A Crucial Divide

Critical views of Christianity and the part it plays in our present world are not hard to come by. It is worth trying to listen carefully to what they are saying. A Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, gives a harsh caricature of the Church in his own country in his novel, Petals of Blood (London, 1977).

The novel focuses on some poor villagers coming out of the belt of arid scrubland which flanks the fertile highlands around Nairobi. They set out on a pilgrimage to the heart of the capital city, seeking to attract financial and political aid to their own area. There is a poignant encounter when they come to the large house and grounds of a well-known leader of one of the ‘main-line’ churches in the country. He is preoccupied, entertaining some fellow members of the elite, of the same ethnic group as himself. He dismisses the shabby little group at his door with a blessing and a swift farewell.

Here we have the ‘establishment’ on the one hand, and on the other an ‘alternative’ church, a white-robed, singing, dancing, healing ‘prophet-movement’. In this body the poor seem to be at home, and are ministered to as individuals. But in fact they are shown to be manipulated by the same kind of political forces as those which are already sustained by the ‘established’ church structure.

Of course one’s first temptation on reading this is to react against such a manifest distortion and over-simplification. Both images, that of the larger denominational Catholic and Protestant institu­tional churches, and that of the indigenous African Christian movements, are evidently unjust. There are in Kenya effective ‘main-line’ church leaders living and caring simply and fruitfully for the poorer people in their areas.

There are indigenous churches which have long offered a genuinely indepen­dent alternative community life and worship, and which are strengthening their programmes of training and of social responsibility.

Yet there is also something that rings true about Ngugi’s critique. He has put his finger on, or at least near, something that is true of Christianity not only in Kenya, but, as we shall see, in other parts of Africa and all over the world. There is a crucial divide here between two types of Christian life and expression. The first is connected with the rational, businesslike forms of secular, Westernised society. The second is rooted in a romantic, mystically minded, pietistic or pentecostal ‘counter-culture’.

In many societies there has been a divergence be­tween what could be called the official, central cults of the ruling group (usually male) and the more free-ranging, innovative spirituality of noncon­formist underlings (often female). Robin Horton drew attention to this kind of interplay long ago in his studies of the Kalahari of the Niger Delta (e.g. ‘Types of Spirit Possession in Kalahari Religion’ in Beattie and Middleton (eds.), Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa (London, 1969)). Ioan Lewis built up a whole theory of‘ecstatic religion’ on a similar basis (I.M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion (London, 1971)). But the controlling framework in these traditional world pictures was never in doubt. There was an underlying unity within which prophetic or mystical movements could arise, become absorbed into the centre and ‘established’, or just fade away.

What is different about the disintegrated religion depicted by Ngugi is that a radically new type of society, dominated by Westernised economic and political forces, has broken in. It is served by the new educational system required by a new technology. And it brings with it a divided spirit and a divided culture. Here people are swaying between privately held traditional interpretations of life and traditional values, such as prevail in the ‘prophet’ movement, and the publicly accepted, modern, secular atmosphere of a commercial city.

Modem Christianity has been shaped by this conflict, a religion seemingly divided within itself. The tension between head and heart, between the secular style implicit in modem technology and the fragmented habits of thought and practice of a more sacred order inherited from the past, sets in motion an inner strife. It goes back to the first mis­sionaries’ appearance. During the period of the expansion of Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century this conflict has deeply and irreversibly penetrated all faiths and cultures. Indeed, it accounts for the disintegration and the relative numerical decline encountered by every world religion. European Christendom was the first religious world to experience this disintegration. Arguably, it was latent in its whole development.

Yet it could be true that out of world-wide Chris­tianity today there may be emerging the first hint of a reintegration, a healing of the division. Some Christians would claim that this healing has also been latent from the beginning in the heart of their faith. They would see as their calling and opportunity the bringing of a fresh coherence into the broken worlds of all faiths. This coherence would be very different from the spiritual uniformity of the past.

The Expansion and Contraction of Christianity The world-wide spread of Christianity over the last two centuries cannot be attributed to the effects of European political or economic dominance alone. It is rather that European technology, and the form of rationality that accompanied it, created a social and spiritual ferment within which the Christian message and the Church offered a means of interpreting and grappling with new experience.

