"Africa Needs God"

Quite the interesting article at the UK Times Online.  Author Matthew Parris, an atheist, was raised in Malawi and he's travelled across the African continent.  He visited Malawi just before Christmas.  Parris concludes that Africa needs a Christian God, not just aid money and secular NGOs:

"Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good."

"....There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours"

"I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition."

"....Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates."

"Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted."

"And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete."

Pretty amazing stuff.  It's so refreshing when people speak plainly!  It's all the more moving as the author clearly didn't even want to come to the conclusion that he did, it goes against the accepted "progressive" mindset.  That was brave.

Interesting comments to the original article, one writes that England needs Christian missionaries:

"Couldn't the same be argued for the English sub-classes that have developed as a result of 60 years of socialism?They are totally passive, dependent on the State ,lazy, feckless,promiscuous, no family or work values to speak of. Britain could do with a few missionaries."

Another writes that "Africa needs Christ to save them from the tribe. The west needs Christ to save them from the individual."

Comments

[Sissy Willis]

This is wicked huge. As I've said forever, quoting Oriana Fallaci, "If an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true."

http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2005/06/quoti_am_an_ath.html