[Cheese]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Racial restrictions aren't a thing for any religion anymore (except for Hinduism, I suppose). Christianity has seen dramatic growth in Africa, with the Christian population on the continent expected to double by 2050 from 500 million to over 1 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be 60% Christian by 2050.

Although Christianity, couched as it was in western civilisation, brought some relief to Africa in freeing it from some of its woes (albeit, in some cases, only partially - e.g. Africa's belief in witchcraft), there are certain areas in which the religion did serious harm to the African way of life. Notwithstanding missionaries' claims that they were concerned to protect indigenous peoples and their interests, the fact remains that some missionaries at least sought to advance the interests and culture of their colonial masters. Mtuze (2003:2) rightly asserts: "The study shows very clearly that the missionaries, consciously or unconsciously, had a double agenda in that they were also de facto agents of the colonial powers who subjugated the propagation of the Word to cultural and political imperialism." For this reason, much of Africa's ways of life were frowned upon, if not totally demonised. Pityana (1999:137) attests to this: "Christianity declared some African practices pagan and the church was a pervasive influence on family practices." This caused led to a serious identity crisis for many Africans, a crisis that resulted in African self-hatred and self-denigration. The nineteenth century was therefore noted for the emergence and gradual increase of conflict between the two cultures (Mtuze 2003:8).


In later years, black Africans managed to salvage, at massive cost (including death), their self-respect, self-love and pride in their blackness, largely thanks to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa. Partially as a result of this, Africans in South Africa consciously chose and used African, rather than Christian, names (Pityana 1999:138).


Another level at which the impact of Christianity proved to be detrimental was its undermining of women's roles in religious leadership (Miles 2009:1). This happened when Christian assemblies were shifted by Constantine from homes to the basilica, buildings modelled on Roman courthouse (Miles 2009:5). Gaitskell (1983) notes that the missionaries' preferred a model of the family that was as follows: "male breadwinner, dependent housekeeping wife and mother, dependent school-going children". As a result, "this was the family model which female missionaries considered the Christian ideal in the early twentieth century and which they tried to inculcate among the women and girls of the urban black churches ..." (Gaitskell 1983:241). Women were socialised to accept that "a woman who took on the masculine role of participation in public life was considered to have renounced the feminine virtues of silence, reticence, modesty and most significantly, chastity" (Miles 2009:6). Such socialisation drove women to passivity and quiescence in congregational worship, thus perpetuating discrimination against women in the Christian church. It is true to say that, today, women's place in the church remains a contentious issue.

In South Africa, racial discrimination started - appallingly - in the church itself. In the nineteenth century, certain white Dutch Reformed members' discriminatory behaviour and the Dutch Reformed Church's decision, in 1857, to introduce separate Eucharist services severely compromised African human dignity (Cilliers 2013:1). This decision was founded on the demeaning misconception, held by some white missionaries and their masters, that Africans were either sub-human or less than human. Mtuze (2003:1) confirms: "The blatant denial of African religion was coupled with an attitude evinced by some of the colonizers and missionaries that the people they found in Africa and in South Africa in particular were not actually people. They were either subhuman or animals."



http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?...92013000200016