AND THEY CHOOSE ANIMISM INSTEAD OF CHRISTIANITY

Antoine Rutayishire, a Rwandan pastor who survived the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi minority of the 1990s, writes in his book Faith Under Fire: Testimonies of Christian Bravery "Before the massacres, no one would have believed that such a thing could happen in a country like Rwanda. Tucked just south of Uganda, west of Tanzania, north of Burundi and east of Zaire, this beautiful green and hilly land was considered one of the most Christian in Africa, with 90% of the population calling themselves either Roman Catholic or Protestant."

One of the most Christian countries in Africa? By what standard? Were family units, village and city life, schools and universities, local and national governmental agencies saturated with a life-system uniquely Christian?

"The 1991 census showed that 89.6% of the population was Christian with 62% belonging to the Roman Catholic Church and the rest of the Protestant Churches. In Protestant circles, Rwanda was equally known as the cradle of 'the eastern Africa revival.'"

The Cradle of the Eastern African Revival? What revival? What constitutes a revival? Over one million people were massacred. Were the 20% who did not call themselves Christian solely responsible for the violence? What was the standard for measuring conversions? According to Rutayishire, it was “European culture and concepts.”

"The period between 1927 and 1942 marked this progressive conquest of the ‘Christian kingdom in the heart of Africa’, actualization of the long dream of the founders of the missionary societies...When you read carefully the excerpts of missionary reports, there is no single mention of conversion, repentance, obedience to God’s laws; the elation is about ‘conversion to European culture and concepts.’"

Herein is another example of the religious fixation upon Modern, measurable means to validate or invalidate spirit. It was the same sacred-secular view of reality that hindered the Chinese church from stabilizing and growing: an emphasis upon an ambiguous spirituality and a "sacred" disregard for the physical world.

The collective results of 20th century missionary efforts were1) the exportation of Modernism, and 2) the simultaneous destruction of the native fabric of Third World culture. In other words, not only did this Modern form of missionarying give nothing to illustrate its authenticity by giving the culture something measurable, something tangible it could grap onto, but it also eroded what was already unique to that culture.

Keep in mind that of much native culture was targeted for annihilation by the Christian West because it was not compatible with Modernism. In the end, what did the native have that was uniquely his own? Nothing. Cannot Christianity have as many valid expressions as there are cultures, or is it uniquely American? Wherever the secular-sacred distinction takes hold, it tends to produce the same bland, monolithic culture in which 1) there is a philosophical disregard for the physical world (including international, national and regional culture) and 2) there is the destruction of what was already there (pagan or non-Christian culture).

In Cry the Beloved Country Alan Paton is speaking about Western culture through the African John Kumalo:

"I do not say that we are free here. I do not say that we are free as men should be. But at least I am free of the chief. At least I am free of an old and ignorant man, who is nothing but a white man’s dog. He is a trick, a trick to hold together something that the white man desires to hold together."

Modernism not only provided the false aspiration of superior culture , but it also destroyed any semblance of covenants the native had to his tribe. By the time Modernism took its toll on the African male during this period, any covenantal duties he previously had to the tribe were smashed. What was left?

"'But it is not being held together', he said. 'It is breaking apart, your tribal society. It is here in Johannesburg that the new society is being built. Something is happening here, my brother.'"

In the end, animism was preferable to Modern Christian culture. And that is exactly where the POMO is.

SACRED-SECULAR ABSURDITY

The sacred-secular distinction has played itself out in discomforting ways during my education career even, my problem largely being with zealously religious families. I will ferret out that their children are not as upright as the parents have showcased them to be and will discover, say, a drug addiction, deep-rooted lying, or a sexual deviance to name a few. And you know what parents will tell me the very next day?

"Oh, we talked with our child, and you WILL see a difference today. We talked for hours, we prayed, we cried, and she really has changed. The Spirit of God was REALLY at work." I will smile and tell the parents I am very hopeful, but then I will say something like this:

"Insofar as your child's interaction with drugs, did you call the numbers your son was texting to find out who his suppliers are? Did you tell the youth leaders at church the names of the kids who are doing drugs with your daughter? Did you get your daughter drug-tested and would you furnish me the results? Are you still giving your son large sums of cash for allowance? Did you take your daughter's license away so that she can't drive?"

