The Fallacy of World Religions: A View from Africa

by Jim Harries

Teaching world religions to African students in Kenya gradually became a strange experience. I say gradually, because in my earlier years of teaching I did not seem to realize what was happening.

Teaching world religions to African students in Kenya gradually became a strange experience. I say gradually, because in my earlier years of teaching I did not seem to realize what was happening.

As the years went by, I perceived that my students were having to go through significant mental acrobatics to grasp what I was saying. I was teaching (and I had no choice but to do this) world religions as understood by westerners to students who were not westerners. The way I taught world religions, in other words, is not at all the way in which students would themselves understand the practices of adherents of the ‘religions’ I was describing should they have met them.

I had a similarly unexpected experience when I taught African Traditional Religions. Initially, it was considered that this ‘special’ course (the course on African Traditional Religion somehow seemed ‘special’ when taught at a theological college in Africa) should be taught by an African member of staff.

For some reason, however, I was asked to teach it. Feeling it a privilege, I made a lot of effort to research the course in advance. I drew on my ten years’ experience of having lived in Africa and engaging closely with African people. I put together a syllabus that drew widely on literature around the topic.

Seeking to Understand

In subsequent years, others were asked to teach that course, many of them Africans. What surprised me was the frequency with which those Africans would approach me, requesting my teaching notes to help them teach African Traditional Religions. When I looked at the syllabus, I found that they had appropriated many of the materials that I had put together. This struck me as strange. Why should African teachers follow my example when teaching their own traditions to their own students?

Subsequent to the above, I had yet another experience. While teaching part time at the same American-led Bible college in western Kenya, I was at the same time engaging with local Christian contexts, including indigenous churches. In the course of doing this, I learned two local languages—Swahili and Luo.

My ministry outside of the Bible college came to be almost exclusively in these two languages. In due course, I began to have difficulties back at the English-language speaking college. It was as if I could no longer express myself accurately to the African students using English.

I had to realize that although our students had spent years faithfully learning English, their English was rooted differently than mine. When I spoke English, as someone born and raised in the U.K., the terms, phrases, and sentences I used were (in my mind) linked to contexts back in England with which my students were unfamiliar.

At the same time, I could see that the students were drawing on African contexts in their use of English. As a result of my community involvement outside of the Bible college, I was gradually learning some of those African contexts. I was realizing that those African contexts were very different from the contexts with which I had been familiar in England. I desired to communicate with African students through a context familiar to them, but I could not do so in English.

Communicating in English became like a game in which I had to tell half-truths (to say things that I knew my students weren’t going to understand, and to not say things that I perceived that they could understand).

Beginning to Understand

A book on the history of world religions by Tomoko Masuzawa has helped me to understand my predicament. Masuzawa helpfully explains some of the historical origins of today’s discipline of world religions. The list of eleven or so world religions with which we are familiar today were not always there. In fact, before the advent of world religions, four categories were widely used: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and ‘others’ or pagan religions (Masuzawa 2005, 47).

In the early years of the twentieth century, suddenly there were more. Masuzawa explains the different ways in which westerners who began to travel the world and colonize distant shores sought to comprehend the beliefs and practices of their new subjects. These, at least as far as English-speaking Brits were concerned, had been raised as Protestants. They expected that other people in other parts of the world would also be ‘religious’. Their expectation was not disappointed. Their ‘model’ of what constituted ‘religion’ was their own Protestantism.

Hence, when they traveled the world, they sought for similarities in other people to what they themselves believed. In many ways, this was a very natural thing to do.

British colonialists (and colonialists from other European nations) who traveled the world sought to understand other people, sometimes in order to work out how best to govern them. Instead of introducing lock stock and barrel (the systems of governance with which they were already familiar at home), they wanted to make sure that their work had a ‘fit’ to the new context.

Certainly, Africans know their own ways of life very well. What they do not always know so well is how to translate that way of life into ways of expression that will satisfy westerners.

