This essay was first published in Credenda\/Agenda<\/em>.<\/p>\n On the evening of April 6, 1994, a missile destroyed the airplane of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana as it descended into the Kigali airport. Within hours of the assassination, Hutus armed with sticks, clubs, machetes, along with the odd grenade and gun, fanned out over the country and began killing Tutsis and any Hutus who tried to protect them.<\/p>\n By early July, when Kigali fell into the hands of the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million Rwandans had been killed, and hundreds of thousands had fled. Within a week after the RPF took control of the capital, Hutus began fled from Rwanda into to Congolese refugee camps that eventually gave shelter to 1.7 million Hutus.<\/p>\n A million murdered in a hundred days: It\u2019s believed that more people were slaughtered more rapidly in the Rwandan genocide than at any other time in human history.<\/p>\n Forty thousand bodies flowed down the Kagera River into Uganda\u2019s Lake Victoria. Hutu boys and men who had grown up playing soccer with their Tutsi neighbors turned on them. Women carrying babies on their backs slaughtered their neighbors and killed infants in maternity hospitals. Men ripped pregnant women open, and killed any male fetuses.\u00a0\u00a0 Hutu men raped Tutsi girls and women, some as little more than toddlers, deliberately infecting some 400,000 with HIV. Small children were dug from beneath piles of rotting corpses, too young to remember their names or their parents.<\/p>\n It had happened before. Shortly after the fall of the last Tutsi king of Rwanda in 1959, Hutus rampaged, driving hundreds of thousands of Tutsis from their land. In 1959, missionaries and priests defended the Tutsis. Not in 1994. Tutsis were enticed into churches, then slaughtered. In Nyamata, 10,000 people were killed while hiding in the Catholic church. Catholic Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva joined Anglican Archbishop Augustin Nshamihigo in supporting the genocide. With two other bishops, Nshamihigo toured Kenya, Canada, England and the U. S. to assure the world that no slaughters were taking place. A former Anglican Archbishop read imprecatory Psalms directed against the Tutsis over the radio, and another bishop prayed that God would throw fire from heaven against the Tutsi \u201ccockroaches.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was a deacon,\u201d Fulgence, a white-sandaled Catholic Hutu told the French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, \u201cthe one who made arrangements for Christian gatherings on the hill of Kibungo. In the priest\u2019s absence, it was I who conducted ordinary services.\u201d<\/p>\n As soon as he heard news of the assassination, Fulgence joined his friends in a killing spree. His first kill was an \u201cold mama,\u201d but that one did not quite count: \u201cshe was already lying almost dead on the ground, so I did not feel death at the end of my arm.\u201d His first true kill came the next day, \u201cthe day of the massacre at the church, so, a very special day.\u201d<\/p>\n One Tutsi victim asked his attackers for time to pray before they killed him. \u201cWe killed God first,\u201d was the response.<\/p>\n What is known as the \u201cGreat Lakes\u201d region of East Africa \u2013 comprising Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Congo, Uganda \u2013 is 90% Christian.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>****<\/p>\n Valentino Achak Deng was tending the fire watching his mother cook when the muraheleen surrounded his village of Marial Bai. They began shooting and setting fire to houses. Valentino crossed the village and eventually found shelter in the church, where he watched as villagers were herded to the soccer field or shot. The Arabs tied up boys, girls and women, tethered them to their horses, and rode away, leaving behind a few stragglers among the ruins.<\/p>\n Valentino ran, not knowing whether his parents and relatives had survived the attack.<\/p>\n What is known as the Second Sudanese Civil War began in 1983, when President Gaafar Muhammed an-Nimeiry stated that he planned to turn Sudan into an Islamic state, imposing sharia<\/em> on the predominantly Christian South. In the South, John Garang organized the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) to resist the Khartoum government. Through the middle 1980s, North and South existed in a suspicious state of truce, but when the National Islamic Front (NIF) established itself as the Government of Sudan (GOS) in a 1989 military coup, it quickly reorganized the government to promote the never-rescinded plan to impose sharia<\/em> on the south. By the early 1990s, Sudan had become the cozy base of operations for Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, with the support of northern tribesman known as the murahaleen, GOS soldiers attacked villages throughout predominantly Christian Southern Sudan, destroying homes, plundering goods and cattle, slaughtering men, and taking women, children, and boys into slavery.