Faith in Schools: Religion, Education, and American Evangelicals in East Africa 9780804773454

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Fa i t h i n S c h o o l s

Faith in Schools R e l i g i o n , E d u c at i o n , a n d A m e r i c a n E va n g e l i c a l s i n E a s t Afr i c a

Amy Stambach

stanford university press stanford, california

©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stambach, Amy, 1966Faith in schools : religion, education, and American evangelicals in East Africa / Amy Stambach. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-6850-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8047-6851-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Church schools—Africa, East. 2. Church and education—Africa, East. 3. Evangelistic work—Africa, East. 4. Missions—Educational work—Africa, East. 5. Missionaries—Training of—United States. 6. Christianity and culture—Africa, East. 7. Anthropology of religion—Africa, East. I. Title. LC433.A353S73 2010 2009032017 371.071'09676—dc22 Typeset by Classic Typography in 10.5/12.5 Sabon Pro

To friends here and there

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

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1.  Introduction: Schools of Faith

1

Part I.  Preparation in the United States 2.  One Hundred Fifty Years of Mission Work

35

3.  Using Anthropology for Christian Witness

65

Part II.  Evangelism in East Africa 4.  Teaching English in Tanzania

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5.  Planting Church Schools in Kenya

132

6.  School-Community Partnerships in Uganda

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Part III.  Implications 7. A New Anthropological Ethnography of Religion and Education

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Epilogue

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Notes

199

References

209

Index

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Acknowledgments

In writing this book I have benefited greatly from the assistance and support of many people and organizations. The Spencer Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Vilas Associates Program generously funded field research. The University of Toronto African Studies Program provided office space and a quiet place to write during a sabbatical year. For their permission to conduct research, I acknowledge with much appreciation the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology; the Republic of Kenya, Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology; and the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology. Through their insightful field assistance, Marshall Kwayu, Kristin ­Phillips, and Benjamin Twagira contributed in important ways to the conceptualization of this book. The Gichiru family offered me a comfortable and welcoming place to live near Nairobi. The ever-amazing and loving Kwayu family once again provided a rare combination of friendship and intellectual insight. My heart is always with them. I am also indebted to the many missionaries, evangelists, churchgoers, parents, teachers, and other participants who patiently and graciously permitted me to observe their work and ask questions. I have attempted to reproduce as accurately and fully as I am able the many perspectives presented to me, but I hasten to say that only I am responsible for what appears in this book. Portions of this work were presented at conferences and workshops in Copenhagen, Chicago, London, Ljubljana, Madison, Jinja, San Jose, Stanford, and Toronto. Participants at these meetings provided valuable feedback and suggestions on early drafts of chapters. I hope my mention of special thanks to a few will stand for my appreciation to many: Sally Anderson, Michael Apple, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Kathy Hall, Sharon Hutchinson, Michael Lambek, Ritty Lukose, George Malekela, Karen Mundy, Adam Nelson, Kristin Phillips, Todd Sanders, and Jinting Wu. I would also like to thank Sam Kaplan and Brad Weiss for their very useful comments on the manuscript, and Jennifer Helé for her support and encouragement. Isaac Bershady provided invaluable assistance at the crucial last minute, and Rebecca Holmes and Matthew Bershady read and reread versions of each chapter, for which I am extremely grateful.

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Acknowledgments

Finally, I wish to offer a belated thank you to my father for having provided cover art for my previous book. I forgot to acknowledge him several years ago (as my parents have jokingly reminded me ever since) and I hope the wonderful editors at Stanford University Press will allow me the space here to repay a family debt.

Abbreviations

AIM Africa Inland Mission CAMEO Committee to Assist Ministry Education Overseas CCM Chama cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution) CNN Cable News Network CRE Christian Religious Education CUF Civic United Front EAMWS East African Muslim Welfare Society EFA Education for All EFMA Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies EMIS Evangelical Missions Information Service FFM Fellowship of Faith for the Muslims GDP Gross Domestic Product ICT Information and Communication Technologies IFMA Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association LC Local Commissioner MBA Master of Business Administration MDGs Millennium Development Goals MP Member of Parliament NBC Nairobi Bible College NAE National Association of Evangelicals NGO Nongovernmental organization OFBCI Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives OIC Organization of the Islamic Conference Tanganyika African National Union TANU TEE Theological Education by Extension UDSM University of Dar es Salaam UN United Nations UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural ­Organization

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Abbreviations

URT USAID WAN WBS WCC WFDD YES

United Republic of Tanzania United States Agency for International Development World Anthropologies Network World Bible School World Council of Churches World Faiths Development Dialogue Youth English Services

Fa i t h i n S c h o o l s

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Introduction: Schools of Faith

This story is about American missionaries on the world’s turf. It unfolds in two parts of the globe: East Africa and the United States. The opening themes are religion, education, secularism, and politics. Each is developed across years of growing political attention to religion’s public significance worldwide. At a certain moment in this story, the view looking backward becomes very different from the view looking forward. That moment is the early 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when East African governments began to pressure American missionaries to register as development agencies. Before this point, evangelical missionaries worked independently of nonreligious aid organizations, and development programs were administered by professional organizations such as Oxfam or CARE, or by governments working bilaterally. Behind East African governments’ pressure was a bigger force, the World Bank, and behind the Bank there was pressure from its greatest shareholding power, the United States.1 The World Bank and the U.S. government encouraged East African governments to subcontract development activities with nongovernmental agencies, including faith-based groups. American evangelical missionaries were wary of this approach. They believed in the separation of church and state. Yet the U.S. government was touting faith-government partnerships as the new value added to development schemes. Linking religion to policy reframed nation-state interests by increasing their moral legitimacy. Some observers remarked that religion was America’s new export to the world. One best-selling historian pinned his hopes on American evangelicals helping to build an empire rivaling the old British Empire (N. Ferguson 2002), and a nationally syndicated editorialist referred to Christian evangelists as America’s new foreign policy force (Kristof 2003, 2008). Popular commentators were right in their own way, yet the story is more complicated than they tell it. It has to do with competing visions of secularism in public life and with how religion crafts new moral geographies that politically secure and link distant lands. Put simply, much as

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the United States had designed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the World Bank worked to develop parts of Africa in ways that were favorable to the political and economic control of its member states. The Bank went about this task in its typical fashion: by tying strings from its development efforts to grants and loans.2 Bundling ideology with money continued (and likely will) for many years, but sometime around the end of the Cold War and before the U.S. “war on terror,” political ideology within international agencies began to take on a softer tone. These agencies began to cast economic relations in moral and religious terms. The thrust of development increasingly became not just to create codependent market economies but also to support ethically linked, morally like-minded communities that share common views about the value of religion for improving public life. Lending and aid agencies, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank, began to identify religious organizations as key providers of basic education.3 In 1998, James D. Wolfensohn, then president of the World Bank, together with Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey and His Highness the Aga Khan,4 convened an interfaith organization called the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD). At a conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2000, the WFDD identified education as a priority area of action in sub-Saharan Africa.5 In January 2001, President Bush signed an executive order establishing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI). 6 By 2003, OFBCIs existed in all eight departments of the federal government, in USAID, and in the Corporation for National and Community Service; and by 2008 some policymakers writing in the U.S. media were predicting correctly that faith-based policies would outlast U.S. presidential and political changes (Hein 2008; Kuo and DiIulio 2008). This overt focus on religious organizations as social service providers marked a shift away from the tenets of high modernity. Whereas the nationstate school used to function as the primary locus of civic enculturation, it now served as a site where connections between religious and global communities were imagined. Some political scientists argued that this shift signaled the weakening of independent governments’ abilities to influence citizens (Reno 2001, 2004) and governments’ withdrawal from development functions (van de Walle 2001: 276). Other observers maintained that it represented a new ideological means for nation-states to extend their political influence and interests globally (for example, Hibou 2004; Roitman 2004). Despite these differing interpretations, the shift set in motion novel forms of control that recalled a long history of Western imperialism.7 For some U.S. and international aid workers, these developments were disturbing, and for many they were outright wrong.

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As would be expected, organizations that supported church-state separation disputed the legality of faith-based policies.8 However, a surprising measure of discontent was also evident among East Africans who shared American faith groups’ views. East Africans who worked closely with American evangelicals privately referred to Americans as “colonialists” and “people without history.”9 Some Christian East African teachers said they did not like the deceptive ways in which Americans advanced religion indirectly while teaching children. East African evangelists felt that Africans, not Americans, should lead the Christian Church on the subcontinent, and few elders within these evangelists’ churches liked the fact that American congregations sending money to Africa continued to demand a say in how the funds were spent. First European colonists, then the World Bank, and now American missionaries, their argument went, treated Africans as childlike and incapable of self-governance. “American missionaries don’t know world history; they’re reproducing African dependency,” said one Ugandan Bible school director of Christian life, who otherwise shared the missionaries’ theological view that divine rule will come to bear on Earth. Yet East African evangelical Christians agreed that the evangelical missionaries were right about one thing: the missionaries understood the value of religion for Africans while most academics (including anthropologists, they said) did not. The missionaries knew that religion happened not only on a certain day of the week and not only in private but also in public places. The Africans did not separate private religion from public life, including life in public schools. Religion and education were seamlessly entwined. Ritual and pedagogy were one and the same. The way evangelical missionaries conducted their work in East African schools, and the way they taught anthropology to Bible college students in East Africa, gave evidence to this point. American evangelical missionaries conjoined faith with social action. They stressed the simultaneity of knowing and learning, of religion and education, and they saw religion as being everywhere and as inseparable from most aspects of social life. For East Africans and American evangelicals alike, the world existed as a sacred cosmos. Their mutually held worldview questioned secular-modern paradigms that separated private religion from public life. This shared conception—although different in details—created a context for collaborative faith-based work in which East African and American evangelicals together could—and did—offer free trauma counseling to American and East African embassy workers affected by the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Nairobi. Together they could—and did—provide technological expertise to business and civil service leaders in Uganda. Together they could—and did—provide free English instruction

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to children in public primary schools in Tanzania. Faith-in-action was a shared method and mode for containing the secular-humanistic—and for some, satanic—forces they perceived as spreading politically and socially around the world. The story presented in this book, then, connects two regions of the globe through an analysis of faith-based programs and missionaries’ activities. In examining the work of evangelical Christians in East African public life—and the recruitment of religious groups for public service by international and U.S. governmental agencies—this book charts a new course for understanding faith in schools. It looks beyond a framework that distinguishes between the spheres of politics and religion, and it explores ethnographically and conceptually the many representational modes by which “religion goes public” (as expressed by Meyer 2004: 94) and by which, I add, the public goes for religion.10 Seeing religion and education as dialectically related—including in anthropological and social theory—opens up a conceptual locus for analyzing how the public realm is transformed and how new governmental regimes emerge. The ethnographic setting of this book starts at Christian college campuses in the United States where missionaries train, then follows the paths of these missionaries to parts of East Africa—central and western Kenya, eastern Uganda, and northern Tanzania—where they and East African evangelists work. The timeframe spans the convergence of major world political-religious struggles and, by association, U.S. and middle-eastern regional conflicts. Rocked by U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania as well as in Kenya in the late 1990s; by Muslim-Christian tensions that coincided with American support for political leaders in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania; and by protests and riots between Muslims and Christians in cities and on the coast over rights to teach and preach publicly, East Africans in the decades on either side of the start of the twenty-first century were, as Brad Weiss (2002) has described, experiencing an upsurge of economic uncertainty and political-religious factionalism. The portrayal by U.S. lawmakers and leaders of American faith workers as “foot soldiers” in U.S. “armies of compassion” lent weight to some East Africans’ claims that the work of missionaries was politically motivated—that it was a campaign to promote American policy by winning the hearts and minds of poor African children.11 Yet in the eyes of missionaries from American colleges (most missionaries were college students) who were working in East Africa, the motivating force of their work was faith, not global politics. Missionaries operated in a selfless mode of service work they called Christian witness, a publicoriented form of service-learning that casts faith work as allegiance to God, not allegiance to people in governments. Missionaries compared the service-learning projects supported by their universities to Jesus’ work

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of teaching and preaching, of helping those in need, and they compared their faith-based, service-learning mission work to participant-observation methods of anthropology. Anthropology for Christian Witness (Kraft 2003), a widely used textbook in evangelical Christian anthropology, furnished missionaries with an explanatory framework for translating their message cross-culturally. To introduce methods and concepts used by missionaries, and to begin to analyze their work in relation to the secular-liberal principles at the core of cultural anthropology, I have divided this chapter into several sections: a description of missionaries’ faith-based work in public Tanzanian schools, a liberal secular creation story on which missionaries’ work (and much of anthropology) rests, missionaries’ strategies for engaging East Africans in evangelical work, and the methodological strategies I have used in writing this ethnography. A final section provides an overview of the structure of the entire book. In a nutshell, and to introduce the argument I develop across this book, missionaries’ work in East Africa makes visible a dialectical relationship between religion and education. At the turn of the twenty-first century, religion and education operated in international policy circles and, in this evangelical faith group’s work, through an emergent new logic of mutual encompassment. Put simply, faith-based policies framed the nation-state as the protector of religious groups, saw religious groups as equal with the nation-state before the law, and gave each the same rights to participate in public life and government. Evangelical missionaries, however, saw the relationship the other way around: religion authorized (good) government, and God, not government, determined morality; religion was government’s protector, and even (especially) education provided by the state needed a good dose of Christian evangelism. Both evangelical missionary and faith-based governmental discourses framed religion and state-administered education as a relationship of mutual enmeshment—a relationship by which state-education discourses of accountability, efficiency, equal opportunity, and so on superseded and encompassed religious-moral ideas of borderless religious faith; and a movement by which religious-moral discourses of faith and spirituality infused and encompassed governing bodies (state and nonstate) with the ideals of providence and historical necessity (Stambach 2004). This relationship—of the state encompassing religion and religion encompassing the state—unsettled classically understood models of governance by which the secular-modern nation-state alone enveloped lower reaches of society, including religious groups (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). To help readers understand the upshot of this mutual encompassment for religion’s new powers in public life, I offer here an ethnographic study of

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how the public is governed through competing claims of religion’s superior geographic reach and higher moral scope.12 To accomplish this understanding, we need, I insist, to look at education, a pivotal site where multiple and crosscutting “schools of faith” (which exist in many forms—secular, liberal democratic, theological, and so on) inform and transform the nation-state.

The Biblical Creation Story As an initial example of Christian evangelism conceived as a form of participant-observation and service-learning, and of the deep connection between religion and education in East African settings, picture a Tanzanian public school in which American evangelical missionaries conducted fieldwork as part of their summer service work abroad. In this case, faith took the form of a spiritual rationality that motivated the missionaries’ instructional methods and attracted members to the church. Set some one hundred meters off a busy tarmac road near one of the city’s center markets, Musoma Primary School is nestled among commercial sites. The day before the events recorded here, the dirt compound had been compacted by a series of brief rains, and clusters of impatiens and an occasional rose bush now flowered brightly in the sun. The school is laid out in typical u-form, with an outward edifice that provides a single entryway. Inside, classroom doors open onto an interior courtyard—a thinly grassed area that doubles as a soccer pitch—and the office of the headmistress is centrally located so that she may observe most of the surrounding activities. A group of American missionaries arrived at 7:30 on a Monday morning. Allison, their leader and administrator, met briefly with a head teacher of the school, then called the rest of the missionaries, several of whom were new to the program that year, to observe something “really interesting.” There, in the courtyard, most of the school’s five hundred students were assembled, lined up in sections organized by grade. The headmistress, shouting to be heard, instructed the children to “sing that Father Ibrahim song!” Missionaries the previous year had taught this song to Standard 5 (Grade 5) students (ages eleven through thirteen), who in turn had taught it to the rest of the school. Enthusiastically and dutifully, the students burst forth in singing, in English, at the top of their lungs: Father Ibrahim has seven sons, and seven sons has Father Ibrahim. I am one of them, and so are you, So let’s all praise the Lord!

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The students threw their left hands into an imaginary circle in front of them and shouted “left hand!” at the end of the first stanza. They shouted “left hand! right hand!” at the end of the second stanza and flung both hands, one after the other, into the air. By the end of the six stanzas they shouted “left hand! right hand! left leg! right leg! head! whole body!” and shook each of these body parts in turn. The students rippled with enthusiasm and glee. Their headmistress beamed. She was pleased that these public primary schoolchildren were speaking English and were so full of energy on this first day of the missionaries’ English language program. Faced with competition from private schools, which were attracting some of her best (and wealthiest) students, Headmistress Ulomi had contracted with evangelical Christian mission­ aries from the United States to teach a free English course during midyear break. She had tried to introduce English as the language of instruction in all classes at Musoma Primary, believing that English would prepare her students for future employment, but Tanzanian Ministry of Education regulations required that she continue conducting regular classes in Kiswahili, the national language. Her idea for this English course was being used at another, nearby public school where the same group of American missionaries had also been teaching for four years consecutively. The English program in both schools had been approved by district and regional authorities and was an exception to what was offered in most public schools in Tanzania. Technically, religious instruction was to be taught as a separate subject, not integrated into an academic lesson such as this English program— unless, as in this case, special terms had been negotiated. The missionaries were college students; most were from nondenominational Christian colleges in Texas and Tennessee. Some were preparing for careers in world evangelism and had come specifically to preach and convert, but most said they had come to fulfill service-learning requirements and teach English to young Tanzanians. The college students—white and middle class—were part of a group of Africans and Americans who called themselves the Zebra Team. African evangelists affiliated with a Bible college in Nairobi preached on Sundays, led prayer groups on Wednesdays, and like these U.S. students, spoke English fluently. A different configuration of the Zebra Team worked in eastern Uganda, where Americans and Africans also sought to educate and evangelize the community. When silence had settled on Musoma Primary’s soccer pitch, the head teacher invited the missionaries to take over. They divided the Standard 5 students (about seventy children) into six groups of roughly equal numbers of boys and girls. Three groups went to different parts of the exterior courtyard, and three moved to the corners of the school’s assembly hall.

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One missionary moved with each group to each of the six activity centers (drama, games, songs, reading, conversation, and art), and two other missionaries—a male-female pair—stayed at each center to teach the center’s activity to the successive groups. This first day’s lesson was numbers, taught using the biblical creation story. At the reading center, one of the missionaries read the entire story, then asked each student to read a sentence aloud: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. On the first day, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” On the second day, God made the sky. He filled it with white, fluffy clouds. Below the clouds He placed a gentle rocking ocean. On the third day, God created dry land. He commanded the seeds in the ground to grow. The land was filled with trees, grass, and flowers. On the fourth day, God made the sun to warm the day. Then He made the moon and stars to brighten the sky. On the fifth day, God filled the oceans and rivers with swimming fish. He filled the sky with flying birds, and he filled the land with roaming animals. On the sixth day, God created something very special: a man in His own image. Man was given a special job too. He was to take care of the earth and all its creatures. On the seventh day, God looked at His creation and said, “It is good!” Then He rested.

The missionaries integrated the Bible story with the academic lessons but did not saturate the lessons with religious meaning or openly interpret the creation story. Their purpose was to use the creation narrative as a backdrop for more general lessons about counting and reading and speaking English, and thus to lay religion as the foundation for building the public edifice of education. They expressed their religious beliefs matterof-factly, including their belief that human history is divided into divinely ordered epochs, or dispensations, in which (as historian Richard Hughes writes about these nondenominational churches) “God used unique means to bring his rule to bear on the earth” (Hughes 1996: xii). East African churchgoers shared the missionaries’ faith in Jesus’ Second Coming, but they differed, as we shall see, in their view that blessings and offerings rather than godly dispensations marked and ushered in Jesus’ ministry. When the last Tanzanian student finished reading aloud, one of the missionaries instructed her to “strike the bell” (that is, to strike a hanging metal disc with a wooden rod), at which time each of the six groups moved to a different center. The Pink Flamingos (the missionaries had given each group of students a color-animal name) moved from the reading center to

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the conversation center. Here a missionary had written on the board, “Hi, how are you?” “Fine, thank you.” The students took turns reading the dialogue while standing in front of their peers. At first the Pink Flamingos’ participation was lackluster and mechanical, but when the missionaries changed the dialogue to “Hey, what’s up?” “Not much. You?” the exercise energized the group. Alex, the head teacher-missionary at the center, asked the Pink Flamingos, “Who would like to be a part of this exercise?” He called on Amina, a Muslim student wearing a head scarf, to read half of the dialogue. Amina stood in the front of the room with another student, Michael, and together they recited the dialogue, with difficulty at first. Alex corrected their pronunciation and encouraged them to continue. Amina and Michael repeated the exchange, much to the amusement of their classmates. Clearly everyone, including the missionaries, enjoyed this exercise. From the conversation center, the Pink Flamingos moved to the art center, where each student received two pieces of construction paper glued together, with seven doors cut into the upper sheet. The students numbered the doors one through seven and drew the day’s creation episode under each. A missionary reread the creation story and showed those who did not know what to draw how to order and sketch the days. The students were especially eager to use the crayons and felt-tipped pens that the missionaries had brought. They seemed little interested in counting in English, because most of them already knew how to do so. After completing the art activity, the Pink Flamingos rotated to the drama center, where they were given costumes. The costumes depicted images representing the days of creation and included hats and t-shirts to wear. All of the students participated by shouting out the sequence, “On the first day” this happened, “on the second day” that happened, “on the third day . . . ” and so on. Gaining confidence to the point that some of the missionaries began to wonder if the students were not becoming too rambunctious, the Pink ­Flamingos moved next to the games center, where they learned to play Pingle Mingle. In this game, the students milled around until one of the missionaryteachers called out a number—such as “Three!”—at which point the students quickly had to organize themselves into groups of that number and ­“mingle.” The girls mostly mingled separately from the boys, and the boys seemed to want to include as many students as possible, despite stating that they understood the number concept. From the games center, the Pink Flamingos moved to the songs center, where they learned several verses that involved counting. By 10:00 a.m. the session was finished and the students returned to their regular classes, which were taught in Kiswahili. The missionaries departed

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to have lunch at their director’s rented house (which some of them called “Little America” and saw as their home away from home). There, in the living room, Allison, as the missionaries’ leader, stressed the importance of engaging the students in “fun activities,” and most of the conversation among the group’s members revolved around what the Tanzanian students had seemed to enjoy most that morning. Allison advised the missionaries not to get carried away in using examples from American pop culture but to stay focused instead on examples that were “wholesome” and “universal.” Referring to such skits as “Hey, what’s up?” she cautioned that slang sometimes degenerates into vulgarities that they would not want to promote. Yet she also said that she thought Tanzanian students needed some “loosening up” and that their learning style was mechanical. At the end of the meeting, Allison asked George to pray for the missionaries’ work. (In these churches, men typically led group prayer; women would do so if only women and children were present.) Everyone then moved to the dining room for lunch before going to Kikweli Public Primary School, where they offered a similar version of the creation story lesson.