This process is explained by Geetanjali Srikantan (2015) in respect to Hinduism in India. Hindu legal systems, Srikantan explains, were created by British people for India. They ‘created’ them in the process of applying their own familiar reasoning rooted in centuries of Christianity and Protestantism to the less familiar contexts they were meeting in India.

When these British colonialists of bygone years came across disputes and quasi legal cases among Indian people, they attempted to standardize and regularize their outcome in ways they had been used to doing in the very Christian U.K., but based on some supposedly indigenous categories.

Hence, Hindu law was ‘invented’ to be a part of Hindu religion. Hindu law was modeled on a British legal system that had developed out of the Church, and was now adapted to India. Hindu law was made up of the kinds of principles that guided Western Protestantism, now applied to something that came to be known as Hinduism (Masuzawa 2005, 133).

Masuzawa tells us that similar things happened with respect to Buddhism. There was no Buddhism waiting for westerners to discover. Rather, in discovering things about what they later called Buddhism, westerners invented Buddhism the world religion—which resembled Christianity, the world religion (Masuzawa 2005, 121-146)!

It is small wonder that my African students in Kenya had to do mental acrobatics in order to understand what I was telling them about world religions given all that history connected to the West, of which they were really not a part. Meanwhile, what they did get was that other ‘world religions’ seemed to closely resemble in many ways the Christianity that we as missionaries were bringing to them. (This, by the way, tended to emphasize the ‘backwardness’ of their own traditions if they were explained in a less Christian way.)

Finally Understanding the Discrepancy

Thinking further about the issue, I looked at what was happening in the design of courses in African Traditional Religion. Certainly, Africans know their own ways of life very well. However, what they do not always know so well is how to translate that way of life into ways of expression that will satisfy westerners. They not only had to get their grammar right and have a sufficient vocabulary, but also had to articulate their own beliefs to others so as to satisfy westerners’ perceptions of what African traditional beliefs were.

All that is a formidable task, involving considerable risk. If a teacher got it ‘wrong’, he or she would be wasting the time of students who were preparing for examinations that were aligned to Western /American thinking. The easiest way out for Africans teaching African Traditional Religions was to model their syllabus on what had already been taught by a westerner. They already had to use books that were written by westerners, or at least books written by Africans in a Western language that also had to be written in such a way as to satisfy westerners in order to get published, distributed, and read!

I was beginning to understand the difficulty I was having in communicating with African students using English. How could I expect African students to construct essays using a language which had roots with which they were so unfamiliar? It was much safer for them to rote learn what they were being told and were reading in the books than to try to design their own accounts and to be marked down for poor grammar, poor use of vocabulary, poor sense, and not writing in such a way as to communicate clearly to westerners.

Insistence on the use of English in formal settings was in effect forcing African people to reinvent their own ‘religion’ in a quasi-Western way.

Insistence on the use of English in formal settings was in effect forcing African people to reinvent their own ‘religion’ in a quasi-Western way.

I was recently caused to think more deeply about the world’s ‘religions’. Some have suggested that African religion should be classified as a ‘world religion’.

But, I had come to realize that African religion, as articulated in English, was a peculiarly Western product, and a peculiarly Christian product: missionaries coming to Africa expected African religion to fulfill a role in African people’s lives that was equivalent to the role filled in their own lives by Christianity. They then expected to substitute the ‘new’ Christianity for those old traditions in order to bring about a transformed way of life.

But this was not only happening in Africa. Similar things were happening in Asia and elsewhere. That is, many people’s traditions were being formalized directly or indirectly by westerners to the extent that they could effectively be compared and contrasted with Western Protestantism. What are the further implications of this process?

Another ‘religion’ being modeled on Protestantism, yet not being Protestantism as such, must according to strict Christian Protestantism be considered doctrinally wrong. In effect, by modeling other religions on Protestantism but rooting them other than in Christ (but in various people’s traditions), missionaries seemed to be playing party with colonialists in inventing religions that were set up to be in a kind of ‘opposition’ to Christianity!

