Africa needs God, says Atheist

Matthew Parris, the columnist for Times magazine and former English politician, published a controversial online article some time ago titled, “As an Atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God”. You can read it here.

His main argument is this.

“Missionaries, not aid money, is the solution to Africa's biggest problem – the crushing passivity of the people's mindset.”

Parris, who as a boy lived in Malawi, explains.

“Anxiety – fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things – strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.”

What exactly does he mean by this?

“How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds – at the very moment of passing into the new – that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old.”

But he tries to give an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain?

“‘Because it's there,’ he said. To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation – that nobody else had climbed it – would stand as a second reason for passivity.”

Christianity is offered as the antitode to the African tribal collectivism/passivity. But Parris seems to misrepresent Christianity as being purely individualistic.

Although it is true that Christianity stresses the importance of the individual person, who was made in the image of God, the individual person finds his self and purpose in relationships. Above all with his Creator, and secondly with other human persons.

In the Bible God's relationship to mankind is expressed as Father to children and Bride to Bridegroom. The Christian God is not an Absolute solitarity, but a Love Community between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And man is made in this image, not in the image of absolute individualism.

I would be very interested in hearing what others thought of the article. What do you think, did he misrepresent the African rural mind? Or did he hit on a certain truth?