Preaching While Teaching? On the face of it, this account of evangelical missionaries’ use of the creation story to teach English may seem parochial—concerned with the activities of only a handful of missionaries working in two schools. However, between 1992 and 2001, the number of U.S. missionaries working internationally increased by about 16 percent (to 44,386), and financial support from the United States for such work increased to more than $3.8 billion dollars, up by about 45 percent from nine years earlier. Welliver and Northcutt (2004: 13), whose survey research documents these changes, note that from 1992 to 2001 a slight shift occurred “away from evangelism/discipleship activities toward education and relief/development activities.” In a follow-up study, Weber and Welliver (2007: 35) note a continuing increase through 2005 in the number of mission agencies reporting community development activities. In step with these trends, the public school English language program in which these evangelical student missionaries participated was just a small part of what the Zebra Team did. In town, the student missionaries tutored secondary school students; on weekends they built bed frames for a rural orphanage. With the Kenyans, they recruited people to church, which was held in a former clinic above a store on Main Street. Also, as illustrated ethnographically in later chapters, they performed similar projects elsewhere in Kenya and in Uganda.

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However, it is not just what the missionaries did but how they did it that was so powerful and carried force beyond specific classes or lessons. They established an unstated but particular orientation to learning in which religious value was embedded. They presented biblical texts as ordinary readings from which ordinary lessons might be drawn, and they reinscribed their claims that they were teaching Christianity with the argument that their lessons were universal. Put another way, these missionaries operated through a particularly Protestant belief in the power of the Bible to transform diverse peoples and save the world. As both English lesson and sociomoral cultivation, the creation story, as the missionaries taught it, involved the Tanzanian children in ideas and activities that included and excluded, and oriented and reoriented them to, old and new ideas and arguments, as well as particular communities, temporalities, and moralities. The missionaries taught aspects of the lesson didactically, that is, they used methods of direct instruction and call-and-response, for example, “Speak more clearly,” “Repeat after me,” and “You should raise your hand before you speak.” They used these phrases to urge acceptance of their lesson through social conformity. This didactic instruction, however, like proselytization, was the least of teaching or preaching in that greater inculcation occurred through lessons conveyed in everyday rituals. Like catechists’ kneeling and praying, or like an apprentice’s work with a master, the missionaries’ work was a matter of disposing the students to accept a particular moral authority; they were not so much preaching while teaching as organizing the social conditions of the students’ work. A long-standing tradition in anthropology has analyzed the inculcation of moral authority as a matter of adult generations creating homologous categories of value that structure habits and social practices. Drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics (“man . . . is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons,” from Part IV), sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977), for instance, developed the idea that moral predispositions are achieved by transposing various “techniques of the body” (a phrase previously attributed to Mauss 1973) onto parts of the entire social system.13 Bourdieu’s work, inflected from Durkheim (2008 [1912]), informed a revision of symbolic anthropology (itself associated with the work of Clifford Geertz) and illustrated how people imagine counter-representations of state, society, and culture through their bodies (that is, how they use their bodies metaphorically, as in, for example, talking about the “body politic”). Taking a more synesthetic approach to morality as “body sense” and “body learning,” Asad (1993: 76–77) proposes “inquiring into the ways in which embodied practices (including language in use) form a precondition for varieties of religious experience”; he suggests that in some contexts, “the inability to enter into communion

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with God becomes a function of untaught bodies.” Whereas Asad critiques symbolic anthropology (and particularly Geertz’s work) for its unreflective Christian borrowings, Saba Mahmood argues that anthropological conceptions of religious expression and human agency are narrowly grounded in a liberal-secular, not only privatized religious, tradition.14 Sam Kaplan (2006) extends this point by developing the concept of the “pedagogical state,” a phrase that captures well how governing interests implicitly craft and explicitly convey citizenship.15 These and other recent works (such as Benei 2008; Coe 2005; Hurtig 2009; Lukose 2009) reveal that education is much more than a tool for advancing individual achievement, more than an extension of the nationstate, more than the activities of schooling. It is as well, and in various contexts, a moral disposition, a habit that paradoxically both produces normative ideas and in many contexts contains a constructive language for critiquing the very forms it valorizes.16 Like ritual in some contexts—and for that matter, like some media17—pedagogic reasoning creates the many realities it also inscribes. Reading, writing, and arithmetic, for instance, provide tools for acting that include conceptual schemes for seeing and understanding the world; but education often juxtaposes social realities that sit uneasily in relation to one another. Despite the conventions that formal schooling sets up, it often articulates a diversity of views—including views about the scope and limits of schooling and about how religion should be understood and taught. Studies within the field of education— particularly those that see schools as agents of change—sometimes overlook this unstable and paradoxical quality of education. Many researchers have reproduced in their writings an unreflexive liberal secular faith in schools—a faith that includes assumptions about the need for and inevitability of separating private religion from public life. Many have also put their faith in the hope that schooling can draw out and change inequalities, as though schooling can solve all problems everywhere and all the time. To avoid the mistake of applying a Eurocentric historical framework of public education and private religion to ethnographic and textual materials—and to avoid this mistake without discounting the liberal-secular premises on which anthropological analysis stands—the arguments in this ethnography have been derived from the empirical contexts the book analyzes. What must be theorized and stated at the outset, I maintain, is that secular-modern ideas of schooling, which evangelical Christians work within yet also seek to change, stand on a foundational myth that is also at the core of social theory.

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A Secular-Modern Creation Story If the biblical creation story is a foundational text that authorizes a religious cosmos, the secular-modern world has, as it were, similar authorizing stories. I tell one of these stories here to illustrate a conceptual premise that missionaries fought against (but of which, in the grand scheme of things, they were also historical products) and I use this story again later to show how evangelical missionaries and East Africans remoralize the secular-modern nation-state. To tell this story, I adopt a register that is intentionally schematic. Other writers have detailed the history, and from their work I distill an armature of concepts to convey the main historicalcultural themes. The story goes like this: Once upon a time, somewhere in Europe, a couple of hundred years ago, the idea came to pass that ordinary people, not kings or queens, should determine the rules of the land. One philosopher who influenced this thinking lay sick and resting in bed for days. Réné Descartes spent a lot of time looking at his ceiling—a grid on which he charted and developed a theory of analytic geometry and a theory of mind and matter. The two theories were related. Philosophers of the time—and later philosophers—were keen to see relational patterns that conjoined the logical realm of the mathematical world with the experiential realm of everyday life. The integration of space and time across the intersecting x-axis and y-axis of Descartes’ patterned ceiling became a model or template for comparing seemingly orthogonal and homologous categories of social life. Among these comparisons were private belief and public action, religion and empirical reality, and sacredness and secularity. The terms of such paired categories were inversely related; the presence of one gave way to the paired other. For instance, as secularity grew, religion waned; and as reality became more rationally understood or empirically known, private belief in the sacred changed. However, the inverse relationship of these homologous pairs also occurred at a point of rational logic. Descartes’ dictum “I think, therefore I am” connected the categories of thought and action and, in the grand historical scheme of all things European, from Descartes’ era of enlightenment to the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, lent support for ­antimonarchist movements and antipapist revolutions. Thinking people, not sovereign royalty, could deliberate and fix the laws—or as the case may be (specifically the Puritans and the Cromwellian revolution in England), thinking people could interpret the Bible and “read God’s word” as authorization to disestablish the monarch-headed state and its church. Education was an important part of this emergent secular-modernity— secular not because religion disappeared (as religious groups today sometimes portray) but because religious expression was regarded as the private

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right of an individual to worship, a matter of choice or of birth that typically centered on the family; and modern because the thinkers and leaders pressing for this form of governance admitted the public value of a plurality of beliefs and did not see public life as based inevitably on tradition (although most did believe in the superior qualities of Christianity and built these qualities into public law). So-called men of letters (literally men at first) articulated these new views, but like monarchs they needed a populist following (or perhaps more positively put, they recognized the inherent value of enlightenment). So the “technologies of power” (Foucault 1977b: 156, 159)—foremost among them reading and writing, and logical reasoning—that authorized the literati were shared and given out (in some form) to the masses by coordinating large nation-state forms of formal education that could bind citizens and subjects to territory. It was predicted that mass education would usher in a new age or era of human progress, that reason would displace superstition and myth in educating the masses, that reading would expand private horizons in the interest of testing and improving personal belief, and that writing would codify a social order that could be governed objectively and rationally through citizens’ informed consent to live by the logical and necessary rules of law and market. Moreover, this functional integration of education with religion as an intellectual technology, as a way of thinking that could shore up a social order, was also to have provided a neat calculation for characterizing—and making—history. It was to have described Europe’s historical process of modernization and to have provided a road map for colonizing and developing the rest of the world. In the famous, perhaps infamous, words of John Stuart Mill, whose philosopher father had worked in the British East India Office, reason and the free exchange of ideas applied “only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties” and not to non-Europeans, whom Mill perceived as caught in an “anterior” time (Mill 1993 [1859]: 78–79). Mill and others advocated for education as a means for preparing so-called backward and uncivilized people for self-governance. Among these people he included those whom the British were colonizing—Indians and South Asians, First Nations people and Native Americans, Africans, and some New World groups. Mill’s words inspired a civilizing mission associated with a stream of ecumenical churches (or what the evangelical churches about which I write would later call “liberal churches”),18 and they informed more than a century and a half of colonial and development policies that conceived schools as institutions through which to train people to work and buy in a cash economy.19 Post-Second World War development planners in the capitalist West and the Communist bloc associated schooling with the eradication of poverty and superstition, and modernity with cognitive advancement and

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individuals’ self-improvement. Sociologist Alex Inkeles’ modernity scale articulates criteria for identifying an educated, modern subject, including “independence from the authority of traditional figures like parents and priests and a shift of allegiance to leaders of government, public affairs, trade unions, cooperatives, and the like” (1974: 9). Schooling, Inkeles indicates, was the key to advancing secular-modernity.

Secular-Modernity and Beyond The secularization thesis remains ever salient in many of today’s international policies, especially those pertaining to education in countries outside the G8.20 A 2003 Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy paper noted that “habits and conventions based upon superstition and myths . . . must be subtly excised by sustained education and demonstration.”21 A 2005 World Bank article stated that a health education manager working in East Timor labored “tirelessly for nearly 20 years to change centuries-old habits of superstition, ignorance and harmful health practices.”22 Secular-modern faith in schools also emerged in comparative models of education that regarded educated persons as those who make decisions freely on the basis of principles of market choice (see, for example, Chubb and Moe 1990; Tooley, Dixon, and Stanfield 2003), and among sociologists and anthropologists who advocated studying education as a means for improving democracy.23 In a nutshell, secular-modern faith was a master-narrative in schools across much of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was, and remains, as I make plain in Chapter Three, a narrative around which cultural anthropology as a discipline developed. Yet as any number of scholars have discussed, there were many holes in the story’s evidence. The problem was that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as secular-modernity expands—did not even characterize much of the West. Rather, it subsumed different histories into a single narrative of Christianity, and often took thin measures of church attendance as evidence of religious belief (compare van der Veer 2001: 14–16). In the United States, the separation of church from state did not minimize religion’s political significance, and in parts of Europe, including England, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, the displacement of monarchs did not result in a disestablished church. The secularization thesis described even less well concepts of religion and education in non-Christian contexts, where religion was, and largely remains, integrated differently into aspects of social life, and where formal schooling historically was associated with colonialism and imperialism, not with liberty and freedom. Scholars working in the postcolonial

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and subaltern traditions made these points clear (for example, Chakrabarty 2000; Mudimbe 1988; Ngũgï wa Thiong’o 1981). To evangelical Christians, the secular-modern narrative was a conceit of human agency. God, not people, enlightened and educated, and delivered people from poverty and damnation. This general belief dovetailed well with East Africans’ concepts of the religious and pedagogic. In that region, religion and education had long gone hand-in-hand, if ever they were separated. Well before Europe’s carving up of the subcontinent, for instance, Muslim missionaries were converting Africans to Islam and setting up networks of schools, mosques, and charities across the continent (Levtzion and Pouwels 2000). These missionaries made no distinction between private religion and public life—nor did most, if any, African communities that Islamic leaders converted, married into, or led. A hundred years later, the British Colonial Office offered both Christian and Muslim groups grants-in-aid for education. Although many European ethnologists of the time denied the existence of Islamic missionary activity (da‘wah) and the effects of Christians in promoting reading, writing, and numeracy—preferring instead to emphasize African animism and prelogic—other anthropologists documented a rich pedagogic quality to life in Africa (for example, Evans-Pritchard 1937; Turner 1967). These latter scholars describe systems of apprenticeship and principles of rationality embedded in the activities and signs of Africans’ everyday and ceremonial lives. Their work argues against any simple differentiation between thinking and action, or between knowledge and faith; teaching and learning and ritual and knowledge were an integral part of precolonial and colonial African societies. At the same time, by the late twentieth century it was difficult, when speaking about social life in Africa, to deny institutional distinctions between religion and education. As the epistemological and discursive premises of political sociability and social memory shifted worldwide (not least with the dismantling of the Soviet Union), and as Europe’s past became seen as particular only to itself and not as a model that paved the way for modernization everywhere, the history of secular-modern faith in schools in Africa was likewise reassessed. By the 1990s, the European colonial system of education was remembered in divergent ways: nostalgically, as superior to the contemporary independent system (a view held by some colonially educated African leaders who bemoaned the presentday state of schools); critically, as ethnocentric and culturally rapacious in teaching Africans “European” ways (a view held, perhaps paradoxically, by some U.S. missionaries and Africans on the Zebra Team who also called themselves feminist, on which more is said later); and skeptically, as training ground for independent African leaders who politically and economi-

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cally favored Western values and discriminated against non-Christians (a view held by some Muslims in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda who sought greater representation in schools and government). Among the latter group were moderate leaders—hardly the radicalized core that the Western presses imagined as the public voice of Islamist protest—who considered that the biggest disadvantage to Muslims politically and economically was their lack of education, a disadvantage that was a legacy of systematic exclusion (whether direct or not, Muslims recognized both) from colonial and independent schools administered by Christians.24 Many of these skeptics were wary that American evangelicals were swaying Muslim youth. Christianity, they said, was playing a soft game of conversion in East African public settings; it was luring people through jobs and opportunities to enroll in free vocational programs run by Christians. To counter these effects, some Muslim groups began to set up similarly charitable programs. Indeed, the same year that American evangelical missionaries began working in Tanzanian schools (1999), a Shia Muslim group established a vocational school for youth. Funded by online donations from around the world, this Muslim mission was staffed by teachers and clerics from the Middle East. The Muslim response pointed out the potential for youth education efforts to be polarized along geopolitical and religious lines. With these fields of skepticism and geopolitics in play, and with independence-era East African leaders in positions to reject American missionaries’ work, one might wonder how American missionaries gained or maintained any presence in the region. Although the creation story lesson presented earlier introduces how American evangelical missionaries worked in two particular schools, it does not illustrate how missionaries in general prepared the field and went about working in the area. To gain an initial picture of their approach and of their technique of Christian witness, let’s turn to an episode of pamphleteering and planning.

Preparing the Field I became aware firsthand of the use of anthropology in evangelism, and of evangelism as a form of participant-observation and service-learning, when in the course of seeking permission from U.S. nondenominational church leaders to conduct fieldwork among their missionaries in Tanzania I was told, “Yes, we would love to have you; we need an anthropologist to teach us about Chagga culture.” That was June 2002 and I have since wondered what I actually contributed. I provided a list of ethnographies, including my own book Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro, which details the history and culture of Chagga-speaking peoples on and around the

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mountain; but the missionaries already seemed to know most of the concepts described in the published works and to want something more than what I could offer. I felt a bit unable to reciprocate their generous agreement to allow me to live with them and observe their work. My primary goal at the time as well as in subsequent visits was to understand the cultural politics that allowed American evangelicals to teach in East African public schools—not only in private schools, as religious groups had done for years, but also now in government-funded public schools. I was aware then, as I am now, that studying Christian evangelism carried a degree of risk of getting caught in the cross fire of easy (but often unwarranted) antagonism between anthropologists and missionaries. Historically, anthropologists and missionaries have held mutually negative attitudes even though the field of anthropology bears the legacy of missionaries’ ethnographic contributions.25 Missionaries have long maintained that anthropologists overlook the real and deeply held religious tenets of adherents and favor instead analyses of (human, not godly) signification of religious meanings. Anthropologists have in turn regarded Christian evangelism as an instrument of conquest and subjugation, seeing missionaries’ work as unwittingly ethnocentric. I wanted to avoid this kind of back-and-forth and focus instead on the larger processes by which evangelism and anthropology have combined in the work of missionaries and East Africans, and through this combination to probe more deeply the cultural conceptions of religion and education that have informed conceptual frameworks within cultural anthropology. I also wanted to understand whether—and if so, how—missionaries’ micropractices linked with and reinscribed new moral geographies at different levels of scale—local, regional, and global-political—and thus needed to understand East Africans’ handling of missionaries. Within hours of unpacking my belongings at the hostel near Musoma School where missionaries stayed, I sat bouncing on a half-broken seat at the back of a daladala (minivan bus), traveling from the regional capital to an outlying market area at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. Kenyan popular music blared from staticky speakers bolted to the dashboard. (The Tanzanian youth who staffed these buses loved to listen to loud Kenyan pop music.) The conductor, wearing flip-flop shoes, dangled his legs from the open door, tapped shilling coins between his fingers, and shouted to prospective passengers, Sokoni! Sokoni! which means “Market! Market!”—the daladala’s destination. The van was packed, with a few passengers sitting atop one another, and the road, though paved, was full of holes and bumps, many deeply felt in this shock-shot vehicle. This was life, and wonderfully so, for on this particular day we did not have to walk. A huge diesel-spewing truck barreled around the bus, passing barely ahead of a blind spot. Above its rear bumper was inscribed the message

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Inshallah—“God willing”; the rest of the sentiment, “we will get there,” was implicit in its shorthand. A few (more explicitly optimistic) stickers were donned our own daladala’s ceiling and seatbacks—“If God is for us, who can be against us?” “My Redeemer lives,” and “My God will supply all your needs”—all in English. Not unusual, such messages bade passengers safari njema—“safe journey”—over what were heavily trafficked and often unsafe roads. The choice of language (Arabic and English) for the blessings differentiated Muslim-owned from Christian-owned transport companies, but not necessarily passengers’ religious affiliations. I was traveling this day with Allison (who had organized the mission­ aries at Musoma School described earlier), en route to a site where she and other missionaries were planning to distribute pamphlets. The pamphlets invited people to enroll in a free Bible study correspondence course. Those who took the course would fill out and mail in worksheets based on Bible stories they had read, and the missionaries would return the corrected worksheets, also by mail. The course materials, which had been developed through the World Bible School (WBS) in Cedar Park, Texas, had been used for decades in parts of Uganda and Kenya to connect American churchgoers with Africans. This year (2002) was the first time that information on the course was being distributed to Tanzanians in this area. Allison shouted above the blasting daladala music that she had joined this mission group the year they first came to Tanzania and had been instrumental in developing the content of the English course. Born in Africa (she was a missionary kid, MK for short, as MKs put it), she planned to work as a full-time missionary, sponsored by her hometown church in Louisiana, after she graduated from college. Her job this summer was to see that the curriculum was delivered in full to Tanzanian students. The year would be difficult, she said, because a district-wide census would be going on during part of the time the missionaries were scheduled to teach (indicating, I thought, that the missionaries’ work must not have been everyone’s priority), but the group would nonetheless be able to condense the curriculum and work more effectively than it had in previous years. How, I asked, had U.S. missionaries come to work in Tanzanian government schools? Allison replied that initially district and regional officials had rejected the missionaries’ project on grounds that missionary work was a form of proselytizing. The missionaries were not allowed to teach because they could not, Tanzanian administrators argued, teach without preaching. The missionaries’ presence in public schools, these officials said, would be construed as an inducement to religion. Eventually, however, the missionaries prevailed—largely on the basis of underlying shared religious views (most officials were Christian) and by agreeing only to use religion as a medium and not to deliver it as their message.

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“We have gotten permission from all of the education offices in the district—you know, the district education office, the regional education office—and from the offices down in Dar es Salaam [the capital city] to do this. And since everybody in our program, since we’re all students learning about the world and helping out voluntarily, we don’t have to worry about work permits or anything like that. We can’t teach the New Testament, but we can use the Old Testament, since that won’t offend the Muslims.” The daladala stopped. Allison and I climbed over the seats and disembarked near a wooden kiosk. There, Francis and Jonathan, two other U.S. missionaries, were waiting. Francis handed out pamphlets, and the three missionaries set about their task semi-independently. Jonathan extended a couple of pamphlets to a group of men repairing a muffler. One of them looked up and distractedly accepted a copy with a rather perfunctory thank-you. Another said, Nimesha pata Mungu, “I have already gotten God,” in what seemed a sincere and honest voice, although to be sure biting humor runs deep in the form of understatement in this area. Another person, a forty-plus-year-old woman waiting for a ride, looked curiously at the missionaries (and yes, at me). At Francis’s prompting, she took a copy, and Francis explained in Kiswahili that the missionaries were inviting people to enroll in a Bible course so they would have the opportunity to study and read the word of God. Having lived in Tanzania for more than three years, Francis’s Kiswahili was fairly good. The woman thanked him and introduced herself, in English, as a teacher at a primary school located just up the road. On learning that these missionaries were in town to teach English but that their program had been temporarily placed on hold, she invited Francis and others to come and teach the children at her public school. “Maybe your students can come and teach our students English for a day.” While Francis and this teacher negotiated the details (which resulted in the missionaries teaching a half-day crash course at the school the following week), Allison and Jonathan continued to distribute leaflets to people in the area. One woman Allison approached asked if she could receive a new Bible, because hers was old and worn (I translated). Francis stepped in to suggest that this woman come to the church to pick up a copy herself. The woman replied that she would not likely get there soon—she was a farmer with little bus fare to spare (and she held out her hand in obvious request for a few coins)—nor did she or anyone else with whom we spoke know where the church was located. “On Main Street,” explained Francis, but this woman still did not know. Nor was her coded request for a bit of spare change met with a handout by the missionaries. Two hours passed and the missionaries were out of pamphlets. Allison and I resumed our conversation over lunch. “Is the English program you

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offer optional? Do you ask parents for permission to teach their children?” I asked. Allison answered candidly: Basically we don’t. We talk to the school administrators, the headmistress or headmaster of the school, and we tell them, this is what we’re going to be doing. A lot of times we give them an advertisement that they can hand out to the parents. The children are free to come to this at any time they want to. If they decide after a few days that they don’t want to come to the program, they don’t have to. We don’t force them. And there have been a few parents that have pulled their kids out and said no, they don’t need to do this.