Had those religions already been there before the missionaries and colonialists came along, then we might say, “Fair enough, now we know what we are dealing with.” Instead, I was discovering that Western people were responsible for inventing religions in the first place, and inventing them so as to resemble Christianity!

It was as if westerners had been creating systems designed to resist the very gospel message of Jesus that they were trying to share!

Discovering Openness to the Gospel

I began to perceive this in other ways as I continued my engagement with people in the community around the Bible college.

I found a lot of people to be surprisingly open to the gospel. Coming from the West, I had expected them to resist an outside intrusion by a ‘foreign’ religion. Instead, the good news of Jesus was very much desirable to them, whenever I could approach people on their own terms. I found that there was another world going on below the surface of formal Western education and languages. People’s traditions have not gone, disappeared, or even been surpassed. This is largely because the foreign things coming along in English were so foreign to them. Aside from the accruements arising from Western inputs, however, there was a functioning way of understanding and perceiving the world running slightly under the surface. (Actually, it was not under the surface at all; it only appeared to be under the surface for those who were confined to the use of English.)

That world running under the surface was very open to gospel inputs. The people operating in that world were not satisfied with their ‘religion’.

Rather, their tradition was limited; it did not claim to answer all questions for them. It was eclectic, and actively seeking for new ‘help’ and for inputs from outside itself! When I came along and sought to share God’s words with people from the Bible in their language, they were often very open to listening.

No wonder that it felt strange to teach African students in Kenya world religions as ‘invented’ by westerners; it was as if I was teaching them that Shintoism and Confucianism are kinds of Christianity!

This made me wonder: Could missionaries, through use of English associated with their own ‘religious’ background, be inventing formalized religions that are designed to resist the very kinds of new things that the gospel intends to introduce?

Perhaps the most surprising thing in all this is the way Protestant Christianity has been, and continues to be, foundational to so many world religions. It is as if Christianity is the blueprint on which they have all been modeled. No wonder that it felt strange to teach African students in Kenya world religions as ‘invented’ by westerners; it was as if I was teaching them that Shintoism and Confucianism are kinds of Christianity!

If Christianity was the blueprint, or the basis of which other religions have been ‘designed’, how can the two be compared? Can you compare a building with a blueprint? To call other world religions ‘religions’ seems to be suspect. There is only one ‘religion’—that is, faith in Christ. Other religions (Islam and Judaism may be considered a little differently) are actually systems set up, it seems, to resist Christianity.

No wonder dialogue with world religions seems peculiar; it can be shadow-boxing! When one dialogues with members of other world religions using European languages, one can very easily find oneself being fed the very things that Europeans originally taught those people to adopt as their ‘religion’.

Perhaps even more significantly, although world religions may have been designed by Christianity to resist Christianity, the people in those religions might not truly own them. That feature of resistance to Christianity is not, in other words, at all indigenous. When reached where they are, still engaged in ancient traditions mediated by their own languages, people may be very open to the gospel.

References

Asad, Talal, 2002, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category.” In A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Ed. Michael Lambeck, 115-132. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Masuzawa, Tomoko, 2005. The Invention of World Religions: How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. London: University of Chicago Press.

Srikantan, Geetanjali. 2015. “Secularisation and Theologisation Examining the Inner Dynamics behind the British Colonial Encounter with “Hindu Law.” Journal of Law, Religion and State 4:49-95.

Editor’s note: The “Moving Beyond Post-colonial Dependency: Developing Sustainability Through Vulnerability” conference, sponsored by the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission, will be held November 8-11, 2017, at Trinity School for Ministry near Pittsburgh, PA. Many of the issues raised in this article will be discussed during the conference. Details can be found at vulnerablemission.org.

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Jim Harries (PhD) has served as a theological educator in Kenya since 1988. He teaches in a variety of churches, including indigenous churches, using the Luo and Swahili languages. Jim chairs the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission.

EMQ, Vol. 53, No. 1. Copyright  © 2016 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.  All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.

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