VAD e.V.

Religious ‘Glocalization’: Versions of Christianity before and after independence

Convenors: Werner Kahl Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. (Hamburg), Eva Youkhana Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. (Bonn)

After the end of colonization, Christianity in Africa has been re-invented. Interestingly, in spite of efforts undertaken by a number of pan-Africanist oriented heads of state of the first generation, to promote African traditional religion (ATR), Christianity has spread rapidly not least because of their intensive links to transnational circuits and the extensive broadcast of their doctrine of salvation. While immediately after independence so called ‘African Independent Churches’ (AIC) offered a more authentic and therefore attractive African version of Christianity the more recent Christian Fundamentalists or Pentecoastal-Charismatic Churches (PCC) have entered a new phase of Christianity by promoting a “complete break with the past” (Meyer 2004). Nevertheless both, the growth and the shift towards Charismatic Christianity, has been due largely to indigenous initiatives.

Dialogue on the role Christianity and the rather new phenomenon of Pentecoastal appropriation play for the formation of African Identity as well as for political decision making processes will help to better understand the dialectics of culture and politics that has influenced and continues to shape societal processes and political dynamics in Africa since independence.

The panel will address both, the relationship between religion and the public sphere on the one hand and between ATR and PCC on the other. The following questions will therefore be tackled:

• Why has the Pentecostal version of Christianity been so attractive and successful in Africa?
• Which strategies are used by PCCs to occupy the public sphere (degree of institutionalization, use of mass media, etc.)?
• Which impacts do the PCCs have on the symbolic structure/arrangements of ‘African cultures’ (revaluation and reconstruction of the natural and socio-cultural environment)?
• To what degree is PCC grounded in, and permeated by ATR?