“And why would they say that?” The ones that have done that have been mainly Muslim and they’ve been afraid that we’re going to try and convert their children. And um, personally, I think it’d be great if we could, but that’s not something we’re trying to force, because that won’t help anybody. Basically, more parents are advising their children or enrolling their children in this program, simply because of the English that they’ll get.26

She was right. From what I gathered later in talking with parents and teachers at Musoma and Kikweli Public Primary Schools, many supported English language instruction regardless of whether it was taught by U.S. missionaries. More than a dozen of the students who had sung “Father Ibrahim” on that first day of the short course were Muslim, and despite the use of Old Testament stories in that course, most of the Tanzanian parents said the point of the course was to help their children develop skills in conversational English, not to teach Christianity. However, there is a fine line between teaching and preaching, instructing and converting, as Allison herself indicated in saying that the missionaries were not proselytizing but it would be “great” if Tanzanians could be converted. What exactly did Allison see as the difference between proselytizing and trying to draw people into her religion? Where did she draw the line between religion and education—or did she? On the one hand, she acknowledged a difference between using the Old Testament to teach English and preaching—a difference she at least agreed to recognize and a line she agreed not to step across for purposes of conforming to officials’ requirements. On the other hand, she suggested that her summer’s work and her life’s ambition were to convert students to Christianity. Her two positions were not necessarily contradictory. As Tanya Luhrmann (2007: 24) notes, “individuals deploy many frames in response to [different] social cues”; but Allison’s positions about “always and yet never converting people” drew skepticism from some Tanzanians,27 and the seeming contradiction of using the Bible to teach but yet not convert students opened the missionaries’ project to questions

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about their purpose and mode of operation—and about whether they were being secretive and deceptive in their work. I say more later (see Chapter Four) about secrecy and deception on and around Mount Kilimanjaro, but for now I wish to underscore the need to examine the religion-education imbrication and its transposition across different yet mutually transforming historical and cultural registers. Such an examination is necessary if we are to understand how missionaries, evangelists, parents, and pupils direct the terms of education and religion to meet their own social objectives, thereby reconstituting the semantic field of state, nation, and civil society.

Two Sides of a Coin: Religion and Education As this conversation and the pamphleteering indicate, religion and education feed off one another in a powerful way, both in the work of these missionaries and in the lives of many Africans, including the work of the primary school teacher who convinced the missionaries to teach a half-day at her school. In East Africa, religion is regarded as permeating more of everyday life than in the United States; that is, it is not always regarded as cordoned off in the space of the personal or the private (of course it is not thought to be so everywhere in North America). Yet, to be sure, there are laws that stipulate the limits of religious expression. “The right to freedom of religion,” writes Tanzanian legal scholar Florens Luoga, “is qualified in Article 19 [of the Tanzanian Bill of Rights] to prevent the use of religion as a tool for encroaching upon, or taking over, State power” (Luoga 1998: 41). Yet religious belief, and its open expression, is integral to everyday social life. Many Christians pray before a meal, whether in a restaurant or at home. In urban areas, the call to prayer for Muslims is heard five times a day, often from a publicly audible loudspeaker. The project of understanding how moral geographies are formed through missionaries’ movements involves more than a recourse to elucidating the hybrid cultural forms that integrate cultural elements from different religious traditions or that compare and contrast curriculum and instruction in multiple educational settings. It also involves grasping the complex entanglements of ritual and pedagogy. Anthropological research on religion and politics has shifted away from concentrating on the relation of ritual to the production of social order (see Bloch 1989 [1979]; Dumont 1970; Rigby 1968) and toward examining the significance of religion in the context of transnational movements and new state formations (see, for example, Bramadat 2000; Eickelman 1992; Rutz 1999). Usefully, most of this recent work conceives of religious belief and knowledge production broadly rather than in narrow institutional terms. Yet there is a missed

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opportunity, I argue—one that is perhaps hidden by the history of anthropology itself—for seeing religion and pedagogy as folding into one another and at times being indistinguishable. Understanding actors’ competing attempts to reconstitute moral-social orders involves introducing a dialectical framework between religion and education, a dialectic by which religion and education functionally integrate and derive their meaning from one another, even as they at times stand as antithetical coordinates. Such a framework stresses that when people engage with those they perceive as other, they objectify and distinguish their perceived cultural differences in the very processes of contact.28 How objectification and distinction occur in this engagement and how missionary activity makes visible various relationships involving religion and education in parts of the United States and East Africa are at the core of my project here. The challenge of course is to understand the religion-education imbrication without reproducing the polarizing discourses that play religion off of secularism. The polarization of religion versus secularism—and of various religions around the world, notably Christianity and Islam— found renewed currency in the media and in world politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. Evangelical Christians in the United States, for instance, supported the study of creationism against theories of evolution in public schools. Hindu nationalists in India called for the abolishment of school reform movements that had been designed to promote caste equality. Islamic groups in Sudan, Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere required the consideration of religious practices in the formation and implementation of education policies. Pope Benedict implored Europeans to get rid of their secular ways, declaring much of the rest of the world to be already postsecular. Religion, it seemed, was on many people’s minds, and many held it to be the opposite of secularism. However, the problem analytically, then as now, was not so much how to theorize conflict (between Muslims and Christians, or secularists and believers, or American missionaries and African evangelists, and so forth) but to theorize and make evident “the existence of pressures and forces that sustain, bolster, and invigorate this prejudicial polarizing discourse,” as Kelly Askew has noted of related tensions between “Arabs” and “Africans” in Tanzania (2002: 54–55).

The Argument In the following pages I elucidate how religion and education are talked about simultaneously as different and as one and the same. I describe and analyze when, how, and by whom a line, distinction, or complementarity

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is made, and when, how, and by whom it is not. This analysis adds a new dimension to anthropological studies both of religion and of education, and indeed breaks down these subdivisions—not only by questioning and conjoining conceptual divides but also by pointing out how anthropological studies across the board have retained a narrow vision of education as a field that promotes one kind of modernity. Education remains identified in much anthropological analysis as state driven and rational—as laying the foundation for secular-modern citizenship. This association, I insist, carries a hidden historicist argument in that it regards education as a catalyst for a particular kind of (progressive, secular, modern) change. Although it is not the final argument of antisecularization critiques in anthropology (such as Asad 2003; Meyer 2004; van der Veer 2001), the association of education with modernity, and of religion with challenges to secularization, has had an effect within anthropology of reproducing a religion-education, privatepublic divide such that education is recurrently seen in anthropological critiques as something that the state imposes, and religion is recurrently seen as that which challenges state secularism. The situation, however, is not so simple. Social reality rarely is. Emphasizing the mutuality of belief and thought rather than seeing religion and education as orthogonal categories is crucial, I argue, for understanding ongoing culture wars as continuously made products of human interests that claim universality over other also universalizing cultural forms (and not for seeing such culture wars as stereotypical clashes of civilizations or as fundamental conflicts of secular and religious views). Such is the story of this ethnography, then: the story of how missionaries, evangelists, teachers, and students—no less than (and often as) policy­ makers, politicians, and development workers—reconstitute the domain of state, society, and culture through their myriad and competing schools of faith. In this work, faith is thus multifaceted and cross-cutting. Faith in Schools captures the inseparable relation between religion and education, and highlights the intersection of various religious, secular, liberal democratic, and cultural conceptions of educational institutions as privileged places for learning, contemplation, discussion, and social critique. As such, it’s about how schooling serves as a site of hope for reshaping the present and preparing the future.

Notes on Method: On Being There . . . and There . . . and There To study how and when religion and education are entwined, I carried out research in no fewer than six places: in Kilimanjaro Region,

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Tanzania, where I have worked as an anthropologist on field projects intermittently for more than fifteen years and where I first became aware of the East African regional work of nondenominational Christian groups; in Nairobi and western Kenya, where nondenominational churches center their training of East African evangelists; at a location in Uganda, where nondenominational churches support computer training and a private secondary school; and at three nondenominational colleges in the southern United States from which many of the most active American missionaries to East Africa come. Observations and interviews for this work spanned the years 2000 to 2006. The three sites in East Africa are each in their own way linked through political-economic complexes that span many generations. Nineteenthcentury trade routes connect the sites, as does a spirit-possession regime (cwezi-kubandwa) whose mediums have blessed and cursed leaders and lands. Cwezi-kubandwa—a nexus of beliefs and practices revolving around spiritual forces (cwezi) to which specially initiated people may become attached as mediums (compare Berger 1973: 1)—is geographically fluid.29 In northern Tanzania, around Mount Kilimanjaro, cwezi-kubandwa appears to have been highly modified in that spirit mediumship was acquired ad hoc rather than through a complex initiation ceremony, and only a few deities prevailed. In western Kenya, in an area that historians sometimes call a “Bantu borderland,” where Bantu-speaking Basoga and Nilotic-speaking Luo live, spirit possession is associated with cien (ancestral cursing) and chira (wasting as a consequence of being cursed), not with groups of hero gods.30 Despite variations across these sites, the general practice of “being mounted by spirits” (kupandwa na wazimu, as it is said in the regional language of Kiswahili) has the effect of connecting the worlds of the living and the dead and of creating a common cultural tapestry across this lacustrine and savannah region. Some East Africans today suggest that Christian concepts of the Holy Ghost are informed by these older ideas of cwezi-kubandwa and that baptism by immersion in these churches evokes deep cosmological concerns with health and healing. Others say that ongoing spirit possession is evidence of Satan’s work and that Christianity has not yet succeeded in routing out this form of evil. In either case, these East African conceptions of religiosity inform people’s understandings of the world today, including how they see their interests in the social and material environment around them. In Busoga, Uganda, a hydroelectric dam built in the 1950s marks a site of contested meaning, including contestations over the presence of an American company overseeing an upgrade and extension.31 Some people in Busoga see ancestral connections in the falls created by the dam, and some churchgoers (American and East African alike) see the whitewaters

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produced by nearby rapids as a source of spiritual power. Around Mount Kilimanjaro, new converts are baptized in the still waters of rivers flowing from the snowy mountain, which is itself considered to be the “seat” of Iruwa, the paramount ancestor to whom all are linked. The visible decrease in snow over the years, brought on by hardwood logging and climate change, has raised concern among some older generations about the future of this spiritual source and icon. In the churches of western Kenya, some Luo likewise associate rivers and lakes with a paramount deity (Were or Nyasaye) and regard the sacrifice of cattle, and more recently of large sums of money, as instrumental in ritually mediating between the living and the dead. A scarcity of wealth (bovine, monetary, or both) and the pollution of waterways by fertilizers, human waste, and in some places mining brings along concerns about the quality of communities’ health and welfare. People living in different places—the Chagga around Mount Kilimanjaro, the Luo in Nairobi and in Nyanza Province (Kenya), and the Basoga at the source of the Nile (Uganda)—all express these anxieties. However, because I am interested in exploring the cultural dynamics that tie together transnational communities—specifically the many ways that missionary circuits come to redefine the sociomoral geographies of East Africans, American missionaries, and African evangelists—this book is organized not around a particular people living or working in a particular place but around ideas about religion and education that are carried by people across locations. As Ulf Hannerz (2003) puts it—and I take the title of this section from his work—being there and there and there, as it were, is not a matter of being everywhere all at once but of linking places, people, and time through people’s ideations and experiences. In East Africa I focused on what missionaries did and on community reactions to the missionaries’ work. In Kilimanjaro Region I observed missionaries’ activities in two public primary schools, where I also interviewed teachers and numerous parents. I met with Tanzanian education officials and with Tanzanian community members who were familiar with the mission. I joined the missionaries on their journeys on foot and by bus around the town to recruit new members to their church (including on the pamph­leteering campaign just discussed), and I lived in the same guest hostel as the missionaries, where I sometimes joined them for morning prayers and observed as they tutored and talked with students after school. I also attended Bible studies and Sunday morning services at a nondenominational church, and interviewed and visited Kenyan evangelists working in Tanzania and later corresponded with them regularly by e-mail. In ­Nairobi I first worked through an assistant, Kristin Phillips, who conducted interviews with faculty at Nairobi Bible College and visited and observed a church-sponsored primary school in western Kenya.

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I later ­analyzed ­Nairobi Bible College’s mission textbooks and curricula with an eye toward understanding how world evangelism is understood and taught. I visited a nondenominational church—one of the main churches affiliated with the American mission group—and observed the community around it—a gentrifying area of new professionals and of recently renovated apartment buildings. In Uganda I attended a prayer meeting led by a senior American missionary. I participated in a baptismal and regular Sunday service, where I spoke with parishioners about their experiences with the church. I later visited a newly built secondary school sponsored by a U.S. Christian university, and I researched aspects of U.S. missionaries’ accounts of this school posted on a public-access Web site. Benjamin ­Twagira assisted in aspects of my research in Uganda. In the United States I focused on university programs that sponsored mission work abroad, with the goal of understanding how missionaries are trained so that I might better understand their work in East Africa. I also focused on the views of missionaries’ professors about U.S. and international politics, with the goal of ascertaining whether—and if so, how— national support for faith-based initiatives in recent years in the United States informed this church’s mission. I visited and interviewed faculty of world missions at two universities in Texas, and I visited and interviewed faculty of missions at a Christian university in Tennessee. I met and interviewed two missionaries in the United States whom I had met in Tanzania (college students who returned to Tanzania each summer to teach in public schools) and I checked out the textbook stores at each of the universities I visited, and analyzed course-related public-access Web pages that provided information on missions programs. In Texas I attended three separate congregations’ Sunday services, to try to understand the variations between them; and I visited local Christian bookstores and reading rooms that had cropped up in the neighborhoods surrounding the universities. Also in Texas I visited a regional archive at a state university to gain a broader sense of the history of this nondenominational church, and I attended a Sunday prayer meeting, where I listened to conversation about Christian families as the core of global missions. In view of the political and sometimes popular association of missionary work with American empire-building—and considering the framing of faith workers as frontline combatants in U.S. faith-based policy32—it seemed important to me to document and understand the on-the-ground work of American missionaries in East Africa. Certainly there is no simple or direct relationship between missionary work and imperialism (Endfield 2006), but historically Western empire and Christian evangelism have long been intertwined (Gould 2005: 40; Mastnak 2002). Most research on Christian evangelism in sub-Saharan Africa has focused on the transforming

28

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effects of British colonial civilizing missions.33 Less often told has been the story of American religious missions to sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in contemporary times; and when it has been told, the analytic assumption has typically been that what Americans “export” evangelically is what people in parts of Africa “take up.”34 Yet this is not the case. In the light of a wealth of ethnographic and historical accounts of African Christians’ command of missionary work and of independent churches (for example, Hodgson 2005; Spear and Kimambo 1999; Summers 2003), it seems important to tell the story of where and how missionaries’ work is taken up and where and how it is not. Conducting field research on and with missionaries was an ethically challenging anthropological task, both professionally and personally. Professionally, anthropologists hold that social actors have “knowledge and strategies that should be explored, without commenting on their value or validity” (Sardan 2005: 9). Yet when I began the project I knew I held anti-missionary sentiment: I did not agree that missionaries should be foot soldiers of American policy. I did not like American expansionist rhetoric or the making of faith into a public aspect of service work and policy. However, I came to see through friendships with East Africans that some East Africans took a different view, and I learned from working with missionaries that there was no single missionary regime. The words of Terence Ranger struck me as instructive for beginning to understand my own anthropological conceits. Ranger advised anthropologists to avoid “the danger of mere point-scoring in the old battle of evangelists versus ethnographers, whose own encounter with indigenous society is ironic enough in itself” (1987: 183). These are reasonable words in view of the fact that my own research would lead me to see how missionaries use anthropology for Christian witness, how anthropology bears the legacy of Western Christianity, and how anthropology and Christianity continue to inform one another despite astute deconstructions of their genealogies (Asad 1993). As is often noted, philosopher Paul Valéry (1958: 58) once stated, “there is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.” For me, that autobiography is materialized in a mundane and even degraded object (although I find this object fascinating): a trashcan made of sisal. The trashcan came from a great-uncle I never met, a missionary to Liberia. It sits under a desk in my house and is faded and fraying at the rim. I always considered it—or more to the point, I always considered my Bible-stumping great uncle’s life—perplexing and curious. How, I wondered, could a person go and preach in a distant land and do so in good faith? I did not trust him, did not believe him, yet he was part of my extended family. Eventually, and perhaps in the spirit of anthropologizing

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everything by way of trying to make sense of a crazy world, I came to see my great uncle’s work as part of a cultural strand of American life worth investigating. Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing drove this point home to me. Tocqueville had identified the importance of religion to American politics as early as the 1830s, when the evangelical Christian groups I study here were beginning to organize, including a group from which my great uncle’s church derived. “On my arrival in the United States,” wrote Tocqueville (1840 [1990]: 308), “the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things.” The story across much of the next century and a half was to be one in which religion and politics were irregularly interwoven. The story of the era in which this book is written is one of the growing presence of religion in public life, including in public schools. Identifying the sea change that makes it possible for American missionaries to teach and preach in public settings—how it happens, and to what effect, in parts of both the United States and East Africa—is a major focus of this work. I have been affected deeply by this research and by the fifteen-plus years I have lived and worked on and off with East African friends, especially those living in the Kilimanjaro area, and more recently by Kenyan, Ugandan, and American missionaries and evangelists working in East Africa. What I choose to focus on here reflects the social networks into which these people and groups have led me. It also reflects a notable lack (but not total absence) of access to Muslim communities. These networks map out a geography that is heterotopic and ever changing. In tracing this geography, I hope to show that the interconnection of education and religion is more complicated than is often imagined, to offer practitioners and policy­makers food for praxis and reflection, and to invite readers to be more critical in identifying the contradictions and limits of educational programs and policies that sometimes promise to do a lot but cannot, and even perhaps should not, do all that they say.

Structure of the Book The organization of this book mirrors the movement of American missionaries to East Africa but does not conclude with a return, as it were, back home. These missionaries come from many starting points. Some hail from the United States, others from East Africa; some identify themselves as East Africans, most as Americans; and the directionality of missionary work, as we shall see, is increasingly intended to be two-way, although to be sure it moves mainly from the United States abroad.

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Part One looks at how religion and education have been presented in the history of nondenominational churches, drawing on the works of historians and missiologists of (and in some cases in) these churches. Chapter Two includes a history of the nineteenth century, when many of today’s nondenominational evangelical churches were formed. The history of debate in nondenominational churches about whether people or God will usher in “a final golden age”—a debate that turns fundamentally on different understandings of education and religion, of humanity and divinity—illustrates how nondenominational leaders’ representations resonate with the ideals of “teaching without preaching” embedded in faith-based policies. Chapter Three examines how university faculty and teachers of religion in the United States draw on anthropology as a field of study to inform their work. It analyzes anthropology texts, syllabi, programs, and theses developed and written by teachers and students of missions, and includes discussion of how mission anthropology and cultural anthropology inform, and depart from, one another. Part One sets the stage for work presented in Part Two. How are religion and education thought about in places where U.S. nondenominational practitioners work? How is mission work reconceptualized, as it were, by those who engage it in the field, including U.S. missionaries and East African evangelists themselves?35 More broadly, what are the various organizing principles and concepts that people bring to understanding and enacting religion and education? Chapters Four, Five, and Six examine these questions through focused exploration of three sites. Chapter Four explores how education is deployed to attract new converts to the church. It draws on recent studies in the anthropology of religion to highlight tensions between the meanings of teaching and preaching, and it queries the relation of religion to education by analyzing arguments about language as an indicator of identity and as a marketable skill. Chapter Five looks at how education is mobilized to resolve conflict. It begins with analysis of programming at a Nairobi Bible college, including a course subtitled “Preparing the Student for Christian Battle,” and it uses this course to consider how cultural analysis and comparative perspectives partly inform nondenominational work. The chapter closes with an exploration of how Kenyan leaders of an independently run nondenominational church conceptualize schooling as a means to “reverse missionize” missionaries, namely, by sending African missionaries to America. Chapter Six, on the church’s work in eastern Uganda, examines how school-related projects are conceptualized as activities that meet a public and often market demand. It focuses on information technology and private schooling as means for conducting educational-evangelical outreach.

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By examining evangelical Christians’ work in various settings, these chapters point out that the religion-education entanglement is more complicated than typically seen in anthropology or educational policy studies. Part Three considers how current policies play on an ambiguity between the ideals of “faith in schools” and those of “schools of faith.” A key finding is that missionaries, evangelists, East African parents, and teachers are divided and heterogeneous in their orientations to religion in education, and that despite statements about religious neutrality found in policies, faith is an everyday element of evangelists’ and missionaries’ work in schools. It is as well an important component of development workers’ commitment to education.

2

One Hundred Fifty Years of Mission Work

Sunday at Pathway Church Vacant lots and 1950s-era burger shops line the major highway leading to Stinton Christian College.1 To the north of campus looms a billboard—“Got Faith? 1-800-PRAY”—and to the south runs a cement-block wall on which has been hand-painted “Jesus’ neighborhood”—an advertisement for Pathway Church. In early March much of this mid-Texas town appears gravelly and dormant. The only people visible whether on weekdays or weekends are those few walking from car to home or back. If the landscape is stark and empty, the faces and the voices of church­ goers at Pathway are not. I opened the door on a Sunday morning to a sweep of voices singing “We’re Marching to Zion,” the words for which were projected on a screen above the stage. An electronically amplified vocal quartet of two men and two women stood at the front of the nearly full five-hundred-seat room. A church elder (male, like all elders in this nondenominational church) announced the names of people needing assistance this week. Another man then moved to center stage and offered what the church bulletin identified as the “Pastoral Prayer,” which included, on this particular morning—the day before the United States invaded Iraq—supplication for “service men far from home” and for God’s help “in guiding the president.” The theme of strength and forbearance continued in the reading of Romans 8:18–24, which, following on the Pastoral Prayer and in the context of events, resonated with the liberation of Iraq. Verses 20 and 21 read, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it [Saddam Hussein was on everyone’s mind], in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Verse 23 brought this theme back to the first person: “We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” Some congregants read silently from personal Bibles they had brought from home. A few whispered the Romans passage from memory. Two songs—“My Hope Is Built

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on Nothing Less” and “Higher Ground”—continued the theme of preparedness and Kingdom building. Next came the Lord’s Prayer, the King James version—“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done”—and then two more songs, “Step by Step” and “Press On,” during which women escorted children out of the sanctuary to attend Sunday school. A man in his forties took center stage to present the morning’s sermon. His message featured his trip to Uganda and Kenya—pure coincidence relative to my work, but indicative of American evangelical churches’ presence in the region. The speaker had just finished preparing his talk on the plane the week before while returning from Nairobi, Kenya. Titled “Traveling Home,” his message began with a slide show introducing people and places in Uganda and Kenya. He offered some matter-of-fact remarks about what he had done and seen there, then moved into a more evocative, imagistic description. Two remarks took his audience aback, judging from their body movements. The first comment was that one of the main roads across the region was known as the “AIDS highway.” The speaker explained that the number of HIV-positive people driving and walking along the road was “so high that coffin makers display their wares openly, on the sides of the street, knowing they’ll have more than one customer on any given day.” Many of the AIDS-afflicted, he noted, had no family or job to support and sustain them, and health care in the country was “woefully inadequate.” The suffering—which he recognized was sadly rendered ordinary by the road’s nickname—could be alleviated, he assured his listeners, by the actions of Pathway congregants. Prayer, financial support, and mission work could help not only to ease but, more importantly, to prevent some of the suffering caused by the disease. The speaker’s second visibly unsettling remark concerned border security—or rather, insecurity. He told a story about an American missionary waiting at a border patrol booth at an international crossing from Uganda to Kenya, hoping that someone would come and approve his passage, but to no avail. The missionary honked his horn, waited and waited, then finally got out and asked for advice. Seeing that no one was interested in addressing his concerns, the missionary waved his papers in the air and shouted, “Anybody want these? Going once, going twice—gone!” then drove right across the border. Because of U.S.-Mexico border concerns, unregulated international passage was a familiar theme for Texans. However, it was a time—less than two years after the attacks of September 11, 2001—of nationally heightened concern about border surveillance. The speaker did not turn the story into a prayer request or fundraising matter as he had the AIDS highway issue. Rather, his point was to show that neither Kenya nor Uganda were

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able to regulate trade and travel legally and thus neither was able to ensure the well-being of ordinary visitors and citizens. Under such chaotic conditions, he suggested, even good people such as this missionary had to operate independently. To the speaker, the apparent absence of border regulation smacked of absence of polity and thus required private action. The speaker’s story about border crossing contrasted with another comment, about African pastors. During his visit he had met with Kenyan and Ugandan church leaders. He noted to the congregation that missionaries from the United States were “not trying to make Africans dependent on Americans but were working to train independent ministers.” (His message sounded much like the welfare-to-work schemes in the United States some ten years earlier.) Toward this end, he explained, workshops were being held in parts of East Africa to teach church-planting methods—that is, how to establish a new church—and plans were under way to bring African leaders to study in the United States. The speaker presented the work of East African pastors as a spiritual antidote to the moral disorder of everyday life, and he implored his audience to support the evangelists’ work financially and with prayer. The last five to ten minutes of the speaker’s message were deeply reflective and evocative. Elaborating on the theme of homecoming and redemption that he had introduced in the first few minutes—and moving away from the theme of despair in East Africa—he pondered the meaning of “life’s greater journey” and described “the path we all must travel if we are to lead our lives with God.” He moved on from Uganda and Kenya and, for that matter, from this town in Texas and instead looked ahead to a homecoming that paradoxically was about returning to a place where no one in the room, he suggested, had ever been. Some in the congregation raised their hands, signaling their reception to his message. Some put their arms over the shoulders of others and leaned their heads against the heads of family and friends. The speaker’s rhetorical tacking between “imagine this” and “but we can’t possibly imagine this,” of unsettling and then reestablishing what he had said, had the effect, as religious metaphor often does (Soskice 1985), of creating a pensive, meditative atmosphere. His closing remarks, nearly whispered and, like his previous words, full of “I don’t knows,” created an aura of transcendence. Hearkening back to the Romans 8:24 passage that had been read earlier—“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?”—he simply attested, I don’t know, I can’t possibly imagine, what beautiful, glorious future lies ahead, but I do know that I might be able, looking around and being here, I might be able to get a small, just a small glimpse, of how absolutely wonderful it might be.