<\/p>\n Over the course of the war, nearly 2 million Sudanese were killed, and another 4 million driven into refugee camps. Most famously, the marauders from Khartoum displaced about 27,000 orphans, mostly boys. Many were like Valentino, running and walking and hiding in the jungle as they made their way toward a refugee camp in Ethiopia where, Valentino told novelist Dave Eggers, they hoped for \u201coranges on white tablecloths.\u201d Driven from Ethiopia, many of the boys walked back across Sudan to a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya.<\/p>\n Since 2003, the Darfur region of Western Sudan has been the site of ethnic warfare between the Janjaweed, a militia drawing mostly from the camel herding Arab nomads known as the Baggara, and a coalition of rebel groups drawn from a variety of tribes. Estimates of casualties have been controversial, ranging from the Sudanese governments low-ball 9000 to the Coalition for International Justice estimate of 400,000 had been killed in that conflict. Numbers are hard to calculate because the dead are dropped down wells, thrown into mass graves, or burned. Over two million people have been displaced by the war.<\/p>\n Valentino was among the fortunate ones. He emigrated from Sudan to Atlanta, where, years later, he learned that his mother had survived.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>***<\/p>\n News from Africa is usually bad, stunningly numbingly bad. When it\u2019s not about genocide, starvation, war, savagery, rape as a weapon of political control, or other large-scale disasters, its about pettier disasters. Riots followed Kenyas elections; at this writing, Robert Mugabe doesn\u2019t look like he\u2019s planning to give up power in Zimbabwe; Christians and Muslims are fighting along Middle Belt that cuts Nigeria into the arid Islamic north and the Christian jungle to the south Dozens of enterprising Nigerians are arrested for internet scams (who doesn\u2019t<\/em> know about these?).<\/p>\n But the news is not always bad. At over 21% GDP growth, Angola has the fastest-growing economy in the world, and two other African countries \u2013 Equatorial Guinea and Sao Tome and Principe \u2013 made the top twelve list of fast-growing economies in the Economist\u2019<\/em>s annual survey. In its Winter 2008 issue of The Wilson Quarterly<\/em>, Stanford University journalism professor G. Pascal Zachary reported on a new generation of entrepreneurial African farmers who are beginning to export to Europe, Asia, and the United States.<\/p>\n Zachary reminds us that \u201cthe vast majority of sub-Saharan Africans neither live in war zones nor struggle with an active disease or famine. Extreme poverty is relatively rare in rural Africa, and there is a growing entrepreneurial spirit among farmers that defies usual image of Africans as passive victims.\u201d Africa is witnessing \u201can agrarian revolution,\u201d led by the \u201csort of canny and independent tillers of the land Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the foundation for American democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n But the really good news from Africa is about Africa\u2019s embrace of the good news.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n American Christians bemoan the decline of Christianity in the modern age. We think that Christianity is primarily a Western European phenomenon. Both opinions are parochial in the extreme. The early church was a Middle Eastern rather than a European creation, and Christianity retreated into the fortress of Western Europe only with because of aggressive onslaught of Islam. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Christianity was a European phenomenon, but the story of modern Christianity has been a story of steady expansion. The slur that Christianity is a White Man\u2019s Religion was true in 1550, but it ceased to be true long ago, and it now bears no resemblance to reality. Northern Christians haven\u2019t heard, and both conservatives and liberals continue to believe the slur is basically correct.<\/p>\n Nowhere has the church\u2019s growth been more impressive than in Africa. At the beginning of the twentieth century, J. R, Mott told an Edinburgh ecumenical conference that Africa was falling to Islam. Lamin Sanneh notes that in 1900, Muslims outnumbered Christians 4 to 1. Since de-colonialization in the early 1960s, however, African Christianity has grown spectacularly. By 1962, there were 60 million Christians, as compared to 145 million Muslims. During the 1980s, an estimated 16,500 Africans were converting to Christianity each day<\/em>.<\/p>\n Philip Jenkins picks up the story:<\/p>\n \u201cAccording to the respected World Christian Encyclopedia<\/em>, some 2 billion Christians are alive today, about one-third of the planetary total. The largest single bloc, some 560 million people, is still found in Europe. Latin America, though, is already close behind with 480 million, Africa has 360 million, and 313 million Asians profess Christianity. North America claims about 260 million believers. If we extrapolate these figures to the year 2025, and assume no great gains or losses through conversion, then there would be around 2.6 billion Christians, of whom 633 million would live in Africa, 640 million in Latin America, and 460 million in Asia. Europe, with 555 million, would have slipped to third place by 2050, only about one-fifth of the worlds 3 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic Whites. Soon the phrase \u2018a White Christian\u2019 may sound like a curious oxymoron, as mildly surprising as \u2018a Swedish Buddhist<\/a>.'