In Africa, the missionary tables have turned

African Anglicans are imposing on the West, not the other way around.

By Jonathan Zimmerman

from the March 1, 2007 edition

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NEW YORK - Hey, the Africans are trying to impose their culture on us!

That's what Episcopalians in the United States are saying about last month's summit in Tanzania, where global Anglican leaders urged Americans to bar homosexuals from becoming bishops and to stop blessing same-sex unions. As The New York Times reported, Episcopalian leaders – who now face a Sept. 30 deadline to comply – condemned "meddling" foreigners for "imposing their culture and theological interpretations on the American church." (The US Episcopal Church is a member of the worldwide Anglican Communion.)

In a sense, the Americans are right. Episcopalians in this country shade to the left, in theology as well as politics, while their African brethren tend to be more conservative. So it's not surprising that the African leaders would oppose gay marriage, or that they would demand that the entire Anglican Communion do the same.

But here's what is surprising, in light of history: It's the Africans who are imposing on the West, not the other way around.

For nearly 500 years, Christians from Europe and the Americas tried to foist their own language, culture, and religion upon Africa. But in the past few decades, the tables have turned.

To understand why, we need to return to the era immediately following World War II. As anticolonial movements swept Africa, sympathetic Western missionaries began to question the arrogant and ethnocentric assumptions that had marked so much Christian effort on the continent.

Decrying prior campaigns to "civilize" the Africans, liberals from the West substituted the language of culture. Every people had a culture, the argument went; no culture was inherently better or worse than another, hence Westerners should take special care to respect and even defend the cultures they encountered in Africa.

But how could you preserve African culture, even as you converted Africans to your own religion? For some missionaries, the answer lay in new syncretic forms of worship that fused indigenous traditions to Christian doctrine. For many Western liberals, however, the rise of the culture concept cast the entire missionary endeavor into doubt.

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