"Insofar as your child's lying, what gives you cause to believe your son is sincere? Did you check up on whether or not your daughter actually was at church last night or at a friend's house? Why did you give your son four hours of unsupervised free time with his friends after you told me you were going to monitor him?"

"Insofar as your child's promiscuity, did you or are you going to get your boy tested for STDs? Are you still going on that trip today and leaving your daughter home all weekend? Did you turn off your son's phone service perrmanently? Do you think that your own infidelity has anything to do with this? Are you monitoring your daughter's Internet use? Does your daughter still have cable TV in her room?"

Nine times out of ten, do you know how these families will respond? They will preach at me. They will tell me that I don't understand teenagers, or I don't understand forgiveness, or I don't understand what it is like for them, or I don't understand faith, or I need to come to their church where the truth is being spoken and learn from their pastor, or they will give me some asinine reference from Scripture that allows them to remain in this sacred-secular fantasy. However, when their "special" child commits the same offense again and again, the parent will shell out thousands of dollars for drug rehab, for intensive counseling, or sometimes they will give up their child altogether when they could have shut their mouths and looked at the total reality in the first place.

This example serves to underscore how you cannot show-case authenticity, and it is equally absurd to apply this thinking to areas of spirituality or missionarying (even though mission organizations/mission brokers expect periodic, measurable evidence). You can count the members of a church and end up with a number, but you cannot count the number of authentic Christians in that church. You can measure the authentic Christian influence of that church bythe volume of its various relationships to the community (the highest marks given to its ultimate indispensability), but you cannot tout that means as exclusively sacred.

"But with the falling out of three global empires—the Chinese, Russian, and American—who will now guide the emerging global culture? What will be at the core of the culture of the twenty-first century? Would it be raw, selfish materialism? Or will the gospel of Jesus Christ take its rightful place at the heart of the new cultural synthesis that is now emerging? That is the question."

When Ling uses the word "materialism", do not mistake him for meaning an infatuation with material possesions. He means a worldview emphasis upon the material with material as the validating factor of every portion of reality. According to Ling, Third World culture was “ready for harvest” because they were more easily susceptible to the appeal of Christianity than the Modern because they already subscribed to a deity of some sort. I know that this is a harsh thing to say, but it is true. However, as Samuel Ling cogently ascertains, back of the esoteric nature of Western missionary endeavors was materialism, which means that, though a genuine sentiment to “reach the lost” existed, the framework for reaching the “lost” was absent deity (authentic demonstration) and to be found in statistical averages, probability factors, and a mechanistic view of cause-and-effect.

THE MARGINALIZATION OF THE THIRD WORLD THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY MISSIONARY MOVEMENT

The Third World was the Modern Christian's ally, especially during the 20th century. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, the Christian had more in common with the Third World native who offered animal sacrifice and genuflexed to his ancestors than he did with the average Modern who owned a television or subscribed to the New York Times. Both were brothers in that they both subscribed to deity.

I do not believe one can properly understand the marginalization of the Third World unless one understands the marginalization of Western Christianity, because the marginalization of the Third World hinged upon the marginalization of Christianity. The scientific West dubbed Christianity inferior because of the grapple-hold “superstition” had upon it. You could not be taken too seriously outside the religious demographic if you did not subscribe to a materialistic (beginning with matter), logical construct.

What the Christian did not realize was that the Modern considered the Christian to be equally superstitious to the Third World "savage." In other words, the Arabic tribal chief, the Haitian witch doctor, the Gypsy fortune-teller, the Hindu psychic, and the Christian fundamentalist pastor were all related because they all subscribed to the existence of an amaterial entity who was the Final Reality.

Had the average Christian realized this, the fervor with which he pursued missions overseas would have been 1) greatly diminished overseas and increased within the West or 2) rapidly streamlined overseas to convert and to strategically develop the entire Third World nations in order to create a formidable ally against the materialistic West. As it went, religious faith was increasingly rendered a subculture in the Western Hemisphere during the 19th and 20th centuries. Again, had the Modern Christian understood his chief enemy to be against deity of any sort, then he would have seen the Third World nations as a strategic ally to some level.

