It has only been a few weeks since I wrote about the attitude of leftists in the leadership of the Catholic Church toward African dioceses that refuse to accept the blessing of same-sex relationships. Pope Francis condescendingly believes that African church leaders will eventually bend their knees to the Pride Cult.
If you think the pope is turning his back on faithful African believers, you ain’t seen nothing yet. A recommendation from a Church of England committee is ready to make the Catholic Church look like a bunch of amateurs. Forget expecting African Christians to accommodate homosexuality — how about condemning Africans to hell instead?
“A report by something called the Oversight Group has declared that the Church should say sorry publicly, not just for profiting from the evils of slavery (through investment in the South Sea Company) but for ‘seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems,’” writes William Moore at the Spectator. “And having apologised, it recommends the Church ‘reach beyond theological institutions’ and ‘enable all Africans to discover the varied belief systems and spiritual practices of their forbears and their efficacy.’”
In other words, the Oversight Group wants to say that converting thousands of Africans to faith in Jesus is wrong and that Africans should stick to their traditional religions. This committee of a major Christian denomination wants to apologize for sharing the gospel.
Related: The New Colonizers
Moore believes that the Oversight Group’s ideas dishonor those brave missionaries who gave their lives to spread Christianity in Africa, many of whom were active in helping end the slave trade. And what about generations of African Christian martyrs?
“Should the Church of England apologise using the wording of the report, it would be an insult to the memory of missionaries and converts,” he writes. “What would such an apology say about the Ugandan Martyrs, 22 Catholic and 23 Anglican converts, who in the 1880s were executed by King Mwanga II? That they need not have bothered abandoning their old beliefs? That they should’ve thought harder about ‘efficacy?’” he writes.
Moore turns his attention to currently persecuted believers in Africa, suggesting that the Oversight Group thinks their suffering may be in vain.
“Today’s African Christians may also be surprised to discover that their faith is optional – especially given that of the Christians in the world who are killed for their beliefs, 90 percent are from Africa,” he adds.
Moore also points out that Christianity replaces some barbaric practices.
“The broadness of the report’s spiritual demands has some deeply alarming implications,” he writes. “Surely there are ‘diverse African traditional religious belief systems’ which the missionaries were right to try to replace? Idolatry, witchcraft, twin infanticide (a practice in south-east Nigeria until it was all but abolished by the Presbyterian missionary Mary Slessor), cannibalism, human sacrifice – to name some of the most extreme.”
Moore appeared on the Spectator’s Holy Smoke podcast to discuss the matter, and he and host Damian Thompson chalked the attitude of the Oversight Group to a wave of religious relativism that plagues far too many Christians in the West. Thompson brought up Cardinal Timothy Dolan equating Ramadan with Easter and Passover and Pope Francis’ statement that God wills religious diversity.
“I’m obviously very in favor of inter-faith conversation,” Moore agreed. “I mean, it’s extremely important, but there has to be such a clear dividing line about not slipping from that into religious relativism, where it’s all just kind of the same. There’s lots of things I think Christians can learn from other faiths, of course, but that always has to be done while, in my mind, while keeping hold of what is true, what you believe to be true as a Christian. Otherwise, it becomes very messy very quickly.”
Moore brought the discussion back to the report when he added, “And I think the wording in this report as it stands is a very good example of that. It is just too sloppy; it’s too broad.”
Moore concludes his article by explaining that if the Church of England adopts the Oversight Group’s recommendation, it could inadvertently turn an apology for mistakes in colonization into a mistake for Christianity itself:
The only sliver of hope for Anglicans is that the C of E simply hasn’t yet clocked the implications of the recommendations and could back away from them. A C of E spokesman says that the Church does not interpret the recommendations as a call to apologise for spreading the Gospel, ‘however, we need to be transparent that appalling abuses took place in the past’. If the Church wants to apologise for abuses, it should. But it has to reject the Oversight Group’s wording, or it will end up undermining its reason for existing. How typical it would be of the Church of England to apologise for Christianity by mistake.
The Church of England’s Oversight Group is exhibiting a similar condescension toward Christians in Africa to that of leftist Catholic leaders. Catholics who have given in to the LGBTQetc movement believe that African Catholics will fall in line, while the Oversight Group seems to think that Africans who become Christians are denying African tribal religions.
Both groups lose sight of the fact that Christianity has a long history in Africa as well as the explosion of Christianity in the continent today. If we’re going to criticize colonization, maybe it’s time for these large denominations to stop colonizing Christianity by trying to tell African Christians how to worship.