The growth of Christianity has been a striking phenomenon. David Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopaedia estimates that Christians of all kinds at the beginning of the 1980s numbered 32.8 per cent of the world’s population.

However, in spite of the great numerical increases of almost all kinds of Christians, there has been a gradual numerical decline when these figures are looked at as percentages of the world’s total popula­tion. This is a characteristic of all religions in the second half of the twentieth century. Apparent increases are offset by overall decline. While there is a persistent survival of localised religions that were once thought likely to vanish, there is also evidence of the rise in apparently secularised areas of new religions, cults and sects.

Meanwhile, the growth of Christianity in Latin America, Africa and South and East Asia is amply documented. This new vitality shows signs of effecting a substantial shift in the patterns of Christian life and sensibility which developed during the long period of its exclusive involvement with the culture of Europe.

Over the past few centuries, that culture has become more and more disintegrated—in several different ways. Not only have there been the divisions along national and church lines, but, especially since the eighteenth century, human self-awareness has fragmented.

In Western society the process which is called ‘secu­larisation’ had meant not so much a total loss of religious awareness as a split consciousness. The so-called ‘spiritual’ dimension can become increasingly confined to the inward, the subjective, the private aspects of life.

In North America the culture as a whole may still be imbued with a faint trace of the old New England spirit, reinforced by the revivals of the early nineteenth century and overlaid by the rich variety of religious contributions from a whole collage of fragments of cultures, black or Spanish, Italian, Jewish or East European. But there is a sense even here of jostling competition and variety, in the midst of which any church, even the great traditional churches that in Europe or the East were once the framework of society, becomes one more optional club.

In Britain and Europe, secularisation has eaten its way even further into life. The sense that churches are part of the whole established order of things is increasingly attenuated. Not only is there a dramatic decline in their membership but that membership itself has long been confined, in the urban and industrial north of Europe (apart from Ireland) at least, to the middle class, and is strongest in some parts of the countryside and in the suburbs. Paradoxically it is where such a church is attempting most consciously to renew itself, to strengthen its corporate sense and to modernise its liturgy a little or intensify its worship, that it is most in danger of becoming even more of a withdrawn sect, a club for the converted.

Yet the whole culture is still, in all its aspects, in its arts and science and technology, in its politics, in its sense of history and its self-understanding, in its moral confusion, in its very self-questioning, deeply derived from Christian roots.

A general religious consciousness survives in amaz­ingly persistent varieties of folk religion. There is a fascination in the media with sensational new heresies or religious controversies between conserva­tive and radical, such as the conflict over the ordination of women. Secular­isation itself is supremely a particularly post-Christian phenomenon.

The central areas of political and economic debate and struggle, of art and the performing arts, may seem to be almost defiantly stripped of all spiritual reference, even though Christian intellectuals, artists or scientists may seek to make their own contribution.

But where the Church has genuinely and deeply involved itself in the quest for a new shape to society, where, learning from the poor and disadvantaged, it has succeeded in generally embodying its own distinctive feeling for wholeness, there it is surely pressing its costly way back into the mainstream in a new humbler guise, gently repenetrating the very consciousness it once helped to shape. In this task the Church of the North needs help from the Third World.

Some of the new springs of Christian life, in areas or sectors of society (e.g. the poor of Latin America) less deeply affected by the force of this European heritage, show signs of transcending these divisions and producing new patterns of Christian perception and sensibility.

By contrast, none of the old, Europe-centred churches has been immune from these tensions, which have been exported and have thus had a deeply felt effect also among the Christian intelligentsia of Latin America, Africa and Asia. This heritage finds its expression in the gatherings of the World Council of Churches, while the more spiritualising side of the division finds expression through the activities of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization.

The Roman Catholic Church has also, in its own circumstances, become divided along comparable lines. Under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and the impulse of the Second Vatican Council of1962-5, many, especially laity and members of religious orders in North America and northern Europe, were deeply affected by the ideas and practices of renewal and aggiornamento. But more recently, under Pope John Paul II and his advisers, there has been a pressing back into older patterns. The Rome Synod of 1985 offered a fascinating picture of the success of‘centrists’ in mediating between implacable traditionalism and dangerous radicalism. Meanwhile, Western Christianity, save for the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and southern Europe, has become less and less of a folk religion and more and more of the private, ‘leisure’ pursuit of those attracted to it.