Civil Society and Religion

Abstract

This chapter undertakes an historical and comparative review of both the internal and external factors shaping religion and civil society in Africa. While most observers agree that civil society in Africa is “poorly developed,” few have explored whether religious institutions have anything to do with this weakness. Although colonial and postcolonial regimes in Africa took a heavy hand in weakening labor unions, media, and other secular associations, religious institutions have grown stronger on the continent and in the international arena as the faith-based development agenda has become a favored outlet for American and other aid to Africa. The chapter is organized around three goals: (1) to show the dynamic but persistent interpenetration of Africa’s many religious traditions and forms of political authority; (2) to analyze the religious language and practices of organizing collective power and interests; and (3) to look more closely into cases in which religious institutions have become closely aligned to states to become facilitators of political discrimination and violence against citizens. The analysis focuses on religious practices and ideas—such as charisma, prosperity, and reform—as processes of unequal capital accumulation and dissemination. Religious authority and state power have been cocreated in modern Africa, but the creative and important tension between them, that Africans have used for political reform and renewal, has increasingly been eroded as international and some local actors have defined faith in increasingly narrow and ahistorical terms associated with neoliberal development discourses.