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The service ended with people standing and moving quietly toward the doors as the quartet sang in the background: My hope is built on nothing less Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, But wholly trust in Jesus’ Name. [Refrain] On Christ the solid Rock I stand, All other ground is sinking sand, All other ground is sinking sand.

Hierarchy and Encompassment: Home, Church, World, Kingdom I have mentioned this service to introduce two points. The first relates to the representational modes through which religious leaders engage their members—including, as we see here, the presentation through prayer and sermon of a particular and mainly hierarchical relation of religion to government. Religious belief is presented in evangelical churches such as Pathway as all encompassing and, as such, neither confined to a church nor separable from government. Home and habitation are tacitly and broadly referred to, including the home of the nation, the home of the family, and most broadly, the home of the Christian Church and Kingdom. Home and habitation are central tropes in evangelical Christian preaching (see Apple 2006; Balmer 1994; Stevens 2001). They provide the everexpanding “imaginative horizons” (Crapanzano 2004) of the ethereal landscape of the community, moving churchgoers to look beyond the present world and its deficiencies. Depending on how the metaphors of home and habitation are invoked and pitched, such images maintain and reinforce distinctions among political, personal, religious, and public domains— including distinctions between what are sometimes presented in evangelical Christian conceptions as distinct spheres of teaching and preaching, home and school, sacred and secular, church and government. However, if metaphors of home and habitation are transposed onto many spheres (political, personal, religious, public), these arenas are themselves conceptualized in relation to one another—which leads to my second point: The imaginative horizons that frame and differently accommodate these domains—home, church, world, kingdom—are linked conceptually in a set of concentrically nested relations. Extending out and into the world involves movement away from what is ordinary, and is followed by reentry, a return home that is augmented by the experience. Traveling home is simultaneously a process

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of traveling to a final, imaginable-but-always-unknown resting place—the Kingdom of God, the end of days, death and resurrection—and of returning to the domestic center of the Christian family, which is itself seen both as being carried outward to the Kingdom of God and as existing at the core of life on Earth. Simon Coleman’s work is an eloquent and intelligent discussion of this process. Coleman calls U.S. evangelicals’ outward-inward movement— the from home to abroad and back again journey—a form of “double” motion, or two-way travel, in which the constant reimagining of one’s own conversion and religious state “permits a replaying of the experience of self-regeneration in the process of missionizing others, ideally converting them to the model of the self” (Coleman 2005: 664). This inner-outer dichotomy, by which home and other are dialectically related, sits at the heart of American evangelical mission work in East Africa, and reflects a Protestant ideal of spiritual knowledge through personal engagement. In working with others, missionaries consider that they are also working on and through themselves; they are themselves spiritually born again—and again and again, as it were—in the course of evangelizing and converting others. Yet analyzing missionaries’ work as a form of double motion differs from missionaries’ own self-conceptions and descriptions of their work as borderless and selfless. In other words, analytic models of evangelical self-other and home-abroad stand in contrast to evangelicals’ portrayal of a Christian Church as global and existing independent of human agency. Evangelicals’ expansive vision of the church—as existing everywhere all the time—extends to churches’ system of governance. An essential feature of the American evangelical churches analyzed here is that they belong to no administrative unit or overarching governing structure. Collectively they call themselves nondenominational restorationist churches—nondenominational in that their congregations eschew ecclesiasticism and pancongregational organization, and restorationist in that they derive historically from the American restorationist movement of the 1830s and regard themselves as working to restore the original Christian Church on Earth.2 Nondenominational restorationist churches number some thirteen thousand congregations in the United States and some forty thousand congregations worldwide, with approximately 1.3 million members in the United States and 2 million members worldwide.3 Each congregation exists independently in terms of funding, preaching, and management. A church brochure reports that nondenominational churches “have none of the trappings of modern-day organizational bureaucracy. There are no governing boards and no earthly headquarters. Each congregation is autonomous, and the only tie that binds us is a common belief in the Bible” (Barnett 1984: 7). This church-level self-portrayal is reflected in Christian ­reference texts.

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Weber and Welliver’s Mission Handbook (2007), for instance, de­scribes nondenominational restorationist churches as “a body of autonomous congregations and agencies . . . which sends and supports missionaries directly from local congregations.” This rather neither-here-nor-there quality of nondenominational restorationist churches—as neither a single entity nor entirely diffuse and unintegrated—raises certain methodological and theoretical considerations. How does one talk about an entity that includes not one but many churches—especially when, in terms of mission work, these churches report no funding sources and declare no main office? How does one verify the numbers of nondenominational missionaries working overseas when the mission-sending groups in charge of them, paradoxically, give no phone number, postal address, e-mail address, or Web site? More to the point, how does one study the operations of a church when its members claim to be “one body in Christ” yet are separated into many different churches and organizations? No single organization stands for these churches, yet clearly they are bound together by the collective value of autonomy. In dealing with this neither-here-nor-there aspect, I employ a hierarchy of categories that narrows downward from evangelical to nondenominational to restorationist. I refer to churches as evangelical when I discuss aspects of congregations that are common to evangelicalism broadly.4 I refer to churches as nondenominational when I discuss aspects that are particular to a subset of evangelical congregations that includes but is not limited to restorationist churches. Finally, I refer to churches as restorationist when I discuss the particularities of these churches that have to do with their desire to reestablish the original Christian Church. I also find it useful to employ a Foucauldian notion of heterotopias (Foucault 1986; see also Held 2005; Hetherington 1997: viii) and to think of these churches as organizations of alternative social ordering—as organizations that are more sociological than institutional, more diffuse than localizable, and more general than concrete. “Utopias,” writes Foucault (1986: 24), “are sites with no real place.” They are “fundamentally unreal places”; or following Ernst Bloch’s conceptualization (1986), utopian phenomena reference future collective possibilities. In relation to utopias, heterotopias are “counter-sites” or “a kind of effectively enacted utopia” (Foucault 1986: 24) that is outside all places. Foucault gives as an example national archives that refract and reflect “placeless” places that make the past look “absolutely real.” He might as well have identified Christian churches or other teleological entities whose members work toward a utopian vision. In the nondenominational churches I describe here, the utopian endpoint of (in their words) “heaven on Earth” is projected simultaneously onto several arenas, each of which is itself recursively nested in relation to others: in the nuclear family, in “God’s miracles”

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that effervesce and are fleetingly evident on Earth, and in the work and witness that people do by way of enacting—or incarnating, as these church­ goers say—a “Godly, biblical view.” By heterotopic I also mean that these churches appear unevenly as sociological entities across space and time, and that their work often materializes in other-than-expected places—sometimes in churches, sometimes in parachurch organizations (for example, supracongregational organizations such as World Vision or Heifer International or Partners for Christian Education International),5 sometimes in prayer groups that meet in private homes, public schools, or Internet cafés. In providing cultural schema for indexing distinctions within and between groups and polities, heterotopic expressions resemble what Sam Kaplan (2004: 400) conceptualizes as the spatial configurations of knowledge: “the moral qualities of territory connected to ideas about groupness and identity.” These moral qualities are multiply generated and inscribed in myriad, sometimes competing ways. By alternative social ordering I mean that, as a general rule, participants identify religious life as transcending and existing outside of or alternatively to the space of ordinary life. Studying nondenominational churches requires a certain willingness to move back and forth between talking about an organization specifically and seeing aspects of that organization as indicative of more general cultural phenomena. This back and forth movement extends to understanding the qualities of these churches internationally. The juxtaposition of U.S. and East African cases requires constant recognition of nation-state contexts as well as of the many ways people experience this transnational spiritual community. Notwithstanding theological claims that these churches exist outside human-historical time, there is a chronological history told by historians of, and within, nondenominational churches. Also, interspersed among accounts of parachurch organizations and mission societies are records of nondenominational churches’ involvement in social services and paragovernmental work. Two themes stand out across nearly two centuries of nondenominational churches’ work: a growing division over the belief that history is episodic and set in motion by God’s miracles (known as dispensationalism, which says that human history is divided into eras marked by unique interventions by God; some evangelists about whom I write believe this and others don’t), and a growing sense among most nondenominational dispensationalist leaders that the work of the Church is not only to preach and proselytize from the pulpit, but to evangelize broadly and to convey religious sentiment through ordinary, everyday activity. In general, members of nondenominational churches distinguish faith missions from civilizing missions. The latter they regard as worldly and misguided in that they preach that people, not God, improve the world. Faith missions, they

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hold, operate on the basis that “faith in God alone” can ease suffering and save souls. My purpose in this chapter is to point out an irony: that the very groups that were once critical of missionary agencies end up becoming leaders in the field. Understanding this shift is crucial to understanding a major transformation of recent times—namely, a movement toward the open recruitment of faith groups by governmental organizations for the purpose of providing social services, and with this recruitment, a change in view of the place of religion in public life, including in the realm of schooling. Whereas nondenominational missionaries once saw building schools and mounting new social reforms as projects better left to civilizing missions and secular governments, they later considered this to be God’s work that they as professing Christians must carry out. Tracing the transition from nondenominational churches’ Bible-stumping days to faith-based public service and locating this change in relation to the projects of American nondenominational missionaries working in East Africa provides insight into how American missionaries—both wittingly and unwittingly—engage with and reshape the meaning of faith in schools.

From Bible Stumping to Faith-Based Service I begin with a brief chronological history of American evangelical Christianity.6 I then examine missionaries’ primary documents, many of which are on file at the Billy Graham Archives at Wheaton College, Illinois. Next, I illustrate how American evangelicals working in East Africa thought about the Africans with whom they worked—namely, as impressionable acolytes not yet prepared to handle an independent church. In the next section I look at how American evangelicals (denominational and nondenominational alike) conceptualized the conversion of Muslims as their greatest challenge in the field. I conclude this chapter with an ethnographic account of a prayer meeting held at a nondenominational Christian college located some five miles north of Pathway Church where missionaries to East Africa studied. In presenting this picture, I am mindful of Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Shiller’s (2002) caution against methodological nationalism—against, in this case, equating American evangelical Christianity with religion in the United States. Evangelical Christianity is much broader and not American in any straightforward sense, as Karla Poewe (1994) plainly notes. To set a historical stage for my argument in later chapters, however, I focus here on dimensions of evangelicalism that are particular to American nondenominational missionaries, highlighting aspects that are most relevant to the restorationist church. First, here is the event history.

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In the public eye, American evangelical Christianity shifted diametrically across the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, evangelical Christians believed in the need to teach and enact social justice through the “social gospel” as a means of bringing about God’s Kingdom on Earth. By the early twentieth century, and with the publication between 1910 and 1915 of a twelve–volume set of books called The Fundamentals, the term evangelical Christianity increasingly connoted belief in a strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. The well-trained evangelical Christian would have memorized Scriptures that could help in preparing for and identifying signs of Jesus’ second coming. By the late 1920s, in response to a growing Christian liberalism, fundamentalist Christianity moved out of the purview of mainstream media but reemerged in the late 1970s, when Jerry Falwell led the Moral Majority in campaigns for school prayer and against abortion. Falwell recognized that liberation theologians, particularly the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., had been politically successful in using religion to mobilize the masses, but Falwell considered that such leaders as King had also “unleashed new sins” of godlessness and feminism, and had contributed, if indirectly, to an anti-Christian backlash in the United States. For some, the women’s rights and black power movements were evidence of this. In the 1980s, American evangelism went “prime time” through televangelism and mass media crusades, and in the 1990s and early 2000s became a key consideration within major political campaigns. Within evangelical groups, including among nondenominational churches, concern emerged over the outspoken ways that evangelicals engaged in world affairs. Not all evangelicals agreed with such statements as Rev. Franklin Graham’s in the wake of 9/11 that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion,” which some felt had overtly politicized and thus demeaned the church.7 But even this subgroup maintained a position that the church had a role to play in world affairs; the Christian Church was not just the people who met on Sundays but a community of believers that existed every day worldwide. To see and make the Church global, by the early 2000s some evangelical Christians (particularly in the United States) had begun to talk of the “postmodern church” and the “unchurch”—that is, a church that was not a regional or national movement per se but an omnipresent force that was simply the best way of being. This quiet, more staid version of the evangelical church worked in tension with the more publicly visible and outspoken of the televangelicals. By the early twenty-first century, evangelical Christians presented their churches as a diverse body of more than one theological mind. But whether divided or singular (and the heterotopic qualities of nondenominational churches made it possible for them to be both one and many), evangelical Christianity by the early twenty-first century had

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become a significant public force. Once ridiculed for being out of step with reality, evangelical Christianity had gone public in a big way. To back up a bit and elaborate this history from the vantage of nondenominational missionaries working in East Africa, American churches associated with present-day faith missions arose in the 1830s, toward the end of an era known as the Second Great Awakening. Within this era, a subgroup of restorationist movement leaders sought to reestablish—or as they put it, restore—the Christian Church as they believed it had existed in the first century c.e. (Casey and Foster 2002; Hughes 1996; Jorgenson 1989). Restorationist leaders held that Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Baptist churches—denominations that had experienced heightened religious activity during the First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s—had become weighted down by doctrinal disputes and divided by competing creeds. The restorationists solidified their following at an 1832 meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, where Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone implored followers to distinguish their churches’ God-inspired beliefs from the human-inspired beliefs of Protestant denominations. Restorationist Christians henceforth referred to their churches generically as “nondenominational” and “Christian” and—in an assertion that evinced these churches’ dispensationalist belief in God’s, not humans’, ordering of time—considered their own religious life to be the authentic expression of a lost original church, not (as an outside analytic perspective would consider it to be) a historical offshoot of reformed Protestantism. Nondenominational preachers deplored ecumenical (that is, in this context, denominational) mission societies on the grounds that they were worldly, not godly. Instead of preaching social reform and instructing people in how to live better lives, most nineteenth-century nondenominational leaders stressed the sole authority of the Scriptures. Denominational churches actively evangelized and sent missionaries around the globe, yet nondenominational leaders preached that denominational mission societies reflected a secularist faith in human power. James A. Harding, founder of nondenominational Potter Bible College in Kentucky, for instance, stated in 1885, “Every missionary society on earth is built on unbelief” (quoted in Hughes 1996, 138–139). Mission work, Harding believed, reflected human interests, not godliness, and the only authority to which a Christian should respond was the authority of God. Despite nondenominational Christians’ strong reactions against the “worldliness” of ecumenical missionaries, the turn of the twentieth century saw the formation of nondenominational evangelical mission associations, including the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919 and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA) in 1917. In part these associations were formed to accommodate the overflow of volunteer

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missionaries joining denominational agencies, but these volunteers also joined to compensate for what nondenominational evangelical churches considered these ecumenical agencies’ misplaced focus on teaching vocational skills instead of proclaiming the word of God. In eschewing traditional missionary activities, nondenominational organizations distanced themselves from what they described critically as “ecumenical and liberal” mission societies. Among the latter were mission societies of North America and Europe commissioned by the Phelps-Stokes Fund of New York to study and make recommendations for education in Africa. In a report of 1920–1921, a Phelps-Stokes-sponsored commission of foreign missionaries described “the modern Christian missionary [as] . . . the advance agent of civilization” (Jones, for the African Education Commission, 1925: i). Such an image—of a missionary leading the world toward civilization, of missionaries as agents prior to God—was anathema to those who had nondenominational visions of mission work. God, not a missionary, was at the heart of any evangelical enterprise; God’s work, not that of any person, brought about the return of Jesus. It was at about this time, in the first-quarter of the twentieth century, that the terms fundamentalist and liberal were popularized and used to differentiate—and increasingly to polarize socially and politically—American Christian groups. Scofield’s Reference Bible, which taught dispensationalism in its notes, was published in 1909, one year after the Federal Council of Churches, a liberal organization, promoted a social gospel in its Social Creed of the Churches. In 1920, Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the WatchmanExaminer coined the term fundamentalist, and in 1923 J. Gresham Machen defined “liberalism as another religion” (“The Monkey Trial and the Rise of Fundamentalism” 1997: 26–27). Ecumenicists, in the nondenominational view, were Sunday Christians and Monday-through-Saturday secularists. IFMA members and affiliated churches took the anti-evolutionist side of William Jennings Bryans in the widely publicized 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” Bryans, who won but died a few days later, exhausted by media “lynchings,” had held that the teaching of evolution in public schools was unlawful according to Tennessee’s Butler Act. Ecumenical churches ridiculed the Butler Act, and with it, fundamentalism. As the publicity surrounding the Scopes trial died, mainstream American media shifted attention to what the fundamentalists regarded as misguided secularist-liberal causes. Meanwhile, out of the spotlight, nondenominational evangelical churches developed a separate realm of education and media (see Marsden in “The Monkey Trial . . . ” 1997, 42ff). Charles Fuller’s radio program, the Old Fashioned Revival Hour, borne of this era, provided a distinct yet publicly accessible forum for presenting and eventually popularizing conservative

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Christian views. Unlike church newsletters and magazines, which were sent only to church members or paying subscribers, radio and later television programs reached and recruited new members indiscriminately. For the already converted, Christian broadcasting fostered a total social world of Christianity. News, information, and entertainment could be obtained from a conservative Christian vantage point. For the unconverted—or yetto-be converted—it provided an attractive and at times generic and nostalgic American point of view.8 Transmitted to U.S. servicemen, Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour helped seed and grow an emergent international ministry.9 After World War II, evangelical ex-servicemen, many funded through the GI Bill, enrolled “in droves” (Pierard 1990: 170) in mission studies programs at Christian colleges. Wheaton College, Moody Bible Institute, and Columbia Bible College experienced significant growth in their student populations. Christian college-trained missionaries—a first generation— received rigorous training in language and cross-cultural studies. Some of these students studied anthropology in connection with the study of languages and cultural history. In 1933, Cameron Townsend and associates founded the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and nine years later established Wycliffe Bible Translators, an organization that puts spoken languages into writing, translates the Bible, and teaches literacy (Pierard 1990: 176). By the time ex-servicemen enrolled in missions studies programs, “linguistics functioned as a sub-discipline of cultural anthropology, and the new breed of missionary scholars readily used it” (Pierard 1990: 176). (How mission anthropology compares with secular forms of anthropology is developed in the following chapter.) In general terms, then, the decades from the 1920s through the 1940s were a period of developing alternative Christian media and higher education. Looking ahead the next twenty years, the 1960s would be a time of organizational expansion. The number of overseas nondenominational missionaries alone would grow from about forty-six in 1946 to about seven hundred in 1967 (Hughes 1996: 235), and the number of nondenominational agencies would increase twofold between 1940 and 1960 (Welliver and Northcutt 2004: 18).10 This growth would continue so that by the 1990s, nondenominational agencies would outnumber their denominational counterparts by a ratio of five to one (Welliver and Northcutt 2004: 18; see also Robert 1990: 30). In part, midcentury growth was facilitated by a new organizational push. Across the 1940s and 1950s, nondenominational churches increasingly worked together, including through the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in the United Sates (founded in 1942), the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies (EFMA, founded in 1946),11 and the Africa Inland Mission (AIM, which had been working

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in East Africa since 1895). The NAE assisted nondenominational missionaries in securing visas and acted as a general clearinghouse for information. In 1964, through the EFMA, the NAE helped to create the Evangelical Missions Information Service (EMIS), publisher of various newsletters and missions resources, including Weber and Welliver’s Mission Handbook (2007), mentioned earlier. In 1953 the EFMA sponsored its first Summer Institute of International Studies, held in later years on the campus of Fuller Theological College (so named for Charles Fuller). The nondenominational churches in these associations—as in their organizational and administrative structures in the United States—were highly dispersed and uncentralized, yet theological principles associated with nondenominational churches were threaded throughout conservative mission societies, as evidenced in IFMA and AIM prohibitions against dancing and instrumental music, against training women to be preachers, and against indulging in the “seething immorality” and “effeminate leadership” that, according to conservative churches, characterized charismatic churches (“The Rise of Pentecostalism” 1998: 28). In contrast with those they called Holy Rollers and “snake-handling Pentecostals” (“The Rise of Pentecostalism”: 25), nondenominational evangelicals were sedate and serious in their form of worship. Notwithstanding their skepticism about ecstatic preaching and speaking in tongues, nondenominational missionaries’ main adversaries during the 1960s and 1970s were ecumenicists, that is, Protestants and Catholics who, from conservative viewpoints, preached a more liberal-humanistic and materially oriented message. Although a progressive branch of nondenominational churches had emerged by the 1970s (Hughes 1996: 310– 312), the mission societies associated with EFMA and IFMA remained predominantly conservative relative to their ecumenical counterparts. The Committee to Assist Ministry Education Overseas (CAMEO), founded in 1960 through the EFMA, established a Theological Education by Extension (TEE) program intended primarily for male missionaries. In 1966, EFMA and IFMA created a conservative alternative to the “ecumenical” and “liberal” churches associated with the World Council of Churches (WCC). They developed a consortium of evangelical fellowships from the United States and Africa aimed at reasserting the value of religion for saving souls rather than for liberating people from poverty.12 From the point of view of conservative agencies, people were saved if they read, understood, trusted, and obeyed the word of God. Anything else was baiting people. From the East Africans’ point of view, however, this focus was insufficient (which I elaborate on in Chapters Four through Six). In Nyanza Province in western Kenya, many people fled to churches that provided school scholarships and paid evangelists full salaries. In Uganda, nondenominational churchgoers

