Why the African Church is Different

It is clear that Christianity in Africa is the Christianity of the twenty first century. The African Church is young, vibrant, growing and demographically dominant. Here are some statistics:

With 171.9 million faithful, sub-Saharan Africa represents 16 percent of Catholics worldwide, a third the number in Europe and more than double that in the United States. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, at 31.2 million Catholics in 2010, has almost as many as Poland and France each, at 35.3 million and 37.9 million, respectively.
And African Catholics are on the rise. From 1910 to 2010, they went from constituting just one percent of the local population to 21 percent, making Africa the fastest growing region for the century. By comparison, Catholics in North America increased from 16 to 26 percent of the population, according to the Pew Research Center.
From 2004 to 2050, African Catholics will continue their climb, increasing by 145.8 percent to 342 million, making Africa the most Catholic continent after Latin America. Europe, meanwhile, will slump from 270 million to 255 million Catholics, at a decline of -5.5 percent by 2050. The Congo Republic that year will become the most Catholic country, with double as many faithful as will be in Poland, according to the Population Research Bureau.

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But isn’t this also true of the Church in Latin America? It is also a church in the developing world: youthful, poor, hopeful… The difference is Catholics are deserting the Latin American Catholic Church in droves. The tidal wave is away from Catholicism to the Protestant sects. The reign of the first pope from Latin America has not served to stem the tide. If papal popularity is any kind of signal, Pope Francis has presided over a disastrous decline in Catholicism.

So why is African Catholicism so different from Latin American? I am not an expert on these matters by any stretch, but there are some striking differences in the development of the two continents that play a part. Latin America was colonized by the Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and therefore, from a theological, philosophical and cultural point of view Latin America was colonized by a European culture dominated by the culture of the enlightenment. Even the Counter-Reformation was dominated by the great theological and philosophical groundswell–although in reaction against them. In Latin America the main theological, philosophical and political influences were conditioned by European, Enlightenment assumptions and pre-suppositions. Added to this was a Hegelian (and ultimately Marxist) perspective on the world which was conflict oriented. These pre-suppositions were the foundation of modernism with it’s anti-supernatural bias, it’s revolutionary mood and it’s “progressive” assumptions.

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