Africa’s Religious Landscape
As the influence of modernity spreads its liberating message, religion will inevitably decline and reside only at the margins of society. So went the maxim popular among the cultured elite in Western societies for much of the twentieth century. If God or the gods were not dead, then they had at last been silenced and religion no longer influenced the social imaginary of the masses.1 At the dawn of the new millennium, the collision of two commercial airliners with two New York towers signaled the collapse of such naïve secularization prophecies. Apparently, religion still mattered to some—even if there was no room for such “superstitions” amidst public discourse.
Of particular irony is that those secular societies are now proving to be laboratories of new religious developments rather than graveyards of religion. This is due in large part to non-Western migration to Europe and North America—many immigrants coming from African countries. For these immigrants, the world is more enchanted, meaning that spiritual realities exist that cannot be known empirically. Amidst these immigrant populations and the cultures from which they come, the gods are not silent and religion touches all facets of human life.2
Turning our attention to religious life in Africa presses us to attend to a diversity of expressions that precludes monolithic descriptions of what particular religions believe and practice. The appropriation of religious beliefs and practices by Africans for African purposes raises the questions whose Islam and which Christianity are we seeking to know?
Historically, Africa was not only a cradle for nascent Christianity—producing such early theologians as Augustine, Tertullian, and Athanasius—it was also the location of the church’s first interaction with Islam in the seventh century. As Dr. John Azumah argues in our featured article, present-day African contexts—where the Church and Islam struggle for peace in the events of everyday life among family and neighbors—are instructive to other parts of the global Church. As the world’s two largest religions continue to vacillate between tolerance and tension,3 proper attention must be given to those contexts where the gods are not silent and African expressions of both Christianity and Islam are extending their vitality and influence to distant lands.