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began to question missionary policies, and in Tanzania, few were drawn into the 1960s- and 1970s-era nondenominational churches unless brought into the ranks of leadership. Ecumenical churches, including Lutheran, Anglican, United Methodist, and Catholic churches, provided humanitarian aid and rehabilitation services; educational programming; technical, managerial, and heath care support; and agricultural and business training, in addition to worship services and Sunday School. In part, American regional antagonisms lay behind aspects of this conservative-ecumenical tension. Conservative missionaries working in East Africa, funded mainly by direct donations from southern congregations, were concerned that ecumenicists, funded mainly by northern churches, were fostering civil rights initiatives and women’s liberation among Africans (King 1971). Some evangelical missionaries objected that ecumenicists were prematurely pushing to encourage Africans to take over foreign missions. As recorded in a joint IFMA-EFMA letter, missionary alliances buffered “inducements put forth by proponents of the Ecumenical Movement who are seeking to bring African churches into the sphere of influence of the World Council of Churches.”13 In other words, evangelical churches associated with AIM worked to prevent the ecumenical WCC from registering denominational churches as its affiliates. “Congo is a perfect example of this,” records the IFMA, “with the newly formed Eglise du Christ au Congo having been set up as a unified Church of the whole nation”—which cut against evangelical ideals of grassroots organization and autonomy.14 The IFMA document, dated May 1971, reported that African church members “tend to see” differences of opinion between conservative and ecumenical missions “in black and white and interpret them in terms of the situation in the West with which they are familiar”—a remark that suggests reference to debates of the time about northern ideals of equality and integration, and southern histories of racial segregation. Even the IFMA recognized “racial prejudice on the part of some missionaries,” noting that “while not as common as it once was . . . there are still those who are unwilling to accept a national [that is, African] Christian on equal basis, to welcome them into their homes, to acknowledge their right to control their own churches, destinies, etc.” Like ecumenicists, independence-minded Africans were pressing for freedom from foreign missions. “Nationalism has undoubtedly been the strongest factor in this pressure,” reads one IFMA memo. “Churches in newly independent countries [are] being subject to pressure from political and governmental sources, and they themselves [are] also wishing to exert their own identity and their independence of foreign denomination.”15 The IFMA identified a “lack of missionary vision” among African church leaders as the reason that evangelical missionaries might not yet leave.16 At issue

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was whether religious organizations ought to bring the Bible and word of God to as many people as possible living in remote areas or, instead, concentrate on improving the quality of life among those already evangelized. Again, at issue was whether the church was a preaching or social-servicing enterprise. The IFMA and AIM tended to support the former. African leaders and liberal missions and churches tended to favor the latter. Writing about Kenya, the IFMA maintained the following: It is . . . all too common a problem that the national Church does not completely share the missionary’s vision to reach out into the unevangelized areas of a country or segments of a society. For example, there is relatively little real interest in the Africa Inland Church, Kenya, to reach out into the deserts of northern Kenya on behalf of the 500,000 nomads following their herds of camels around from one water hole to another. To the existing church, it seems that establishment of more secondary schools, dispensaries and hospitals is definitely a higher priority.17

In other words, African leaders working with evangelical missionaries began openly criticizing American missionaries. Whereas these Americans wanted the soon-to-be-independent church to run after “nomads” to preach the Bible, African leaders wanted the church to stay put and focus on teaching and providing health services. It was not, however, only disagreement between Americans and Africans about the future focus of the church that fueled divisions. Financial matters were also a concern. Who would pay African church leaders’ salaries? “Most churches in emerging lands are relatively poor,” reported the IFMA. Moreover, “the complexities of our personalized support system [that is, of congregations raising funds to support missionaries] elude them.” The “us-them” opposition not only infantilizes but also distrusts Africans. The IFMA questioned the “handling of funds . . . by men with flexible ideas regarding the use of designated funds!”18 In other words, evangelical missionaries accused Africans of stealing from missionary coffers; but this was not entirely the fault of Africans, these missionaries continued; the ecumenicists had made things worse by creating among Africans an appreciation and taste for material niceties, expensive schooling, and financial wealth. Ecumenical missions and liberal denominations—wealthy compared to many faith missions—were not afraid to buy converts by spending money, conservative evangelicals said. In the context of conservatives’ efforts to avoid attracting new members with baits of wealth (which conservatives in any event generally felt they did not have), “Ecumenical interests are all the while dangling offers of generous cash grants and scholarships for overseas study before the dazzled eyes of church leaders,” notes the IFMA report. “It is not easy to point out the strings attached to such offers, for they are invisible strings for the most part.”

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Newly independent East African governments managed these missionaries in different ways. Uganda achieved its independence in 1962, and the early leadership drew on connections with Anglican and Catholic churches to manage primary and secondary schools (Furley and Watson 1978: 398)—until Yoweri Museveni declared in the late 1980s that religion was an obstacle to national unity (Cheney 2007: 8). The Kenyan and Tanzanian governments likewise built on missionary connections. Kenya became independent in 1963, and Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first president, encouraged British settlers and missionaries to stay to help develop the nation (Lonsdale 1978). Kenyatta’s policy of harambee (join and work together) built on some churches’ ideals of justice and development. In turn, Julius Nyerere, first president of Tanganyika (which gained independence in 1961), maintained connections with Catholic Maryknoll missionaries and the Missionaries of Africa (Jong 2000: 133). Nyerere’s 1967 policy of ujamaa (African socialism) reflected the Christian values of social growth and sacrifice. In each of these countries, first-generation national leaders maintained connections with missionaries—although the missionaries they courted were mainly of the liberal-ecumenical school, not the preachingonly congregations that the IFMA affirmed. From East African governmental vantage points in the early years of independence, church work was closely tied to national development. From missionaries’ perspectives, religion-state connections were less clear. A common theme running through evangelical mission projects across the roughly hundred years outlined so far suggests that evangelical missionaries believed that the work of the mission is the work of God, and that the work of God is converting souls, not handing out rice or building schools. The latter was the business of the state. Governments, not churches, should take care of citizens, and churches should glorify God and stand at the ready for a coming golden age. Much of this approach was to change in the late 1980s, when independent governments in East Africa began to require foreign missions to develop a practical focus. The East African governments made their request as part of a growing realization that as independent nations they had authority to stipulate foreign visitors’ work, in keeping with the loan conditions of international agencies to downsize government financing for social services. By the 1990s, many church missions were required to defend their in-country presence by demonstrating their relevance to economic development. In part this reassertion of state authority was a way for national leaders to appropriate the successes of nonstate organizations in providing social services where underfunded governments had failed. It also reflected, however, a generational shift in African leadership. Because they no longer had direct connections with colonial-era ecumenical mis-

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sionaries as their former pupils, East African political leaders developed various approaches to the religion-state connection that were, and remain, contradictory. The second Kenyan president, Daniel arap Moi, a member of the African Inland Church (an independent branch of the AIM), took credit in the early 1990s for the social services provided by AIM (Hearn 2002), even though some AIM members saw Moi’s move as wrongly laying claim to their mission work; and in other contexts Moi complained that AIM undermined state authority. In Tanzania, the second president, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, a Muslim from Zanzibar, defined mission work to include projects funded by Islamic groups. Mwinyi’s 1993 attempt to enroll the United Republic of Tanzania as a member of the Organization of Islamic Countries provoked criticism from his opponents, injected an already present though still small religious element into Tanzanian multiparty politics, and reinvigorated ecumenical, not evangelical, missionary efforts at the national and international levels (a realignment that some groups later saw as the early stages of “underhand plans by the U.S. to undermine Muslims”).19 Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni wanted nothing to do with sectarian politics, and his family’s affiliation with Pentecostalism complicated the history of Catholic-Protestant rivalries in his country. Museveni, like Moi and eventually Mwinyi and Benjamin Mkapa (Mwinyi’s successor), supported the work of religious donors on the condition that these donors would operate openly and comply with state regulations. Museveni’s cooperation, starting in the 1990s, with the Anglican and Catholic churches in mediating conflict in the north is another example of governmental engagement with ecumenical rather than evangelical churches. It was at about this time—the early 1990s—that nondenominational missionaries associated with Pathway Church registered their projects as nongovernmental organizations. A nondenominational Christian Bible college in Nairobi was expanded into a vocational-training school; a mission-sponsored church in Uganda added an Internet-training program. Simultaneously, East African evangelists whom American missionaries had themselves baptized were advocating greater local leadership and congregational autonomy. Their pressures were not only coincidental with governmental requirements to register missionaries but also part of what Africans regarded as a logical outcome of having been school-educated: attainment of the knowledge and skills needed to manage organizations independently. (East Africans felt, however, that American missionaries did not always see or acknowledge Africans’ abilities to run the church themselves, without the Americans’ oversight.) As well as being pushed, American evangelical missionaries felt pulled into involving themselves in practical work. As the opening vignette of this chapter illustrates, missionaries were openly wary of international security

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issues in the post-9/11 context. Their sense of needing to step in where government did not was not necessarily a new position. In 1975, the IFMA had recorded that “the total number of illiterates in Kenya increases every year. The government cannot cope with the problem alone. They need our help—and so does every other African Nation.”20 Missionaries had previously justified their presence as compensating for ill-equipped governments. However, in the post-9/11 era, when religious identities—especially those of Christianity and Islam—played into and often stood as shorthand for geopolitical conflict, Pathway leaders’ questions about government capacity indicted an entire state-governmental world. In some evangelicals’ views, despite years of missionization and modernization, much of the world remained poor and poorly governed. To shore up weak and vulnerable states and to correct the mistakes that civilizing missionaries had made, nondenominational evangelicals joined in the response to the call to provide social services, and in the process they began to transform those services significantly. The enveloping nature of these churches helped to make this effort effective. In a move that dovetailed with fiscal-conservative views—that is, with an “anti-Great Society era” trend that had started in the 1980s and gained ground in the 1990s—evangelical-conservatives had, by the 1990s, entered into what they had previously regarded as a separate, secular sphere. The world-at-large was not the only domain in which to minister, however. American missionaries to East Africa argued that government at home also needed more religion. Whereas many twentieth-century nondenominational churches had eschewed political involvement on the grounds that government reflected worldly rather than godly efforts, a survey of nondenominational restorationist churches conducted at the turn of the twentyfirst century revealed that ministers in the United States would “like to be more involved in social and political activities than they are presently” (Foster, Hailey, and Winter 2000: 152). The survey reported that these American leaders “increasingly identify, in a partisan way, with the Republican party,” and that of those interviewed nearly three-quarters agreed with the statement that “religion is losing influence in America” (153). About 60 percent supported the statement, “The United States needs a Christian political party” (153), and about 60 percent agreed that nondenominational churches should influence and lobby officials. A majority (76 percent) maintained that government was “providing too many services that should be left to private enterprise,” and only 26 percent agreed “that the federal government should do more to solve social problems such as poverty, unemployment and poor housing.” In the United States, nondenominational churches changed the focus of their rescue missions. Where once they had primarily passed out Bible

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materials and held Bible study groups, increasingly they offered personal assistance to people needing nursing care and after-school tutorials. One nondenominational leader noted that in the late 1990s his daughter had begun to teach math “in a public housing project.” He asked rhetorically, would it help poor people if the church paid their electric bills? Would it give them a skill they could use to help themselves if we just gave them unemployment assistance? No, he said, but neither would Bible correspondence courses alone help people see “a better way.” What was needed, he argued (and said was in keeping with nondenominational churches’ twenty-firstcentury philosophy), was a plan to reinvest the welfare system with a more disciplined, more evangelical morality. Vocational skills, technical knowhow, hard work, and new, meaningful opportunities would together provide the necessary ingredients for lifting destitute people up from poverty.21 In moving into public housing and after-school programs in the United States, nondenominational churches were part of a movement that sociologist José Casanova termed the “deprivatization of modern religion” (Casanova 1994: 211), that is, the movement of religious activity from the private realm of the family and church to the public realm of everyday life and public places (see also Asad 2003: 199). This shift in the direction of public work was marked by the growing involvement of nondenominationals in education. The same leader who described his daughter’s public housing work noted that nondenominational churches were committed to supporting public education. Unlike conservative Christians who in the 1980s had established private Christian schools, nondenominational churches twenty years later were committed to working equally in the private and public realms, arguing that “God’s work is everywhere.” This historical shift from preaching to teaching, and from Bible stumping to working in social services, paradoxically drew nondenominational missionaries closer to the civilizing missions they had long criticized. This shift came with the effect of using Scripture to teach literacy, numeracy, and geography (see Chapter Four), and of reconceptualizing the interrelation of religion and education in a way that was at odds with liberal views. Put succinctly, education provided an ambiguous domain for merging ideas of social and spiritual salvation, where social salvation was seen as a matter of rescuing people from welfare and teaching them marketable skills. Much as the homefamily-world-Kingdom expansion had long been characterized by an interchangeability of values, the school became a site for merging and blending secularist and theologically conservative conceptions of education and religion. Thus the spatiality of the church—its heterotopic expansiveness— extended to the moral sites of schools and became a mode through which late-twentieth-century evangelical missionaries could see themselves as working within yet not being of the sphere of secular-liberal government.

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Evangelicals’ transition from once abhorring to now leading missionary work was facilitated by a new conception of education and the blurring of distinction between evangelical preaching and public teaching. If the dawning age of faith-based public service was the era of Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour, that age matured in the decades leading to the turn of the twenty-first century. Henceforth, nondenominational churches have been key players in faith-oriented educational programs, including adult literacy and health counseling programs as well as in public and private schools. In the following two sections I trace the transition from print media to broadcasting to an embodied concept of education. This transition, I show, was fueled in part by a growing evangelical Christian sense of Islamic threat and global revival that spurred evangelical work in public places through the early twenty-first century in East Africa.

The Evangelization of Muslims: A Fellowship of Faith Part of the wider public that evangelicals wished to reach in the 1970s and 1980s were Muslims—or as the evangelical Fellowship of Faith for the Muslims (FFM) put it, “those to whom no tidings of Him came.” A Call to Prayer for the Evangelization of Muslims—the pamphlet from which this description comes—arrived at the IFMA offices on July 20, 1970. Soliciting the prayers, services, and financial contributions of autonomous congregations, the brochure advertised a lending library and correspondence Bible course for Muslims. The latter involved a postal-exchange program by which Muslims in East Africa were mailed Bible study guides and written exercises to complete. Christians in the United States and Canada were to read and correct these exercises and send a personal note back to the students, encouraging them to persevere and declare Jesus as their Savior. If the exercises were successfully completed and the correspondence student demonstrated Bible knowledge, he or she would receive a certificate of course completion. “The steady rise of the literacy rate,” wrote the FFM in 1981, “is bringing a tremendous boost to literature, newspaper evangelism, and enrollment by Muslims in Bible correspondence courses” (Joyce 1981: 5). Frank C. Laubach’s evangelism and literacy program had helped to grow an audience of Christian readers overseas (in the 1970s, Laubach had been a member of the IFMA board), and the growth of global televangelism, centered in the United States, had raised general public awareness of the power of individuals to participate in evangelical crusades. By the 1980s, however, Bible correspondence courses had begun to play a secondary role to broadcast media.22 In part this had to do with what the FFM described as the

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hostile positions of some countries to Christian missionaries. It listed among these countries Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iran—countries that through the early twenty-first century remained in uneasy relation to the United States. One way of circumventing Islamic countries’ closed-door policies, the pamphlet continued, was to evangelize over the airwaves. As Fuller’s program had targeted overseas Americans in the 1940s, new radio programs sponsored by Christian organizations targeted Muslims in their own lands. The FFM recognized two advantages of this approach: radio could reinforce language and literacy programs by encouraging people to read the Bible, and radio could reach everyone indiscriminately, not only those who already believed. Evangelical broadcasters working in “Arab” lands reported that hundreds of new listeners were writing weekly to request Christian literature and sign up for correspondence courses. A missionary in the Middle East said, “We are selling more Bibles now in one year than we used to sell in five” (Joyce 1981: 12). Another missionary stationed in sub-Saharan Africa noted that “more than ever before our Muslim neighbours are asking questions and entering into discussion” (Joyce 1981: 12). Referring to the power of radio over print, the FFM reported, “Faster and easier travel speeds the Gospel messenger over desert and jungle, reaching thousands now instead of the hundreds before” (Joyce 1981: 5). More baldly, it stated that in “Arab” lands where “radios abound, [n]othing can stop penetration by that medium” (Joyce 1981: 5). Fear of not only religious expansion but also Islamic political-social totalitarianism also drove the shift from Bible correspondence courses and on-the-ground evangelizing to missionizing through broadcast media. In the 1970s the FFM had portrayed Muslims and Christians as sharing common ground: “[Muslims] believe in Christ’s virgin birth, His miracles, His bodily ascension to Heaven and future return, [even though] they deny His death on the cross and His Resurrection” (FFM n.d.: 6). In contrast, a pamphlet printed some eleven years later, also by the FFM, Christianity’s Supreme Opportunity: The Muslim World, offered world geographic and political reasons for needing to evangelize Muslims. The pamphlet noted that “in some quarters today Islam is evidencing a somewhat startling resurgence; a number of governments are putting increased restrictions on Christian missionary presence and activity” (Joyce 1981: 2). It also reported that “Islam is taking an increasingly significant place in world affairs. Politically and economically it presents an almost frightening challenge to the West.” Unlike the earlier portrayal of Muslims as preachable and reachable (“God loves them and sent His son to save them,” FFM n.d.: 6), the 1981 publication described Islam as “a strongly totalitarian social

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and ­political system . . . especially resistant to Christian penetration.” It also noted that “Islam has global plans for expansion—and the money to carry them out—which it is steadily doing” (Joyce 1981: 3). Sounding uncannily like the language of American foreign policy in the early twenty-first century, the FFM publications of the 1980s began to cast Islam as without territory and ever-expanding. “Muslims can no longer be relegated to distant and exotic lands. They are almost invading the West— immigrants, students, businessmen, oil magnates and investors”—categories of persons who later would be the focus of post-9/11 security. Whether this evangelical shift toward mistrusting Islam was informed by direct attacks on Christians overseas or by conservative congregations’ defensiveness in response to the rise of the Nation of Islam at home—or more likely by the fact that the Islamic da‘wah (mission) in sub-Saharan Africa was the success story with which other religious groups needed to compete23—what is clear is that by the 1980s evangelicals were redirecting their attention to areas of the world they considered to be vulnerable to Islamic religious and political incursion.24 A map published in the 1981 FFM booklet portrayed parts of northern and eastern Africa where Islam was growing as “fractured and confused.”25 These were places, the FFM said, where Christian evangelists might renew their attention and pitch and stake their tents. The pamphlet referred to overseas evangelism as “tentmaking,” in reference to 2 Corinthians 5:1— “Now, we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.” Tentmaking meant itinerant evangelical preaching, staying on the move, spreading the word, and covering large swaths of ground. The concept imaged the human body as a godly domicile that could provide shelter and hospice anywhere. Tentmaking was shorthand for missionary work and for God’s Church the world over. It was also a concept frequently read in the context of discussing the Great Commission, that is, the Biblical injunction to missionize associated with Matthew 28:19–20: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

Nondenominational Christians interpreted the Great Commission—particularly the final phrase—as evidence of a final, golden age of history involving Jesus’ return. This idea about an end time was evidenced in the pamphlet’s reference to “these last days [of] great movement out of Islam, millions coming to Christ” and to “the harvest He has been preparing for this time in history.”

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Again, however, these theological ideas were not independent of chronological history. Indeed, they informed evangelical Christians’ understandings of global events and world history. Whether seen from the dispensationalist or the nondispensationalist point of view, the end of the Cold War reinvigorated American evangelical Christianity. U.S.-centered nondenominationals came to see much of the world as divisible between Christianity and Islam (with China an exception, where nondenominationals saw “ancestral ways” as a challenge to Christianity; see Hiebert 1994: 102). In the view of nondenominationals, and in keeping with the views of scholars (and at the time, the U.S. media), the rise of Islam began well before the end of the Cold War in 1989. The rise of Islam had reached a critical moment in 1979 with the fall of the Shah of Iran, but Islamic growth took on new urgency with the end of the Cold War. Tensions of East versus West—of capitalism versus communism—realigned with a Christian-West versus Muslim-Middle East attitude; and the dismantling of the Soviet Union led to increased religious expression in ex-Soviet Muslim republics (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan among them). In Africa, the United States fought a devastating Cold War battle in Somalia that from the vantage point of American and East African evangelists working in Kenya radicalized Muslims, drove many of them to Uganda and Tanzania, and cast the post–Cold War climate in East Africa as one of Middle East versus West and Islam versus Christianity.26 In this context of a religiously radicalized and defiantly borderless religion, tentmaking took on greater urgency as a symbol and mode for rapidly deploying the faithful to the field. The sheer volume of change in a thawing post–Cold War era called for an evangelical method more powerful and populist than evangelizing through print or broadcast media. According to missiologists (that is, faculty who study and teach about missions) at American Christian colleges,27 and as evidenced in studies of 1970s and 1980s-era evangelical Christianity (Peshkin 1986; Harding 2000), this new method of evangelizing became known as Christian witness. “If we now determinedly set ourselves to the task of witnessing to Muslims, by one means or another, we will be moving decisively towards achieving the evangelization of the world,” wrote the FFM (Joyce 1981: 4). Christian witness was a way of living—a form of prayer, a personal orientation. It was something that Christians could do to further the work of global evangelism. The FFM pamphlet advertised the availability of “literature on Islam and on Christian witness,” including a daily prayer book that North Americans could use to pray for the unconverted (Joyce 1981: 13). The Samuel Zwemer Institute in Pasadena, California, offered training programs in church planting among Muslims, and the FFM issued “news bulletins” and held “prayer gatherings in support of Gospel witness to Islam” (Joyce 1981: 14).