\u201d<\/p>\n African Christianity has a reputation for being wildly syncretistic, and the reputation is not unwarranted. The fact that much of the numbing violence in recent African history has occurred in predominantly Christian areas gives pause. How deep can faith be if African Christians are killing each other? One is tempted to respond with a tu quoque<\/em>: The North has seen more than its share of Christians killing Christians. Can anyone say Dresden?<\/p>\n Besides, the charge that African theology is a mix of animism and Christianity is often the result of ignorance and prejudice. There are plenty of signs of maturity in African theology, and these signs suggest that African Christianity is not only learning, but has become a teacher for the rest of the church. Africa is teaching Western Christians how to do Christian theology without the confining restrictions of the Enlightenment.\u00a0\u00a0 Lamin Sanneh has it right: \u201cWorld Christianity is not one thing, but a variety of indigenous responses through more or less effective local idioms,\u201d but these various responses largely share one thing: They work outside the \u201cEuropean Enlightenment frame.\u201d As the gospel is \u201cembraced by societies that have not been shaped by the Enlightenment,\u201d the North can \u201cgain an insight into the culture that shaped the origins of the NT church.\u201d`<\/p>\n The good news is not just that Africa is accepting good news. It\u2019s not just that Africa is becoming Christian. It\u2019s the kind of Christian it\u2019s becoming.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Enlightenment Christianity grows in part from scientific discoveries that challenged the medieval view of the universe, a view believed, for all intents and purposes, to be based on the Bible. Dante\u2019s elaborate cosmology was the biblical cosmology, and Copernicus and Galileo seemed not only to be challenging tradition but revelation itself. Historians got into the fray. One of the controversial books of the 17th century was Isaac de la Peyrere\u2019s Pre-Adamites<\/em> (1655). Peyrere argued that Adam was not the first man but the first Israelite<\/em>. What in the Bible is only a strip of white space between Genesis 1 and 2 became an alternative history of indeterminate length. The Bible\u2019s authority in history, like its authority in cosmology, was under assault.<\/p>\n One response to these developments, of course, was thoroughgoing suspicion of the Bible and its claims: but another solution was the dualistic option. Dualists didn\u2019t reject the claims of the Bible, but used the concepts of \u201climited scope\u201d and \u201caccommodation\u201d to neutralize Scripture. This was Galileo\u2019s solution. The Bible, he suggested in a famous letter to the Duchess Christina of Tuscany (1615), was not mistaken about scientific facts. It couldn\u2019t be mistaken because it made no scientific assertions in the first place. Scripture has to do with salvation, spirituality, and ethics, but scientists must look to God\u2019s other book \u2013 nature \u2013 to learn about the world. (Part of the trick here \u2013 and it is a trick \u2013 is Galileo\u2019s assumption that Scripture requires interpretation, and thus is uncertain, while nature is transparent to the scientific gaze.) What look like scientific assertions are merely signs of God\u2019s benevolence, as he accommodates Himself to the unscientific mind of primitive men. God knew, of course, that the sun didn\u2019t stand still for Joshua, but instead of confusing ancient Israelites, He babbled in their infantile language.<\/p>\n This was the theme of Benedict Spinoza\u2019s Theologico-Political Treatise<\/em> (1670), one of the earliest works in biblical criticism. Spinoza challenged traditional claims about authorship, and claimed that the Bible was pocked with historical, scientific, factual, and philosophical errors. No matter, though: The Bible was still valuable since it taught true religion \u2013 that is, obedience \u2013 perspicaciously and consistently. Philosophy and theology are wholly separate areas of study, and the Bible is useful for the latter but hopeless on the former. Spinoza\u2019s treatise, as his title suggests, was not only one of the earliest works in biblical criticism, but also a political treatise, one of the earliest defenses of the modern liberal, religiously neutral state. That Spinoza combined in the same volume: no accident. For Spinoza and most early modern liberals, the liberal state was primarily a state in which various interpretations of the Bible are tolerated.<\/p>\n