المسيحية ودورها في التحول الاجتماعي في إفريقيا

الملخص EN

Christianity is presented by the Church as the largest religion in Africa and all over the world, according to statistics conducted by research centers specialized in religious sociology studies.

Christianity reached Africa in two stages; The first was very early, since the first century AD, by some of the apostles of Christ, peace be upon him, and some of the earliest Christians, but it was confined in Egypt, North Africa, Ethiopia, and later the Kingdoms of Nubia.

Then that first Christianity declined after the emergence of Islam, in a strange phenomenon, and it had no longer exist except in Egypt and Ethiopia.

the second stage is relatively late, it begins with the advent of European missionaries, to sub-Saharan Africa, under the title of the so-called “geographical exploration campaigns”, which began in the fifteenth century AD, and the flows of missionaries continued on the continent, to intensify remarkably during the nineteenth century, and continue till these days, in many forms.

In its expansion in Africa, Christianity benefited greatly from military and political power, represented in the colonial campaigns, and the authorities they established, as well as its emergence in Africa, accompanied by ugly practices, such as the campaigns of hunting slaves and transporting them to the New World (the Americas), in addition to the use of people’s need to persuade them to convert to Christianity, in what is called (evangelism).

The relationship of Christianity with African communities is a very complicated, as there are fundamental differences in the nature of Christian teachings and beliefs, with the nature and instinct of the African human being.

But Christianity relied in its great expansion, if we accept it, on its strategic alliance with the colonial authority.

It also used education to make national elites, who became the successors of the colonizer in holding the reins of government in African countries.

The social transformations brought about by Christianity in Africa can be classified, mostly, in the category of imbalances; such as the consolidation of the concept of dependence on the West, the duplication of religious identity, the disruption of social cohesion, and the destruction of the simple African economic patterns which is based on production and self-sufficiency, in favor of the market economy and Western consumer patterns, in addition to spreading hatred and sectarian hatred.

And part of these transformations can be considered positive shifts, but it is not without problems, such as spreading education, spreading health care and contributing to the treatment of epidemics and diseases.

The insistence of the mainline churches (missionaries) to impose the Western cultural model and European lifestyles on Africans, coupled with the contempt for African culture and rituals and their classification as evil and paganism, without presenting an integrated religious model that would convince the African that what Christianity brought is better than what they had.

All of this has exacerbated the internal conflict of the Africans between the teachings of this new religion, and their tendency to belong to their inheritances that form their cultural and social environment, and their respect for them, and it ended with an African revolution against Christianity in its Western form, which emerged in the current of the so-called (new churches) or (independent churches), which rejected Missionaries line, and imposed their interpretations of Christianity that align with African traditional beliefs, ignoring the criticisms of missionaries, the global church and the Vatican, Although it classifying them as apostates.

The global church was blatantly forced to abandon many of its ideological origins, in favor of local African beliefs, in order to preserve its existence from fading, due to the departure of many of its followers from it to Islam, or to return to their African roots, which led to the formation of a special (African Christianity), Within what is called contextual theology.