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Bearing witness meant praying concertedly and contributing to the work of the Church, including evangelistic work carried out “on faith” that God would provide the funds. However, bearing witness also meant taking one’s Christian ways to the world and living a life of Christian witness abroad. It meant going about one’s daily work—whether at home or elsewhere—with the realization that what was ordinary was itself divinely inspired. In this commonplace, almost hidden way, nondenominational Christians could carry their witness into the national and international mainstream where they did not so much preach publicly as just plain live. They could carry Christian witness into an open realm without seeming to transition from a private space—or to put it as the director of the U.S. White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives put it in 2002, Christian evangelists could “preach without preaching, not by words but by example— by the catching force and sympathetic influence” of what they did (Towey 2002). This re-rationalization of Christian proselytization as “converting by example,” not by “words alone,” made it possible for nondenominational missionaries to reconsider the meaning of “handing out rice.” Whereas once they had seen rice-giving as charity—as the very kind of welfare evangelism they had criticized for fostering Africans’ dependency on American charity—they could now see handing out rice as a service offered in the spirit of Christianity. They could see it as an act of God that conveyed meaning in its manner; bearing witness was a means to an end, not an end itself. Nondenominational missionaries working in East Africa called this mode of witnessing “the Jesus method of instruction.” They differentiated “the Jesus method” from “the secular way.” The former involved ethically infusing whatever one did with moral value—allowing everyday activities to exude what Jesus would do—whereas the latter was simply doing a job, acting without, as it were, witnessing. This new form of development work equated Christian witness with public service and humanitarianism. It involved working in novel ways with some of the very groups that nondenominational churches had earlier condemned—secular governments, liberal church associations, and humanistic aid organizations—but it conceived of partnerships with these groups as a matter of subordinating the humanistic to the spiritual. Secular work, including that of government, was separate from the Church, but the work of the Church extended into and could help transform development work. By the late 1990s, nondenominational missionaries working in East Africa were evangelizing in the vein of Christian witness. Student volunteers from U.S. Christian colleges quietly preached in public without ever mentioning Scripture. How they did this—how they preached without mentioning their faith and how they embodied the Jesus method of instruction—is

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the story of much of the rest of this book. First, however, it will be useful to visit a U.S. nondenominational college from which several on the Zebra Team mentioned in Chapter One came, and to see through this college how religion and education are at times made to be one and the same.

Stinton Christian College Stinton College’s buildings stand crisp and white on a hill. A few years after its founding, the college hosted a series of anticommunist political rallies, and by the 1970s its patrons and financial supporters included energy and oil industry representatives.28 A pamphlet advertising a 1990s alumni weekend framed pictures of the campus in red, white, and blue. Although conservative politics may jump to the fore, stereotypes of “left” and “right” say little about missionaries’ awareness of their own complicated politics and histories, which the following vignette partly illustrates. Allison, the head teacher from the mission project in Tanzania, was a student at Stinton College. She was preparing to return to Tanzania for the fifth time in the summer of 2003. Allison said she’d meet me in the chapel one morning from 9:40 to 10:10. The lights in the chapel had been turned way down and everyone in the packed hall was standing and singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” with such force and feeling that I could not hear myself hum along with the melody. After a second hymn, a student offered a prayer, then introduced the guest speaker—a man born in South Africa and married to an Italian woman who described his family as his “own UN.” “My daughter’s the French. She automatically goes against whatever my son, the U.S., wants to do.” The political allusion was timely and the gender symbolism stereotypical. France had just taken an international stance in refusing to vote in support of the U.S. plan to invade Iraq; and at a more mundane though no less political level, French fries at this college’s campus had just been renamed “freedom fries,” a small phrase with a large intent. The joking turned serious when the speaker moved to his topic: “The Christian and His Government.” “Are governments ordained of God?” he asked. “Are we to obey government unconditionally? Should Christians turn a blind eye to evil, as Matthew advises in chapter 5? Or should Christians support government, including governments that use lethal force, as suggested in Romans 13, 1 through 5?” He spoke about a tension between two potentially conflicting mandates: one, that Christians must submit themselves to governing authorities, and two, that Christians “don’t obey people, they obey God.” Like the speaker at the service at Pathway Church, he simultaneously paired and differentiated religion and government. He

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encompassed one with the other and then reversed the relationship. Working from the principle that Christians must obey the law, he also argued that “God put government in place,” thereby positioning faith and belief as concepts of a higher order than politics and government. He asked, “Does God ordain totalitarian or democratic forms of government?” “Can a Christian revolt against government and join in a fight with it?” “What should we try to do for our rulers” (Acts 26:1–3, 29), and “Should the government support the church?” (1 Corinthians 16:1–2). In the end he said he had no final answers, but he encouraged his listeners to search for such answers themselves. In its indeterminacy, the speaker’s message, and the meeting itself, reflected a prescient point made by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (his nationality ironic in light of the speaker’s words about the UN)—a point about education that I extend here to relate to religion. In The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (1996), Bourdieu elaborates how teachers and students reproduce their own power through everyday pedagogy and rituals. They imbue the ordinary world with a “quasi-magical” language that defines and describes reality. “The immediate, concrete object of The State Nobility,” writes Wacquant in the book’s foreword, summarizing Bourdieu’s argument in a phrase, “is the structure and functioning of the uppermost tier of [a] system of higher education and its linkages to the country’s bourgeoisie and top corporations” (xii). Bourdieu’s argument is that those in power reproduce their elite positions by linking their work to business and government. They portray the present in terms of foundational text and see in that text a historical necessity—a chronological imperative that leads “naturally” to their leadership; they believe in and promulgate a moral imperative that casts their work in terms of urgency and certitude; and they adopt and perpetuate a cultural vision of social reproduction that stymies creativity, places a premium on a division of labor for order, and only slightly modifies and transforms “reality.” Although Bourdieu’s emphasis is on the social reproduction of elite power in the realm of schooling in a liberal-secular state—France—his theory of the rationalization of knowledge is suggestive for Stinton College in relation to creating a new Christian citizenry and governing elite. Indeed, it is thought-provoking for theorizing power anywhere. In this meeting, the speaker’s pairing of religion and government—of what Herzfeld (1997:19) might call intimate and public codes—conveyed a sense that although church and state were institutionally separate, separation did not necessitate disregard for government. The speaker articulated a relationship between religion and government that unsettled preconceptions. He then mystified this relationship with references to a foundational text, the Bible, and used this text to question the secular-modern basis of government.

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This questioning provided, in turn, a space for inquiring into the moral basis of government, and for imagining and working to create, as new citizens and leaders, what members of this group envisioned to be a better world cast in a Christian mold. Allison was not at the prayer meeting that morning. She had had to work at the nearby public school, where she was interning (like many religious institutions, Stinton Christian College sent teachers-in-training to work in public schools as part of their practicum requirements), but she had left a message to meet her in the cafeteria. There we met with another missionary, Ellen, who had compiled a scrapbook of the missionaries’ trip from the year before. Ellen had arranged the photos at various angles, on cutpaper backgrounds and with other attractive designs. The album opened with photos from London, where the missionaries had stayed for a week to plan and rehearse the English lessons they would teach. There they also learned about African culture, including how to greet people, shake hands, and for women, to dress modestly. The program in London was self-organized: missionaries who had been on the trip in previous years prepared and led the session. Among the pictures taken in Tanzania was a striking photo of Jonathan (one of the three, including Allison, whom I had joined in pamphleteering). He and two other student missionaries wearing “raincoats” with pointed white hoods that Ellen had made out of plastic garbage bags and duct tape. A remark published by a historian of nondenominational churches came back to me at this time—that a strand of members within these churches had been Klan members in the early 1920s and favored school segregation after it had been abolished by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 (Hughes 1996, chapter 12). Ellen made this connection with the Klan directly, remarking, “I had to tape down the hoods so they wouldn’t have points, but first Roger wanted me to put a cross on his,” as the picture showed. Whether the photo elicited nervousness for these missionaries or a sense of victory over the past, or both, is impossible to say. Yet the photo presented a glimpse into the missionaries’ self-awareness and sense of church members’ fallibility and potential to be read as having lived on the wrong side of history.

Making Sense of Missionaries’ Work: A Preliminary Analysis At one point it crossed my mind to consider that nondenominational missionaries are an example of “cosmopolitans” in the sense described by Anthony Appiah (2006: xiv): “citizens of the cosmos” or of the world who espouse the ideal of cultural universalism and know that human knowledge

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is imperfect and provisional. Certainly these evangelical Christian missionaries are cosmopolitan in that they seek to transcend national borders and politics. They subscribe to the idea that cultural differences exist and that despite these differences people everywhere share a common humanity. On further scrutiny, however, they do not take cultural differences seriously; they are more like the “fundamentalists” that Roy (2004: 25) describes in his account of Muslim believers who seek to return to a perfect past. Evangelicals of the “fundamentalist” kind, suggests Appiah (2006: 140), are “universalist without being tolerant.” They seek to create a perfect world on Earth that is open to all, provided that all share their faith. From the separatist churches of the nineteenth century to the mission organizations, prayer meetings, and study-abroad programs staffed by Christian college students, the goal of nondenominational evangelists appears to be to create a universal church that is singular in faith—notwithstanding nondenominationals’ imagery and rhetoric of inclusivity and grassroots autonomy. Whereas nondenominational forebears explicitly rejected educational, industrial, and civilizing missions, believing that Western education led Africans to material sin, Allison and Ellen, like other missionaries in their group, used education—their own and those of the East Africans to whom they ministered—as a medium with which to express belief in a single religion and in which to mold reality in one particular way: after their particular reading of the Bible. Seen from the angle of the work of Appiah and Roy, these nondenominational missionaries are not simply “believers without borders” but believers who believe in a single kingdom—exactly what they feared most in Muslim groups, to whom tidings, they said, had “yet to come” (their imagery).29 Seen from the angle of analyses of missions and empire,30 missionaries’ work in East Africa is thus part of a long history of cultural imperialism, the underlying premise of which is that some people are more advanced than others in attaining enlightenment and reaching modernity. These missionaries’ own advanced stages are reflected in what they see as their close cultural proximity to the Bible (a point on which I elaborate in Chapter Three). Yet believing in dignity and living one’s creed need not be experienced as imperialist by those within the nondenominational community. To the contrary, those who devote their lives to faith-based work see it as pragmatic and humanitarian—and it is humanitarian, although, again, in a singular, nonpluralistic way. This self-perception is apparent in the work of Johnson, Allison’s and Ellen’s professor of anthropology. Johnson taught a “vocational approach to mission work” and advised student missionaries working on service-learning projects overseas. To give an example of the work he advised, he spoke of engineering students from Christian colleges build-

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ing water systems in India or Iraq and in the course of their project “exemplifying the work of Jesus.” Johnson advocated a “holistic approach” to missions and service-learning that integrated people’s spiritual and material needs. “Rice Christians,” he said, used to preach and try to lure people in through gifts of rice and clothing. They expanded and reproduced the welfare state by reinscribing it in the work of the liberal church. Johnson advocated instead “working beside people and teaching them skills” and in the process “letting others see the love of Jesus” in the work of missionaries. The church, he said, used to emphasize eschatology—matters pertaining to life after death—instead of focusing on present-day reality. Previous generations of missionaries tended to talk about what was to come, not about the here and now. In contrast to Pathway Church leaders’ emphasis on Jesus’ return and what was yet to be, Johnson was present-focused and, as he put it, “not overly evangelical,” yet very much like what he considered Christian believers ought to be: pragmatists who work to reshape the mainstream and “live a life of stewardship.” This framing of the church as unevangelical was a key aspect of nondenominationals’ early twentieth-century work. By erasing evangelism from the language of witness, missionaries’ self-image became all the more mainstream and ordinary—not at all like those fiery and undisciplined Pentecostals whom nondenominationals said preached chaotically and irrationally, as though grand theater and public spectacles could demonstrate God’s presence. Televangelism and faith healing may have been a part of the work of 1980s-era American evangelicals, but by the turn of the century, nondenominational Christianity had become a more rational operation.

Summary This chapter has identified two key shifts: the movement of nondenominational churches into service-oriented public life, and a shift in the methods of mission work from Bible stumping to Christian witnessing. Witnessing and going public went hand-in-hand. The juncture of the two emerged as a function of pressure, capability, and understanding of historical precedent. In response to what nondenominational leaders perceived as liberal churches baiting members and creating dependence through welfare missions, nondenominational churches moved into service work. They responded to governmental pressures for relevance by infusing nonreligious projects with Christian witness. They effected this change by expanding their system of autonomous self-governance to a global kingdom, ostensibly borderless. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus in their own ways provided historical precedents for these shifts. King had taken “the pulpit

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to the street,” but unfortunately, to these missionaries, had delivered the wrong message; Jesus had converted people by teaching, not preaching, and remained the exemplar of a faith-based service worker and a model of the perfect anthropologist (Kraft 2003). The schools that have emerged from this era of evangelism use education as a tool to demonstrate salvation, to orient followers to a new way of life through the embodied faith and witness of missionaries. Using evidence from field research conducted in East Africa, I elaborate this method of embodied proselytization in the chapters that follow. One of the points on which I insist is that the entry of nondenominational, nonevangelical missionaries into education and public life is facilitated by congregations’ emphasis on the spatial indeterminacy of the Church. This indeterminacy makes it easier to see the Church’s work everywhere and yet in no specific place, all at once. Whereas some religious groups may see the world as neatly divided between private religion and public life, these missionaries seek to create a complexly interwoven public-private system. Whether this means working within or separate from government is cast ultimately as a personal matter. What is not negotiable is the value of “living a life in Christ”—or as one professor of missions put it on his syllabus, “to communicate God’s eternal message cross-culturally” and “to see the need, feel the call, following the Master’s lead!” Toward this end, nondenominational missionaries teach anthropology, and it is to a discussion of this subject that I turn next.

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Using Anthropology for Christian Witness

Anthropology Class and Faculty The anthropology professor’s office at Stinton College was decorated after the style of a Kenyan Luo house: three-legged stools clustered in the center, thatched cross-supports hung overhead, and standing to one side, a wooden framed bed over which had been draped mosquito netting. Professor Block (the students called him Tim) described his office as a replica of a “wealthy Luo house” in that “most Luo sleep directly on the ground; few can afford mosquito netting.” Outside his office hung a map of East Africa on which missionary sites were marked with color-tipped pins. Many sites were clustered in eastern Uganda, several were in central and western Kenya, and four or five were widely scattered across the mainland of Tanzania. Like the ethnographic maps of students’ fieldwork that hang in the halls of many university departments of anthropology, this map indicated where student-scholars had gone. The student-scholars here were majoring in mission studies. Professor Block had lived and worked as a missionary in Kenya for thirteen years. He and his wife had traveled widely throughout eastern Africa. Two of their children had attended local schools, and all family members spoke some Luo (the local language) and Kiswahili (a national language). Notwithstanding his life’s commitment to preaching, Block was openly critical of missionaries and evangelism. Like many of his faculty colleagues, he condemned what he described as the “damaging and destructive work” of evangelicals. “Missionaries often go in and try to change African culture without understanding people’s inner values. We mess things up. We destroy cultures. We do a lot of damage.” To my surprise, he had adopted and repeated many of the views I had heard from Peace Corps volunteers and university researchers in Africa: that missionaries obliterated African culture and supplanted indigenous forms with Western values. Unlike his critics, however, Block believed that cultural destruction did not need to accompany conversion. In a conversation we had in his “Luo house,” he questioned the putatively progressive argument that ­Africans were merely brainwashed by foreign Christians—as though Christianity

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was inherently Western, which Block contested—and he took issue with the liberalist criticism that Christianity was culturally narrowing and extractive. He maintained that evangelism “enacted God’s will” and that the Bible “answers everything—we only need to know how to apply it.” One of the ways he said he organized work, and discerned and understood the Bible, was in and through anthropology. Anthropology, he suggested, provided a system for demonstrating (if never justifying) the powers of the Bible. “Once we know others’ views, we can use the Bible to reveal points of contact, points that Jesus showed us how to develop through our ministry. And there, through those common points, we can contextualize our work.” In Block’s conception, anthropology helped students discern “outward form from inner meaning.” It helped to plant what he called “sustainable, indigenous Christianity.” Among the courses Block taught at Stinton College was one titled Cultural Anthropology in Christian Perspective. In this course, he introduced concepts of cross-cultural communication, fieldwork, contact zones, and culture shock. On one particular day in the spring of 2003 he lectured on “worldview” to a class of new missions majors. He began his discussion with a story about how he and his wife had come to work in western Kenya.1 When my wife and I first arrived in the early 1980s, we knew absolutely nobody and didn’t know the language. The first couple of years were a full-time learning process, a matter of studying Luo, learning the culture, trying to understand Luos’ worldview. We began in the bush. We went out into villages and started asking about Luos’ concepts of God. We soon found out that theirs is an angry God, a God who’s far away, who deserted them and left them to the spirits all around them. Those are Luos’ assumptions, the ideas they had that had influenced their values, their behavior, their worldviews. But then we started talking about [Luos’ concepts of God], asking, Is this the only perception of God there is? Could there be others? Is there evidence that God is kind and loving? We didn’t deal at all with how they dressed or how the Luo people ate or what they lived in, ‘cause those kinds of things are irrelevant. Instead, we would sit under a tree and work with people, talking to them from their own perspective, from the perspective of let’s try to understand God better, let’s try to understand life, let’s try to understand good and evil. And we found areas of their worldview that corresponded with biblical truths and principles. We found points of contact that reflected what the Bible says is true. These shared points were always there. We did not create them. Because you know, one of my biggest premises in conducting mission work is that change comes from the inside out. We missionaries go in with a Christian perspective and just allow God to bring about the change among people. The change is indigenous. The change is sustainable. We don’t go in and force people to change. We trust in God that things will change.

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Interrupting himself, Block took the occasion to mention social change in order to introduce more formally his subject: worldview. He did so first by sketching a picture on the board of several chairs, a table, and a lectern or pulpit (though no one recognized any of these objects at first). “You know,” he said, “Americans are a platform people. We do everything on platforms. We sit on platforms, we eat on platforms, we sleep on platforms. We even preach on platforms. Why? Why don’t Americans sit on the ground?” A bit surprised to be so quickly jettisoned from thinking about mission work into discussing tables and chairs, the class sat silent for a moment. Then, fairly quickly, the students agreed that the ground is dirty, dirt is bad, and they didn’t want to sit on the ground. How could it be otherwise? Germ theory had nothing to do with culture, and chairs were much cleaner than the floor. Here again Block stepped in, challenging the students to think anthropologically. He suggested that in fact the ground could be clean and that germs could be managed in other ways. “These tables, they’re just artifacts,” he said. “They’re useful for what they do, for sitting on, throwing your coat on, standing on to hang a picture. But aren’t there alternatives? Other ways of staying clean?” He emphasized that tables and chairs had come to represent for his students what it means to be healthy, clean, proper, properly socialized, and even wealthy or poor. He quickly suggested that these social beliefs, these collectively held ideas about value and health, were buried deep in the ways people used, for instance, tables and chairs. He called these beliefs “worldview” and said worldviews “vary culturally.” Implicitly drawing on a line of reasoning stemming from Weber (1904) to Geertz (1973a, 1973b) to a group of anthropologically trained missiologists,2 Block explained that inner values make up outward culture, and that people living in different parts of the world have different values and worldviews. (Later in this course he sometimes had students read excerpts from the works of Weber.) His lesson here on worldview set the stage for establishing concepts central to mission anthropology: that different people have different beliefs, that surface forms refract deeper meaning, and that social communities around the world have similar values but are often caught in different stages of development—pagan, animistic, secular, and Christian were to become his categories. “Imagine, for instance, that you are a Luo person living near Lake Victoria,” he continued. “Someone puts a bed in your house and encourages you to sleep on it and not on the floor. You believe that the air circulating under the bed carries malevolent forces. Spirits. Evil. Witchcraft. You appreciate the bed. It represents a gift. But until you change your worldview, until you change your values and assumptions, you continue

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to sleep on the floor.” Block’s argument was beginning to take shape: that Luo and American culture—including American missionaries’ culture, past and present—unfolded and progressed at different rates of change and followed different, sometimes intersecting, trajectories. “Now, the first generation of missionaries believed that if you changed the surface forms of African life, you could change people’s worldviews. Missionaries built a square church in the middle of round huts. They put a Christian veneer over a pagan culture. Crosses replaced charms and idols, priests and pastors replaced waganga, witchdoctors. But this did not change worldview. It only made Africans secular. It destroyed parts of African culture, just as many critics of missions claim.” Indeed, Block maintained that missionaries’ previous mistakes had shifted Africans from paganism to secularism, and that missionaries themselves had not been spiritually advanced enough to have seen or done otherwise. However, he associated these missionaries with ecumenical churches; denominational churches had introduced material gifts. The way to change African life, the way to get Luo to sleep on beds and “forget about the witches underneath them,” he said, was not to hand out better beds but to understand and work through Luos’ beliefs. Block ended his lecture by returning to his reflections on fieldwork. He picked up his autobiographical narrative where he had left off, with the point that real change comes from the spirit; and in keeping with nondenominational churchgoers’ views that the church centers on and radiates from the household, he identified the saved Luo community in terms of a two-parent nuclear family. When my family and I left Luoland, there was a far greater peace among the people. They weren’t afraid. They were healthier. They were better educated—not because there were schools but because, you know, fathers started playing a different role, mothers started playing a different role. You know, the oral aspect of culture and history, mothers and dads started telling their kids stories and tying in Christian stories in the history, you know, bringing out the Christian aspect of it, of their traditional beliefs.

