wedding has taken place. What is the relationship of the the betrothal and crowning to the traditional wedding? And if the couple can't go to communion until after the church wedding (because they're 'living in sin'), what is the place of their very real union (with children!) in the eucharistic community of the Church? What are we signaling by such arrangements about the relationship of the Church to the culture?

More broadly, how does Africa, as such, encounter the Good News? Or has it encountered the Good News... or only something called "the church"? How should/would an encounter with God's Good News— the news of what God was doing in the world, in his Messiah— impact the traditional understanding of marriage, family, clan?

I was constantly driven by my experience and by my students to ask, What was the power of those events that took place in first-century Palestine, and how can we convey it to people in 21st-century Africa? (This presupposes that we've encountered it ourselves, of course.) Our usual treatment of the scriptures as a compendium of disconnected tales that we are to allegorize as teachings about ethics mostly only serves the further superimposition of European views— including Western Rationalism— on Africa. The current hysteria over homosexuality in some parts— a hysteria of which Orthodoxy in the West is itself not free— is an excellent case in point. Our moralistic allegories ensure that Orthodoxy will quite firmly be placed in the framework of government-sponsored CRE religion at best, and otherwise of traditional ideas and attitudes which have never even heard of Christ. The fact that we quote Chrysostom more than Barth doesn't mitigate this or change the framework.

And suppose people actually do connect with the encounter that is attested in the scriptures. How do we get, in Africa, from that initial encounter with God's Good News (which seems in many ways to remain yet unaccomplished) to the Liturgies of Ss Basil and John and the teachings of the seven Councils? Especially when we are rapidly moving from a time when the church wedding is a kind of consumeristic Western add-on to the traditional wedding, complete with elaborate gowns and videotaping, celebrated privately and apart from the eucharistic synaxis— to a time when, due to urbanization, cultural breakdown, and loss of tradition, African weddings will be as individualistic, western, and consumeristic as they are in the West, and still without reference to a eucharistic community that hardly exists anyway? Is individualistic, Orthodox-style consumerism the "Orthodoxy" we want?

I'm not saying anything special about Africa, by the way. I think exactly the same issues have faced us from the very day of Pentecost, and have become especially acute, mutatis mutandis, in both Europe and America (not to mention Russia and Greece) today. It's only that in Africa the contrasts are higher and therefore the image is perhaps a little more sharp.

Which is why I love Africa: it makes you recognize what is really important, and to face up to it!