Much of the 20th century missionary movement was transfixed upon China, Africa & the Far East.Why? For all the focus the Western Church put upon these regions, Modernism provided the framework for most, if not all, Western interaction with these nations. Samuel Ling, author of The Chinese Way of Doing Things, says that despite American missionary efforts in the 20th century, the Chinese Church had to start over after 1900, 1927, 1937, 1949, and 1960 because the cultural institutions were not strategically targeted and substantially changed.

"Dwight Moody’s revival called thousands of American and British university student’s to go overseas to 'evangelize this world in our generation,' but the Gospel brought to China, India, and Africa was often an anti-intellectual and anti-theological gospel. The result was that the Chinese church and Chinese theological education suffered; we have inherited a second-rate model of ministerial training and an anti-culture stance." (SAMUEL LING)

That "partial" view of Christianity that says God is not Lord over everything was in many cases the foundational impetus for overseas evangelism. The Christian consensus (at least in America) thought the world to be divided into regions of sacred and secular, so it attempted to "make" Jesus Lord in those parts of the world absent "Christianized" culture and devoid of the Christian message, respectively. "The uttermost parts of the earth" functionally meant those cultures that were "backward" in relation to Western.

Samuel Ling's complaint is not that missionarying was happening or that the Chinese were necessarily being patronized. His problem was that the paradigm in which the missionary effort was being executed followed the dictates of the sacred-secular distinction which was uniquely Modern. It was interested in individual salvation experiences and not in measurable, cultural advancement. The missionary movement exported a [Modern] culture Ling calls “second-rate.”

"What about the twenty-first century? Are we ready to move on beyond the 'starting over again' phase, to build something more mature and more permanent, something which bears a meaningful relationship to our social context (global culture) and to history?" (SAMUEL LING)

By “meaningful relationship” Ling means that which does not see life in artificial portions of sacred and secular. You cannot develop a "sacred" idea unless it has a "secular" expression. How do you measure the success of Christian conversions? You don't and you can't anymore than you can measure love or hate. You can demonstrate its integrity by the influence it has in measurable areas, namely, in the area of ethics, but you cannot have "hundreds accepting Christ" and think that something was truly done. You have no proof other than "evidences" in the physical world.

ATHEISM & THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789

The atheistic inheritance of the West comes down to us directly through the French Revolution of 1789. Originally, the French Revolution stood against the oppression of the masses by the aristocracy. The aristocracy, however, was backed by the Church. So the Revolution stood against the authority of the Pope. However, it did not differentiate between sacred tradition and the revelation of Scripture. The Revolution lumped together the traditions of the Church (which are finite) and the authority of the Bible (which is infinite). Because the Revolution believed both the Church hierarchy and the Bible to be the source for all of the inequality in the world, it would not allow the Church or the Bible to provide answers for its problems.

It is correct to say that the French Revolution was a revolution against inequalities. However, those inequalities were not fundamentally social, economic, or racial inequalities. The Revolution superimposed the social inequality or injustice in the world due to abnormality by sin upon the material, created order. In a nutshell, t wrongly attributed the abnormality by sin to the order of creation.

So the Revolution did not properly distinguish sinful divisions from intrinsic distinctions. The inherent distinctions determine how the world works like the Circadian rhythms of evening and morning, spiral-cyclical motion of six days work one day rest, lunar and menstrual rhythms, and the general trend from birth to maturation, ignorance to wisdom, immaturity to maturity. However, these rhythms belonged to the "old" order that the Revolution rejected because of its association with sacred tradition and Scripture.

Without intending it, the Revolution warred against the concept of a transcendent God Who created his own distinctions in nature because He wanted to do it and not because He had to do it. By tinkering with these intrinsic rhythms, it began to dismantle the universe. For a while, even, the Revolution changed the seven-day week because of its direct association with the Church calendar and the Biblical account of creation.

By “distinctions in nature,” I mean that God created dogs, trees and water, and they are all distinguishable as themselves. That is a very different thing than chauvinism, vertigo and cancer cells: distortions of the created order. The problem with the Revolution was that it did not just want to find a cure for chauvinism, for vertigo or for cancer: it wanted to find a cure for the dog, for the tree, and for the water.