Other missiologists shared Professor Block’s approach in viewing social change through the lens of anthropology. Allow me to introduce a second, briefer vignette drawn from a conversation with John Amory, professor of missions at Lindstrom Christian University, located about five hundred miles north of Stinton College. Professor Amory’s office, unlike Block’s, was lined top to bottom with books and journals and stacks of papers. A research professor, Amory was preparing a series of lectures to deliver to theologians in East Asia. He started the conversation with a remark that echoed Block’s thoughts about the shortcomings of evangelism: “Surely we don’t want to defend the paternalism of missionaries. I mean, a lot of

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them are arrogant and assume that Western life is superior.” Like Block, he regarded the study of culture as one way to lessen missionaries’ ethnocentrism: “Missionaries and evangelists must learn to read time and culture. Missionaries need to ask, ‘What worldview type predominates in Africa? Animism? Islam? Christianity?’”3 Amory’s categories mirrored Block’s typologies. Both regarded worldview and social change as influenced by processes beyond humans’ control. However, whereas Block saw hope in Africans’ trajectory, Amory was less optimistic. Pulling from his files an essay he occasionally referenced in his lectures, Amory elaborated his point that the visible forms of Christianity— churches, schools, crosses, robes—were only surface markers of deeper views. As evidence of the world’s thinness, Amory referred to anthropological works he described as “written in the secular vein.” Charles Piot’s Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999) was on his list. In Piot’s work Amory pointed to the argument that African villages are highly connected to a global system, and that rural Africans are no longer, if they ever were, located off secular-modernity’s political-economic grid. Piot’s last sentence sums up the part that Amory saw as particularly disturbing: “The village [is] a site . . . of the modern, one that is as privileged as any other, one that has shaped the modern as much as it has been shaped by it, and one that brings to the modern—that always uneven, often discordant, ever refracting, forever incomplete cultural/political project—its own vernacular modernity.” Whereas Piot celebrates vernacular modernity, Amory laments it. Keen to move beyond what he considered to be growing secularism among Africans, Africanists, and ecumenical missionaries, beyond the secular in secular-modernity and toward a stage he referred to as Christianmodernity, Amory looked to anthropology both to reveal and to provide an analytic framework for understanding a common, if hidden, Christian culture. Using culturalist terminology to describe the church’s methods, he characterized today’s nondenominational churches as “postmodern” and “emergent.” That is, he saw the true Christian Church as unfolding toward a prophesied future, a utopian end of time. This developmental process was spiritually guided, he said, not human-made, as was secularism. “Secularism as a worldview presupposes that humans are able to chart their own course,” the essay continues. “On the practical level secularists tend to live for the here and now. They are absorbed by material, this-worldly concerns, are extremely busy with earthly distractions, and are career consumed. . . . A secular church [italics in original] seeks human advantage and personal gain by holding to [material] forms rather than the Spirit of God.” Amory’s hope, following that of the essayist, was to use anthropology to improve the delivery of evangelism. In short, he viewed ­anthropology as a means to

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organize human experience within a framework to which Scripture already applied. There is in the missionaries’ version of anthropology a complex understanding of temporality. Whereas a prevailing tenet of mainstream anthropology is that knowledge informs social change, the relation of knowledge to temporality is more complicated in nondenominational frames of reference. My project in this chapter is to understand how missionaries in these nondenominational churches draw on anthropological concepts of time and culture to organize and shape their work, and how these concepts organize the social services they provide overseas. We already see from Block’s and Amory’s thoughts that time and culture are important organizing metaphors. The question is, how are they important, and how do they organize what these missionaries do? In the following pages I first discuss missionaries’ representations and understandings of culture—namely, as a geographically located system of signs and symbols that reveal hidden underlying meanings. I then examine how these ideas perform and enact missionaries’ own conceptions of reality. They do so, I argue, by working through and articulating secularist forms of knowledge that, like religious faith, carry a sense of the limits of human knowledge and an ingrained skepticism of self, other, and the world. Toward the end of the chapter I look at how students of missiology use anthropology in their theses and research, and in the following three chapters I look at how American nondenominational missionaries operationalize anthropology on the ground, in fieldwork. In Chapter Two I introduced nondenominationals’ conceptions of the church as borderless and limitless (that is, as spatially heterotopic). This chapter addresses nondenominational concepts of time and place as utopian expressions of a perfect world. I argued previously that nondenominationals’ evangelism expanded from the home to the Kingdom and back again, and that their itinerant movement among these fields—what they themselves refer to as “tentmaking”—continually reconstituted the process of nondenominationals’ personal conversion (compare Coleman 2006). In this chapter I stress that the temporality of evangelism is infinitely recursive, that is, missionaries see the act of missionizing as needing to occur again and again and again, until “Jesus’ return.” In its recursiveness, mission work is cumulative. It builds up over time. In this end-game orientation, mission work is exhaustive. It eventually “runs out,” though joyously, because when the end of time appears, true believers will “return to heaven.” But what, until the “end of time,” are missionaries to do? What is the purpose of life on Earth? Is it to do good works? To study Scripture? As we saw in the previous chapter, the sectarian isolation of earlier genera-

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tions has given way to public service. Evangelism has shifted toward relief and development activities (Welliver and Northcutt 2004: 12; Weber and Welliver 2007: 35). Although nondenominationals are divided over whether good works “speed” Jesus coming, or whether preaching to the entire world will simply coincide with this ideal end, they largely agree that the work of Christians is “to be prepared and to prepare the world for Christ’s second coming” (Van Rheenen 1996: 41). This makes for some important everyday and near-term activity. Anthropology is one conceptual scheme these missionaries use to organize and shape this work. Anthropology helps missionaries articulate a near-term frame with long-term temporal frames, and assists in connecting the immediate work of the everyday with the longrange cosmological visions of evangelical Christianity.

Strategies for Mission Work: Service-Learning and Publicly Engaged Anthropology Let me set the groundwork a little more specifically, first with respect to the teaching of anthropology in general, which is to say not only in Christian colleges but across the United States; and then in regard to the history of the anthropological study of religion and the interpretive and intellectualist strands of anthropology. the teaching of anthropology

Starting at around the mid- to late 1990s, higher education programs in the United States began increasingly to call for transparency, accountability, and public value in academic programming. Such calls were in part a response to attempts by politically disparate interest groups to align education with the operational logic of international markets (Hall 2005; Urciuoli 2005). In this context of audit and accountability (Strathern 2000), anthropology furnished institutions of higher learning with a methodological framework for responding to public calls for practical relevancy. In particular, anthropology provided field experience and volunteer opportunities for students to participate in a method of instruction that combined classroom lessons with community service (Hyatt 2001). This constructionist form of pedagogy—popularly called service-learning—involved field placement with public agencies, including working in after-school programs, hospitals, or housing projects, or with city councils. In international programs, it often involved teaching English or working in schools. The imperative to serve and to learn while volunteering—and in doing so to prove the public worth of the university—did not escape private, including Christian, institutions. At one of the U.S. nondenominational

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colleges that sent missionaries to East Africa, for example, world evangelism was described as both the moral responsibility of a Christian and an exciting form of service-learning that will “look good on your resume.” At this school and other Christian universities in the United States, anthropology served as a method, a theory, and a technique by which world evangelism and public service might be rationally linked. One service-learning project at Stinton College, for instance, advertised the opportunity to learn about other people while teaching English overseas. It might have looked like an advertisement at my own public university except that it included a quote from Acts 1:8—“Be my witness in Jerusalem, and in all of Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Service-learning was here framed as a short-term public outreach program to build long-term Christian communities. Engaging in service-learning as a form of evangelism reflected a shift from older, mid-twentieth-century mission ideas of anthropology as an “aid to enculturation and conversion of the native” to a means for defining and ensuring missionary students’ own personal and educational advancement. Whereas post-World War II mission anthropology programs helped missionaries better translate and communicate the Bible (a point I discussed in Chapter Two), mission anthropology at the turn of the twentyfirst century sought also to engage students in an activity. Thus world evangelism had near-future significance; it resulted in immediate payoff in terms of students’ own educational portfolios and biographies, and nondenominationals certainly hoped and prayed that it helped to change the lives of those with whom missionaries worked. Along with the rise of service-learning came a more general search in anthropology for public relevance and practical applicability. Advocates of public interest anthropology directed research questions and studies to topics that mattered beyond the academy. Some began to “challenge the rational frameworks of the idea of policy making” (Wedel, Shore, Feldman, and Lathrop 2005: 48) while others tailored their work to the projects of grassroots organizations. As an example of the latter, a group at the University of North Carolina initiated a program about and for the advancement of local social movements. Another group, the World Anthropologies Network (WAN),4 sought to link disparate communities by providing critical perspectives on globalization. Secular anthropology’s public turn corresponded with but differed from new ideas within mission anthropology. To be sure, both modalities of anthropology aspired to public relevance and to effect beneficial social change, both used the language of justice and morality to act now for a better future, and both sought to engage beyond academic confines

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with the increasingly technologically connected world. However, whereas secular versions conceptualized morality and time as measures and experiences of what people do, Christian anthropology conceptualized time and morality via a particular reading of biblical prophecy. Thus, for instance, a service-learning project at Stinton College advertised that teaching English in a city housing project was a response to the biblical imperative to “live and reach out to the world,” paraphrasing Matthew 28:19.5 Another project paraphrased Matthew 24:14 in suggesting in its promotional materials that service work, when widely performed, will coincide with the end of time—a utopian space that is variously interpreted in these churches as the Apocalypse and perfect peace on Earth (at which point Earth would be heaven or paradise).6 Moreover, the general trend toward audit and accountability within the U.S. academy arose in a context of academic revival of interest in the study of religion (Jones and Lauterbach 2005). Analytic frameworks moved from seeing religion as symbols to unpack to seeing religion as a matter of doing things and as having public significance. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Professors Amory and Block were themselves graduate students in the discipline of anthropology, the prevailing mode in the study of religion was to interpret the meanings of signs and symbols, and to see religion as a declared expression of faith. history of the anthropological study of religion

Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Culture (1973) was widely read in the 1970s and 1980s as defining and developing the school of thought to which these missionaries subscribed—an interpretivist school, so called because it stressed the need to explain actions and meanings in social and historical contexts. Geertz’s classic definition of religion is that it is “(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (Geertz 1973a: 90). Although nondenominationals were uneasy with this definition, because it suggests that symbols and motivations are divinely inspired, not dressed-up expressions of false consciousness, Geertz’s formulation fit well with a conception that religious value was cryptically coded, and that surface forms were just that: superficial. In the 1980s and 1990s, the prominence of Geertz’s formulation waned in secular anthropology (and less in mission anthropology). It did so largely in the wake of two critiques by Talal Asad (1993, 2003). The first

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critique was that in focusing on the underlying meaning of surface-level symbols, “Geertz unwittingly normalized features of his own (necessarily parochial) cultural/religious background” (Lincoln 2003: 1), namely, denominational Protestantism. Geertz made religion into a game of decoding an array of hidden meanings, and he made the mistake of confusing his own analytic frame with his object of analysis: religion. Again, however, to nondenominationals, translating or interpreting interior meanings was precisely part of what religion was. Their own view of religion was commensurate with Geertz’s. Although to my knowledge no nondenominational scholars engage directly with Asad in their writings, many write and talk positively about Geertz, for the very reasons that Asad criticizes: because Geertz is interested in religion as the interplay of forms and meanings, and because he holds constant one framework for analysis (see, for example, Hiebert 1994, 2004; Kraft 2003; Van Rheenen 1996). Indeed, Professor Block, discussed earlier in this chapter, quoted Geertz in his class. Unlike Asad, he favored Geertz’s work. Asad’s second critique, which took hold among secularists but not among missiologists, was that in attempting to separate religion from other concepts of anthropological theory, Geertz unwittingly reproduced Enlightenment distinctions between sacred and secular, that is, he committed the Weberian fallacy of believing that religion, economy, and politics exist as discrete social and institutional categories, and of considering that people everywhere differentiate social life from personal life according to principles of public versus private. Asad maintained that whereas Geertz sought a universal conception of religion, religion was in fact not always or everywhere a separate social domain. Rather, Asad maintained, it emerged through what people did, not exclusively in what they said or symbolized. Asad’s own parochialism, secularist anthropologists have argued (see, for example, Caton 2006; Lambek 2000), was to see religion almost exclusively as performative rather than as indicative, that is, to regard religion as more a matter of embodying and enacting belief than of ever interpreting a symbol or stating a creed. Surely, Asad’s critics contemplated, religion is both expressive and declarative, both the statement of belief and the enactment of principle. In effect, these critics questioned the analytic purchase of Asad’s framework for reasons similar to those for which Asad rejected Geertz: because Geertz’s view projected a particular vision of religion (as performative and embodied, not symbolized or stated) to all of society. As a corrective, Asad developed a genealogy of religions that showed how disciplinary practices historically have variously constituted diverse communities; but his extrapolation reinforced the picture that religious expression is maximally present in what a person and a community do, not—or at least not only, as one possibility—in what its signs symbolize (Asad 1993: 64).

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From nondenominational vantage points, Asad’s second critique is neither problematic nor in conflict with his first critique. That is, missiologists would agree that religious belief is performed and enacted; but unlike Asad, missiologists would see enactment as occurring along with, not instead of, symbolization. Nondenominational missiologists would—and do—agree that religion is expressed in and through activity. Such activity is, after all, Christian witness. They also say, however, that people have “platforms” and that hidden meanings lie beneath worldviews. Whereas Asad analyzed Islam to make his point that religion is expressed performatively, and whereas some secularist scholars consider that “it is surely no accident” that “the most telling critiques” of Geertz’s anthropology should “come from scholars primarily concerned with Islam” (Lincoln 2003: 109), nondenominational missiologists would consider it odd that Asad looked outside Christianity. His focus on Islam would suggest that he does not understand the breadth of belief that falls within Christianity, and that he—like Geertz, paradoxically—subscribes to a vision of religion that is implicitly ecumenical and denominational. For to nondenominational missiologists, Christianity affirms both the metaphysical and the intellectual, the constitutive and the symbolic, the embodied and the expressive. As Michael Lambek (2000: 310) might put it, nondenominational missionaries are good Aristotelians; they do not distinguish between “the study of abstractions and engagement with specific issues or instances.” The operative modes of Christian witness conjoin activist and intellectual dimensions. Much like putatively secular modes of learning-through-doing and of effecting change through service-learning, Christian witness evokes a sense of seeing, knowing, embodying, and testifying to an element that is both within and outside a person, and the very act of witnessing brings this element of transcendent power into creation. Witness affirms the authenticity of an event or phenomenon and, in affirming it, culturally constitutes it. In other words, it objectifies existential problems (being, birth, death; becoming, living, passing) and transforms these problems into more humanly graspable forms in the course of living a Christian life and evangelizing. Perhaps this is why missiologists teach anthropology: because it is a framework in which to think about doing and being, seeing and knowing, or being born into and living (in myriad surface-form as well as deeper ways) a Christian life. One of the key texts that nondenominationals use, Kraft’s Anthropology for Christian Witness (2003), treats anthropology as a field-based engagement for understanding and acting within the world. In an introductory subsection titled “The Importance of Anthropology to Christian Witness” Kraft writes, “Anthropologists have taught us a great deal about the need to take everyone’s culture seriously” (2003: xiii). Kraft lists ten reasons for studying anthropology:

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1. Anthropology attempts to deal with what people actually do and think. 2. Anthropology historically has dealt primarily with non-Western peoples. 3. Anthropology has developed the culture concept. 4. Anthropology takes a holistic view. 5. Anthropology is a perspective, not simply a subject. 6. Anthropology focuses on communication. 7. Anthropology distinguishes between forms and meanings. 8. Anthropology has developed the concept of worldview. 9. Anthropology has developed the research method most helpful to Christian workers. 10. Anthropology deals with culture change.7

Kraft defines culture as “the total life way of a people, the social legacy the individual acquires from his group,” a people’s “design for living” (Kraft 2003: 38), a definition he draws from Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man (1949: 17). He goes on to explain that in mission anthropology, culture is studied to “answer questions” that secular anthropology does not address. “Committed Christians,” Kraft writes, apply anthropology “to a task that far transcends the anthropologist’s goals.” Whereas secular anthropology examines how people live, Christian anthropology conveys God’s will. Kraft’s distinction between Christian and secular anthropology lies in seeing the first as primarily transcendent and the second as primarily analytic. Christianity’s transcendent element acts on and helps to discern forces that are invisible. Kraft writes, “Since God exists and He and His Kingdom are to be our supreme value, we are to participate in the war between Him and Satan. . . . The battle between God and Satan takes place within every sociocultural context” (2003: 451). As Kraft puts it, Christian anthropologists deploy their witness to “change people’s allegiances, their perspectives, and their behavior in the direction of [God’s] ideals” (2003: xiii). Mission anthropology, in other words, is useful, he argues, for effecting change, which is, as he sees it, a matter of letting God play out in missionaries’ tracing and linking up of diverse worldviews. The genealogy of critique from Geertz to Asad and beyond (such as Caton 2006; Lambek 2000; Mahmood 2005) is well known within anthropology. So too is the phenomenon of audit culture in academia (Shore and Wright 1997; Strathern 2000). Less well known is nondenominationals’ functionalization of anthropology—that is, how evangelical Christians make anthropology function for them—and that they see divine intention in students’ public service work. In the secularist view, missiologists recontextualize anthropology for the purpose of converting and changing

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people. The concepts they use draw on ideas that are familiar within the field of anthropology, including, most notably, ideas about time, transformation, and points of contact. I turn to these ideas next.

Mission Anthropology: Time, Transformation, Points of Contact To understand the concepts of time and culture embedded in Christian anthropology, and to grasp how missiologists use these concepts to teach and conduct mission work, let us examine Professor Block’s course in greater detail, particularly the texts he uses to teach. Here I show that Block’s materials elaborate four points about culture, time, conversion, and change. First, culture is discrete. In other words, ways of doing things correspond to groups of people living in specific places and times, such as the Luo of western Kenya, the Chagga of Mount Kilimanjaro, the Basoga of eastern Uganda, or for that matter, the nondenominational missionaries of the United States. Second, cultural groups have different ways of conceptualizing time. Block’s course represents Africans’ time as circular and Americans’ time as linear. Biblical time, his main textbook argues, is linear in that “God began time with creation and will ultimately bring it to a grand finale with the second coming of Christ” (Van Rheenen 1996: 121); but biblical time is not necessarily forward-moving within the plane or trajectory of human time. Third, conversion marks and effects temporal change in the lives of groups and individuals; conversion happens when cultural practices are properly aligned with the values embedded in the Bible. Fourth and finally, positive growth and social change are measured through a global network of religious communities that have moved through “stages of infancy to full adult” and are described as existing beyond the parameters of nation-states. Together these points suggest a Geertzian typology in which missiological time is “timeless” in relation to biblical culture. However, whereas Geertz (in the essay “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali,” 1973b) describes the immobilization of time in relation to Balinese ideas of personhood and behavior, I, drawing on what these missionaries see, regard time for members of this community as detemporalized in relation to what they call Judgment Day. Evangelical time depends, as it were, on the arrival of an end of time when human souls will be deemed damned or saved. But why is temporality so crucial to missiologists’ ideas about anthropology? Why don’t they focus on personhood or social value or other Durkheimian categories that might also ramify with their ideas about worldview? Their apocalyptic sense of time is in many ways evident. Less manifest is how their focus on time (as variable, culturally discrete, effective,

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and bench-marking) expands into and helps to shape new spiritual communities and social values. One clue may lie in the textbooks that missiologists assign and write. What is interesting about mission anthropology texts is that they present time as a fixed concept. They codify culture as a set of traditional traits that mark proximity to a future. In other words, mission studies texts do not so much depict a human-centered view of history as they argue for—indeed, assert the truth of—a universal biblical time. In portraying time narrowly, as linear versus cyclical and not as socially constructed and enacted, missiologists recontextualize that which is obviously human—culture and tradition—and redirect the human-made world toward building a global Christianity. They do so by identifying the time of their “target” cultures and by using this time to discern points of contact and distance from the Bible; these relative points are in turn seen as the preaching points through which to raise questions about traditional practices, and in so questioning to create a slippage of cultural allegiances; these changing allegiances assist in measuring—if not speeding—movement toward an end of time. Thus, on the face of it, missiologists’ temporal framework offers a different foundation for a comparative theory than does mainstream anthropology. The latter focuses on the historically divergent and culturally generative properties of collective sentiment and disposition—a focus that stems from Weber, to be sure, but also draws on the works of Durkheim (1912), who originated the idea that collective representations are human expressions, and, more recently, Bourdieu (1977), who furnished the understanding that dispositions and doxa are learned, not God-given.8 Seen from missiologists’ vantage point, such a human-centered sociology is destined to be secularist. Missiologists’ constant return to timeless time—to the tuning of events to a master narrative that jointly reveals and determines the future—organizes their daily work and the textbooks they use to teach. In his classes, Block drew on portions of four mission anthropology texts: Anthropology for Christian Witness (Kraft 2003), Anthropological Insights for Missionaries (Hiebert 2004), Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Hiebert 1994), and Missions: Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Strategies (Van Rheenen 1996). Each text begins by examining the theological foundations of mission work, and each suggests that missiological decisions must be rooted in Christian faith lest missionaries reproduce a modern-secular worldview. Gailyn Van Rheenen depicts a three-tiered model of missionary work (137). At the foundation is theology, on which rest the social sciences, including sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Judging from Van Rheenen’s near exclusion of discussion of sociology and psychology, the most important of these social sciences is anthropology. Van Rheenen’s teacher, Hiebert, writes that anthropol-

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ogy can help missionaries contextualize their messages cross-culturally and can aid them in understanding “the social change that occurs when people become Christians” (2004: 15). All of these authors—Kraft, Hiebert, and Van Rheenen—depict an interrelation among three cultural areas: the missionaries’ culture, the culture of those they missionize, and the concepts and values expressed in the Bible (see especially Kraft 2003: 13). Van Rheenen calls these three areas “target culture, American culture, and biblical culture” (1996: 120), and Kraft refers to them as “our own interpretations and worldview,” “receptors’ understandings and worldview,” and “biblical authors’ writings and worldview” (2003: 448). The authors are mixed in their opinions as to whether biblical culture includes the human historical context in which the Bible was written (Kraft’s view) or is the expression of a perfect and divine value that inheres fundamentally in the Bible (Hiebert’s and Van Rheenen’s views). However, all three agree that the worldviews of biblical authors are more divinely centered than are those of Americans and their target cultures. In all three authors’ conceptions, culture is both a way of doing things and a temporal modality. Hiebert, for instance, asserts that most missionaries live in “linear time” (1985: 131) and see activity as unfolding across a structure of beginning, middle, and end. (All three authors assume that mission culture is American culture, and that American culture is all of a piece, not heterogeneous; this assumption is at odds with their view that mission work will create new, independent, non-American missions, but it also bespeaks an assumption that the “in charge” culture is American.) The cumulative trajectory of American missionaries’ time is reflected in other parts of missionaries’ home culture, Hiebert notes, including in missionaries’ own conceptualizations of progress, knowledge, and human growth. Professor Block used an example from Hiebert’s text in teaching about linear versus cyclical time. Block explained to his class that an “ordinary part” of mission work in East Africa is “trying to figure out Africans’ ideas of time. You may show up at the appointed hour at a person’s home in a village, only to find no one is where they said they’d be. But you have to realize Africans work on African time—not by the clock but by the social time of day. If it’s lunch time, they’ll show up around that time. If it’s evening, it could be from 6 to 9 p.m.” Block drew on his own experiences working in Kenya to illustrate his and these authors’ points. Although at other times he qualified that “Africans too wear watches and watch the clock,” Block, again after Hiebert, contrasted American time as punctual with African time as “seamless,” that is, as folding into events, not separating them. Africans, for instance, Hiebert argues, focus on the “event at hand rather than on time itself” (2004: 131). African time is reflected in the languages of different “tribes” or culture groups. “In some tribes time

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is almost like a pendulum, going back and forth,” Hiebert writes. “People in these cultures speak of going back in time, or of time ‘stopping’” (2004: 131). Van Rheenen considers that cultural modes of time can be layered, including in their traditional (not only modern, clock-bound) modes. He writes that Africans “may conceive of time as either linear or cyclical. . . . In linear cultures ancestors are spiritual beings whose names are remembered and continue to be part of the family folklore. They are actively concerned about the family and intervene when forgotten or when decisions are made with which they disagree” (1996: 127). In Van Rheenen’s conception, this linear model can also be circular at the level of social reproduction; ancestors are “the living dead” whose ranks are supplemented generationally (see also Kraft 2003: 217). Threaded through theological conceptions of human-cultural and biblical time is a discussion of a “transcultural theology” that, Hiebert (2004: 217) argues, serves as a mediating conceptual field between a biblical world and that of various cultural theologies. (Cultural theologies are what interpretivist-secular anthropologists would call cultural cosmologies and belief systems.9) Hiebert depicts discrete cultural contexts that are characterized by their own traditions. The culture of the Bible intersects differently with each of these cultural-theological contexts. One of the primary goals of missionaries, he writes, is to better align points of contact between the Bible and culture. In Professor Block’s and all three authors’ views, language study is an important means for connecting and integrating these two domains. By translating the Bible into local languages, missionaries hope to find near equivalents for key Christian concepts and through these terms to develop and grow what they call a transcultural Christianty. Thus, as it is for anthropologists in general, for mission studies students there is in their academic work a premium on language study and on the selection and contextualization of information. In fact, missiologists’ focus on identifying points of contact as a means for understanding historical change may sound to those who first studied anthropology in the 1980s, as I did, like a historical anthropology of structural conjunctures (Sahlins 1983: xiv, 123, 125) in which different interests are theorized as being realized through the microsociology of interactions, or like a cultural theory of contact zones in which persons from different locations define themselves in relation to how they see and represent one another (Pratt 1987).10 However, unlike these secular modalities of conjuncture and contact, which are always historical and which focus on the production (not a priori existence) of differences and common ground, mission anthropology conceives of power asymmetries as existing in and of themselves, that is, as innate cultural traits given to people by God. Cultural hegemonies and counterhegemonies—what Block called the good and evil of the world—are mani-

