Anglicans, North and South

Peter Berger recently analyzed the state of the Anglican communion in The American Interest. The missionaries who were sent to Africa brought a gospel and Victorian morality. They succeeded in converting many in Africa to Christianity, and these converts conformed their lives to the morals the missionaries taught. Now the North has drifted from Victorian puritanism, but the South has not. The success of the Anglican mission to Africa now haunts the former missionaries.

Berger notes that the division is not simply North and South. It exists within the former colonies themselves: “As the Union Jack was ceremonially lowered and the flags of newly independent African nations fluttered in the breeze, the leaders of the resistance movements took over, dressed in business suits and speaking fluent English. . . . the new African elites who celebrated the end of the Victorian Raj had been successfully indoctrinated with Victorian morals—and those turned out to be very functional to poor people trying to get out of poverty (if you will, the Max Weber effect), even if the elite (like elites everywhere) only paid lip service to moral principles while enjoying the hedonism supported by the privileges of power.”

But bishops in Africa are not among the elites. They have no patience for lip-service or hypocracy: “When they uphold good Protestant values, in the best Evangelical tradition, this is no mere lip service—they really mean it! And so the Archbishop of Uganda may by 2019 excommunicate the Archbishop of Canterbury!One way of looking at what is happening here is as an international extension of the American culture war. America is at the heart of the Anglican crisis. It is the Episcopal Church of the U.S. that is specially sanctioned by the angry African bishops; even the Canadians have thus far avoided sanctions (they have only allowed some local variations on same-sex marriage while the Americans have formulated a policy for everyone).”

Elites in Africa have benefitted from globalization. And globalization has also brought cultural changes to Africa: “Western and in the developing worlds. In the former the 1960s and 1970s saw a powerful sexual revolution that by now is largely victorious. In the same period the developing countries have been undergoing an accelerating modernization process. In the nightclubs of Nairobi and Lagos American films, music and sexual liberalism have been fully adopted.” But the wealth and hedonism of the elites doesn’t penetrate to the masses: “there is a deep class divide: Most Africans are still poor; they don’t dance in classy nightclubs; they try desperately to get out of extreme poverty and secure a better future for their children. And here Hollywood is an elusive mirage of frustrated aspirations; Nashville is of more practical help in getting out of poverty—the ‘good old religion’ is also the good old Protestant ethic.”

Though Berger is skeptical that moral puritanism has a long-term future, he cites David Martin’s research on the effects of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity on the the lives of the poor. Further, “Brigitte Berger has shown how what she calls the ‘conjugal nuclear family’ (husband and wife living with their children in a household separate from wider kin) played an important causal role in European modernization. . . . She also argued that the same arrangement has a modernizing effect in developing societies today, particularly in Africa. This is the real liberation for women and children in the slums of what used to be called the ‘Third World,’ and the ensuing domesticity can be attractive for men as well in the midst of rapid and tumultuous social change, where all the traditional sources of stability – village community, tribe and extended kin – have weakened or disappeared.”

The Victorian ethic is a better route for Africa’s poor than the Hollywood ethic.