Religion in Public Life

Using the concept of (multiple) identities as constructed by (shifting, porous) boundaries, the paper explores how these philosophical notions play themselves out in Africa under condition of globalization. It begins with the idea of an African Renaissance, given special currency in South Africa and more widely by our current President, Thabo Mbeki. It is his sense of Africanness that I probe, and its relation to identity under globalizing conditions. Second, I read globalization itself as a way of orienting the notion of identity within a broader field of terms—social, political and economic. Third, I treat what seems either to be truncated or seen as derivative forces of money (or economy) and power (or politics) in some theories, namely, culture—more precisely, religion, the one thing that seems most derivative to creatures of the Enlightenment. I seek to redraw boundaries, to read globalization from another place, to link it to the place of Europe and to relocate it in an African worldview, which is not an African worldview alone, and thus to decentre it.

Religious convictions and ways of seeing reality have their own independent impact, in the case of the World Trade Center towers a very visible, clearly material, and highly symbolic impact all at once. This has given rise to new discussions on religion in society, in the public sphere. To think again of theology, and religion, in the public place, in the market square, I focus on the lens offered by the idea of civil society, to highlight some important challenges to theology in our time, in dialogue with the African context, and with the work of people such as Mahmood Mamdani, Cohen and Arato, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Questions about the ecclesia and the believing/acting/responsible human being emerge clearly. I end by claiming that responsible theological reflection seeks to break open new possibilities amidst the limits of present actualities. It partakes of what is to come, refuses to possess the truth, supports the struggle of human beings to actualize themselves, takes its stand against suffering, and incorporates the other in just institutions and ways of living well together. I argue that it is not difficult to test our thought and our action against criteria, or thereby to grasp the task of religion, or practical faith, in civil society.

Written for the end of the millennium, this essay considers the future for Africa and what this means for a public Christian witness. It begins by considering Africa's experience of marginalization from the globalizing world economy, noting how this is both historically conditioned and heterogeneous. Problems of governance, power and authority rest within this history, particularly the colonial disjunction between citizenship and subjecthood mirrored in policies of mixed direct and indirect rule (M Mamdani). In such a situation, Christianity cannot confine itself to issues of inculturation and evangelization, but must enter into the public sphere more directly. This is complicated, because Africa is also a continent of contested Christianities, indigenous and exogenous. From this angle of view, the question is how one takes into account critical questions in Africa about resources (human and material), gender and well-being (or illness and disease, negatively). Without attention to such issues, a Christian (or any other) response is likely to at best naïve, at worst disingenuous. The challenges are clear. A key issue is whether African churches or Christian groups have the resources, or the will, to respond to them adequately.

What is the public sphere like in South Africa today? In what way is it public? And what might it mean to speak of "reconstituting religion" in this public sphere? In order to answer these questions with some intelligence, we need to understand how the public sphere is currently constructed. The essay describes such a construction in terms of a shift to: a postcolonial situation; a postmodern situation; a post-resistance situation; the reality of globalization with the falling of the walls which were erected from within by apartheid and reinforced from without by international sanctions; the trouble in which resistance discourse finds itself since 1994; and the rise of a more nuanced understanding of resistance (hidden or coded "arts of resistance"). Related to these shifts, we pay attention the way in which identity and difference are implicated in each other in this context. This leads to a final, critical question, an ontological one: Who? Who is our prime interlocutor in determining our view of reality, our sense of what it means to live as a human being in this society? Who sets the agenda, frames the questions, offers the key categories for our understanding or our condition? Who benefits from the way in which transitional processes are conducted and new social arrangements are put in place? Who does not benefit, who suffers the consequences? More pertinently, who does so systematically, that is, not merely arbitrarily?

The title Life, the Universe and Everything, the third volume of the famous four volume trilogy (sic) called the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, recently deceased ("I love deadlines," he said, "especially the whooshing sound they make as they go by"), is perhaps the most adequate statement of the depth and breadth of the challenges to researchers who investigate the question of religion in South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. I argue that such research needs to focus not only on the role of religion in social transformation, but on transformations within religion itself, those that are occasioned by our current context and historical conjuncture.

The essay thus deals, after some initial comments, with brief discussions of "regional" concerns about methodological/ontological issues, with hermeneutics, with practical questions, and with the present conjuncture of history in South Africa-all in order to define a field of responses to the question about research challenges on religion in South Africa.

Since its arrival in Southern Africa, the Bible has been a site of struggle (West 2007), though often in more complex ways that most postcolonial analysis has acknowledged. This article reflects on some of that history but focuses on the present, examining the place of the Bible in public discourse in South Africa, more than a decade after liberation.