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festations, as missionaries see it, of an imperfectly understood moral order, not of human interactions and interests. Along these lines, Hiebert developed a concept of incarnational witness: the idea that missionaries, through fieldwork, can embody and know aspects of divinity. Van Rheenen developed a similar thought: “The message of God must become incarnate in us. We must become God’s message in human flesh dwelling among people” (Van Rheenen 1996: 73). To Hiebert, the form of embodiment that Van Rheenen depicts is both part of culture and beyond it. “Incarnational witness goes where people are, speaks their language, and becomes one with them. . . . Incarnational witness also means that the gospel and its messengers stand outside [others’] language and culture” (Hiebert 1994: 66). In his class, Block argued that Hiebert’s idea of “incarnating one’s self through fieldwork” was in the interest of “re-incarnating others to Christ.” His point, which captures a particular phenomenological perception of social change as inflected through nondenominational missiology, is suggested in Kraft’s discussion of the theological implications of using anthropology for Christian witness. Kraft writes pointedly that fieldwork fuses and infuses new relationships, and that Christian witness not only conveys a message but is constantly reshaped and changed by the encounter. Christian witness involves recommending, both to our own people and to those of other societies, that they live as Jesus did in what might be called “Kingdom normalcy.” We are to use whatever is usable in our heritage (as Jesus did) but freely supplement by reinterpreting, altering, or replacing what we started out with in order to grow in our relationship with Christ and to capture as much as possible of our cultural heritage for Christ. The assumptions and principles we advocate accept as much of the cultural heritage (whether theirs or ours) as is compatible with Christian faith but assume that wresting cultural structures from satanic use may be difficult and will always involve reinterpretation, altering, and replacing. [Kraft 2003: 451–452]

I compare Kraft’s and other missiologists’ ideas of the “satanic” with those of East Africans in the next chapter. For now I note that Christian models of culture and time have been well analyzed by anthropologists of Christianity. Joel Robbins, for instance, describes how “Christian ideas about change, time, and belief are based on . . . assumptions that are organized around the plausibility of radical discontinuities in personal lives and cultural histories” (Robbins 2007: 6–7). His view of Christian models of time and culture examines Christians’ own hopes and yearning for rupture and discontinuity. John and Jean Comaroff (1997) observe how conversion plays out across the longue durée. They analyze Christianity as a “conversation” between missionaries and converts across generations. Fenella Cannell (2006: 43) illustrates that Christianity “can be defined only in reference to its own

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historical development” and “can never contain only a single message with single possibilities because Christian doctrine is in itself paradoxical.” Much like secular-modernity—or for that matter, schooling—Christianity, these observers note, constitutes and is constituted by many different social practices. As a sociomoral orientation and narrative of nothing larger than (so to speak) the world, and much more, Christianity (seen from an anthropological frame) essentializes images of its self and its other—its self as saved, its other as not—and it converts the latter into a version of the former by marking its trek toward Judgment Day. Like any universalizing discourse, including that of modern nation-state schools, Christianity promises a better world; it articulates what that world looks and might look like, and it subjects people to new circumstances that test and compel them to change toward the form of the imagined future. The paradox of Christianity being more than and yet only itself does not mean that various inflections of Christianity are fake or artificial. Rather, it means that Christianity (indeed, again like schooling) carries the power to be everything to many groups, and yet, seen from this perspective, never everything all at once.11 The models offered by Robbins, the Comaroffs, and Cannell capture aspects of the form of Christianity about which I write here. American missionaries on the Zebra Team used anthropology to leverage conversion and “replace” culture in the short term. They condemned as “superstitious” Africans’ propensities for secrecy, and called “animistic” and “heathen” African witchcraft and polygyny. The way to change these archaic expressions, mission studies teachers taught, was to identify common cultural values and then preach and teach through these points of intervention. Once points of contact had been revealed, the missionaries could unlock culture, so to speak, and bring Africans closer to biblical time. Thus, for these missionaries, Christian models of culture and time stressed both near-term and forward-looking change. However, missionaries also espoused a model of slow transformation, as evidenced in their interlocking concepts of missionary cycle, cultural distance, and biblical time; to observe their work across several years (as well as to read it in terms of the historical record, as presented in Chapter Two) is to see that the effects of their work were slow-paced. Before midterm break, Block’s students discussed, in addition to concepts of time, a subject that Van Rheenen’s text calls “the missionary cycle.” The missionary cycle is a heuristic for thinking about evangelism as fieldwork. Its stages are selecting a site, studying a new language, moving into field service, and then cycling back and forth between home culture and mission context. A missionary model of the long or, more accurate, midterm durée, it helps students identify where they are in the course of becoming missionaries, and includes helping them to anticipate how different cultural understand-

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ings of time will affect the work they do. Most of the students in Block’s anthropology class used this cycle to identify where they were in the course of mission work. Thus the cycle was both a descriptor of and a guide for entering “a new culture” and anticipating “culture shock” (Kraft 2003: 125). After the midterm break, the students discussed cross-cultural communication and strategy in mission work. Following lessons on the character of culture and cultural validity in which “cultural validity from a Christian perspective, is the anthropological perspective that cultures are essentially equal to one another but are ultimately judged by God” (Van Rheenen 1996: 81), Block’s course turned to discuss concepts of cultural distance. Block stipulated that, regarding distance, his model derived from a typology detailed in Ralph Winter’s chapter “The New Macedonia: A Revolutionary New Era in Missions Begins” in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement (Winter and Hawthorne 1992). In Winter’s model, cultural distance is codified in terms of difference between the missionary or teacher and those taught. This distance is measured in a coded, graded, and delineated formulation of E-1 to E-3, whereby E stands for evangelism and E-1 refers to a nearly complete cultural overlap between mission and target culture. “E-1 evangelism occurs among people who speak the same general language as the missionary and have a similar cultural heritage” (Van Rheenen 1996: 82). E-2 evangelism is a less-than-perfect relationship. “This type of evangelism occurs when Anglo-American Christians teach first-generation Spanish-speaking Hispanics in the United States, Latinos in Central and South America, or Germanic-speaking people in Europe” (Van Rheenen 1996: 83). E-3 is a form of evangelism between two significantly different cultures, examples of which “include Kipsigis teaching those of Asian or European heritages, Anglo-Americans teaching Hopi Indians in the Hopi language, and North Americans proclaiming the gospel in Asia and Africa” (Van Rheenen 1996: 83). Likewise this form of evangelism is seen as occurring when African groups evangelize among American secularists. Although Winter does not himself specify an E-0 (E-zero) model, Professor Block, citing Van Rheenen, defined E-0 as a matter of preaching to people who out of habit or family background attend church “but have not declared Christ as Lord.” These conceptions of evangelism—where E-1, E-2, and E-3 unfold in a continuum and E-0 stands outside as a separate category—are taken up in courses taught by American missionaries to African Bible studies students in Nairobi, Kenya, discussed in Chapter Five. For now it is important to note that this “E-scale” (Winter and Hawthorne 1992: 774) reflects missionaries’ ideas that conversion is a matter of minimizing gaps in worldviews; that missionaries are seen as needing to learn “the language and the cultural domains of thought of their adopted people” in order to “communicate God’s message with appropriate metaphors

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and illustrations without losing its core essence,” and need anthropology to do this; and that Americans in some contexts are considered better equipped to missionize and preach than people from “closer cultures” (Van Rheenen 1996: 84). On this latter point, Van Rheenen gives the example that Americans are more effective than Kipsigis in working with Kisii, Luo, and Maasai, all culture groups living in different parts of Kenya. “Incessant intertribal feuds and cattle raids have created such animosities that most Kisii, Luo, and Maasai would not accept a Kipsigi evangelist in their midst. American missionaries as E-3 evangelists are more effective than Kipsigis as E-2 evangelists,” Van Rheenen writes (1996: 85). This is a point with which, as we shall see, East Africans only partly agree. Woven into these cultural logics of time, distance, change, and evangelism is another conception of the Christian Church and its presence in the world. Missiological reflections on anthropological issues are used with the goal of developing strategies for church growth. In the final third of Professor Block’s course, discussion turned to “church maturation” and building church “independence” (which are also detailed toward the end of Van Rheenen’s text). Block employed a model of human development to describe the church from infancy to full adulthood. Combining metaphors of human growth and ecological sustainability, he taught that the first stage of churches planted by missionaries was infancy. If properly rooted—by which he meant if missionaries were preaching using cultural categories that had meaning to people locally—the church would grow to adolescence, at which point baptized members would begin to preach directly to their neighbors, circumventing the full-time need for nonindigenous missionaries. Independence followed adolescence, until “about five years later, as with each of these stages,” Block said, the church would reach full maturity: adulthood. Adult churches are “indigenous” entities that build on and conform to the values and norms of the local culture; and indigeneity—the quality of being native to an area—is an ideal form for reasons of efficiency. Human resources are not wasted, he said, and everything about the Bible makes sense to the churchgoers. “The goal of missions,” Van Rheneen (1996: 187) writes, is “the establishment of indigenous churches. Only indigenous churches, rooted in their cultures, will be able to accomplish effective social and evangelistic ministries.” Notwithstanding missiologists’ positive emphasis on indigeneity and efficiency, Professors Block and Amory expressed uncertainty. “If we use indigenous thought to preach, how do we know we are not reproducing godless humanism?” Amory asked. He was skeptical about the secularrational basis of anthropology. “Missionaries,” he said, “regrettably still believe” in human self-sufficiency and “still need anthropology in order to help rationalize our way to some answers.” He described this Catch-22 of

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using rational thought to sustain Christianity as a feeling of cognitive dissonance, of feeling as though he believed in one thing but acted on another. This sense of dissonance, he said, was shared by “all people at some level,” although some “are torn between values of animism and polytheism, others between polytheism and secularism, or between secularism and theism.” Amory turned again to anthropology to assess moments of cognitive or cultural dissonance. Like Block, he saw anthropology as a means to identify common cultural “receptors” among various people in the world around him. If, however, a goal of mission anthropology is to grow and develop the Christian Church, the Church does not stop at the moment of independence or adulthood. It links with other interdependent entities that are networked globally. The final meetings of Block’s anthropology course attended to international cooperation and networking (the title of a subsection of Van Rheenen’s text). These sessions focused on using culture to minimize misunderstandings among global partners, including a tendency for “Westerners to dominate partnership relationships” (Van Rheenen 1996: 199). Although they favor free enterprise and private ownership, mission anthropologists express concern for the uneven transition of states to marketdriven economies. Paraphrasing Van Rheenen (1996: 185), Amory argued that present-day nation-states increasingly hold less significance than international consortiums when it comes to regulating or directing trade. In such a world, Amory maintained, it is important that religious organizations operate at the supranational level and learn a lesson about interdependence from global business. “Interdependence frequently becomes more of a goal than independence,” writes Van Rheenen; and one way interdependence is achieved, Block explained, is through global networks of learning and communication, including schools. “The atheistic secularism that formal schools convey,” he said, paraphrasing Kraft (2003: 287), is “spiritually deadening.” Kraft in turn asks his readers, “Is there a future for church-run schools in the Two-Thirds World?” (288). (In missiological conceptions, “Two-Thirds World” refers to non-Western societies.) “We have already affirmed the basic validity of ‘service’ within the overall program of the Church,” writes Kraft (2003: 288), but “are schools worth the bother?” From the work of the Zebra Team and from the many service-learning and short-term mission projects conducted in schools, it would seem that nondenominationals have answered yes. With all this in mind, consider finally that Christian witness and global networks articulate at different registers of scale. Christian witness transcends and reincarnates in the everyday; global networks encompass and supersede nation-states.12 Taken together, witnessing and networking frame mission work as a matter of working with the long view in mind

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when living and working day-to-day. In other words, concepts about time in mission anthropology reveal missionaries’ own sociotemporalizing— their own making of, or preparing for, a world they imagine will exist when Jesus comes back to earth. In this missiological framework, anthropology provides a mode for operating in the near-term while preparing for an end. Using various models (cultural-ecological, incarnational, cross-cultural, and life-cycle), mission anthropology identifies culture with a place and treats people and places as sources or opportunities from which to learn. This pedagogical objectivism defines a group (including students and readers of mission anthropology as well as those with whom they work and whom they study) as a product of tradition and as subject to change. In other words, nondenominational anthropology presents conversion as a process that involves the identification and coordination of points of contact predicted and prescribed in the Bible. Correspondences among people and places evince divine planning, not human agency or ingenuity. Whereas nation-state textbooks and secular pedagogies envision readers and featured peoples as living within state territories, mission anthropology uses concepts of transcultural theology and incarnational witness to suggest membership in a global ecumene. In the following section I elaborate these points about the near-term, processual value of missionary anthropology and the modalities of time embedded in mission pedagogy. A final consideration is in order here, by pointing to a disconnection between (yet evincing the impossibility of neatly separating) secular and Christian anthropology, and by locating the course and texts discussed earlier in a network of relationships. Ralph Winter, whose E-scale evangelism Gailyn Van Rheenen’s textbook describes, was chairman of an advisory council at the Summer Institute of International Studies when it was launched at Trinity College in 1974.13 Paul Hiebert, author of Anthropological Insights for Missionaries and Anthropological Reflections on Mission Studies, received his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Minnesota, taught anthropology at the University of Washington for several years, and offered a course called Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Communications at the launch of the Trinity College summer school. Both Hiebert and Charles Kraft, author of Anthropology for Christian Witness, were on the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Mission (now School of Intercultural Studies) for many years. There, with a third anthropologist, Alan Tippett (who earned his doctorate at the University of Oregon), they taught several courses: Cultural Anthropology in Christian Perspective, Intercultural Communication, Applied Anthropology, Urban Anthropology and Church Planting, and Theory of Anthropology. Van Rheenen, author of Missions: Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Strategies, studied the works of Paul Hiebert and Charles Kraft. Van Rheenen references Kraft’s

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“1976 mimeographed classroom notes for anthropology, Fuller Theological Seminary” in his list of works cited (232). In his preface, Van Rheenen acknowledges “Dr. Paul Hiebert, whose writings and courses continue to stimulate my thinking,” and Hiebert wrote the forward to Van Rheenen’s book. In turn, Van Rheenen as well as Professors Amory and Block had all at various times worked as nondenominational missionaries in East Africa. Considering that many of these missiologists were trained and taught at public and nonreligiously affiliated universities, or in a range of religiously identifying institutions,14 drawing a distinction between Christian and nonChristian scholarship is again difficult. The more pressing matter, if we are to grasp the organizing principles of their work, is to understand the processes by which time is construed within mission anthropology. How, at the meta-analytic level, do missionaries conceive of and use time? How do they infuse and project their vision of time onto a wider sociopolitical world? As Nancy Munn (1992: 109) writes in a review essay on the cultural anthropology of time, “Control over time is not just a strategy of interaction; it is also a medium of hierarchic power and governance.” This conception has implications for understanding how anthropology gets drawn into missionaries’ understandings of government, statecraft, and policy.

Indicative and Subjunctive Temporalizations Time is an inexorable aspect of all social experience and activity. It is sometimes narrowly simplified as single-stranded and linear, but this understanding of time overlooks that discourses of time take on sociotemporal form. Talk about time is already a spatiotemporalization—a social making of time across space. “Although Western theory frequently treats space as time’s antithetical ‘Other,’ time’s Other turns out somewhat embarrassingly to be its Other Self” (Munn 1992: 94). One way that Christian and secular anthropologies overlap is in their focus on points of contact and conceptions of time, yet the two differ substantively in how time and contact are conceived. Whereas secular anthropology in the mode I am using to analyze mission anthropology deals with time as a sociocultural process that is “continually being produced in everyday practices” (Munn 1992: 93), mission anthropology conceives of time as geographically and culturally particular and as reckoned by, or unfolding in accordance with, an external and objective time-device: the Bible. As we have seen, the Bible is viewed as the ultimate and perfect arbiter of human time. With regard to temporal externality, mission anthropology uses time to describe and assess “target cultures” of variable distance from “Bible culture” (Van Rheenen 1996: 120), and it uses the Bible to identify points

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of contact through which to contextualize missionaries’ message. Secular anthropology, in contrast, conceptualizes cultural distance as a concept to be analyzed. How people see relations of distance is a reflection of cultural value and asymmetrical relations of power as seen in secular anthropology, not a measure of an animistic or secular “stage” on a historical trajectory. In view of these dissimilar conceptions of time and contact as relative points of distance versus relations of power asymmetry, understandings of social change also differ between mission and secular anthropologies. In nondenominational Christian modes, social change can be prophesied or foretold; people’s experiences can be perceived as having a corresponding dimension in a world beyond human knowledge. In secular modes, change can be examined as a product of human interaction. The present is generally conceived analytically as the accumulation of past events and as the basis for informing human actions and decisions in the future. Thus mission and secular anthropologies have partly overlapping conceptions of history. Yet missiologists do not see their own typifications as projected categories of a long Western history. That is, they do not account for the idea that people, including missionaries, are making, not just experiencing, time. From outside a nondenominational cosmological model, it is clear that nondenominational horizons (like those of anthropology) have a history. The Kingdom-building anticipated by missionaries’ movements draws on a time of “emplacement” (Foucault 1986) stemming from Europe’s Crusades and Middle Ages and continuing through and beyond the late twentieth-century evangelization of Muslims, discussed in Chapter Two. Missiologists’ objectivist way of seeing time—that is, as characteristic, categorical, and “emplaced”—when regarded from within anthropology, is ahistorical and acultural. It detemporalizes experience and evacuates the past. Jane Guyer (2007) has discussed this aspect of evangelical futureorientation in a thought piece comparing evangelical and macroeconomic time. Her point that classical economics and biblical traditions share a notion of end-time, “when final or ‘marginal’ utilities can be calculated, or when the Savior returns” (Robert 2007: 438, paraphrasing Guyer 2007), extends to our consideration of how nondenominational time interweaves with ideas of human betterment through public policy. Both nondenominational and public policy modes anticipate a long-range end: public policy sees an end when development is finished and global equality is achieved; nondenominational Christianity sees an end when Jesus returns and all Christian believers are saved and in heaven. In the meantime, both nondenominational and public policy projects fill up the near-term with humanitarian service. The conceptual arcs of nondenominational work and public policy—their starting points, end points, and ranges of meaning—are coterminous and partly articulate with one another.

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The question is, how? I’ve already suggested that for nondenominationals anthropology links the domains of theology and world development. This intermediating place of anthropology is evident in missiologists’ tripartite model in which theology is the foundation, the social sciences are the methods and tools, and global strategy is the pragmatic ends. However, this model needs to be unpacked in order to consider how anthropology is specifically used. Taking a meta-analytic view of mission anthropology, how do missionaries create their own sociotemporalities in the course of studying and doing anthropology? How do anthropologically schooled missionaries reflect on and categorize what they do? These latter two questions are different yet related. The first question is formulated in a subjunctive mode: How is time imagined and lived while it is also intended to become or exist? The second question is formulated descriptively and asks how the past and present are codified: What is the system of classification? “Linear versus cyclical time” is descriptive; “incarnational witness” is subjunctive; it enacts or performs its own utopian vision. Within the pedagogical framing of missionary anthropology, no attention is given to analyzing a human-social element in the subjunctive mode. The indicative is operational; the subjunctive is seen as a matter of faith; it is where suprahuman agency operates. In other words, in Professor Block’s course and texts, students’ attention is focused on the traits, language, and qualities of “a” people—the Basoga or the Luo or the ­Chagga—not on how these people (or for that matter, on how nondenominational missionaries) make realities. Homi Bhabha (2006) has called the indicative and subjunctive modes “competing pedagogical inflections.” Writing about how differentially centered and marginalized groups are incorporated into a nation—that is, how people who identify with various communities are “written in” to official narratives, including those of textbooks—Bhabha distinguishes between “an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory ‘present’ marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign” (Bhabha 2006: 211). The former he calls indicative; the latter he calls subjunctive and recursive. Whereas Bhabha and others have sought to theorize cultural difference in regard to the place of marginalized and migrant peoples in secular-modern polities, missionary anthropologists have been less concerned with locating a place in secular-modernity than with making the space of secularity itself liminal. In other words, they seek to effect, through a theological reading of the Bible, an elision of secularity through cosmological time. They seek to become Christian moderns.15 For these nondenominationals, one way of avoiding the secularization of religion is to develop a modern-rationalizing mode of inquiry that is

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itself linked to biblical prophecy. I explore one example of such a knowledge-building project in the following section, where I analyze a missionary’s master’s thesis and account of fieldwork. Whereas Professor Block’s course and texts give insight into how anthropology is taught to students in “stateside” colleges, this missionary’s work and the master’s thesis he wrote show a logic by which these nondenominational church leaders translate textbook knowledge into fieldwork.

Cultural Equivalence as a Manifestation of Biblical Prophecy Jeremy Phillips began working as a missionary in western Kenya in the 1960s. There he helped to plant several churches he described as having become “mature and thriving.” In the late 1990s he moved to northern Tanzania, where he worked with other American missionaries and a cadre of Kenyan evangelists to plant new churches. My conversation with Phillips occurred over a meal at the nondenominational missionaries’ house in northern Tanzania. “Why are missionaries so interested in anthropology?” I asked. “What is so useful about the subject?” Phillips answered with a story. Earlier that month he had been preaching in Maasai areas west of Mount Kilimanjaro and had been trying to impress upon Maasai people how far away America was. “I told them two days by plane,” he said, “that it was that far, but they don’t think two days is far, so I told them if they were to drive their cattle for five years, that’s how long it would take for them to get to America. Then they realized how far it was.” He said his first example was overly “secular” in its focus on air transport and in fact he was less interested in using cultural equivalence to convert time and distance than in understanding what he described as the “key moral principles of different cultures.” As an example of what he meant by “key moral principles” that are shared among diverse peoples, he told a story about when he started working in western Kenya in the late 1960s. He began by picking up the Bible in the local language and asking what the title meant. The title in Luo was Muma and he asked what it meant but was told, well, it meant only “Muma,” that “Muma” was just what Muma meant; but he wasn’t satisfied with this, so he began to learn the local language by comparing the local-language Bible and the English Bible using a concordance—an alphabetical cross-listing of words and concepts, with references to specific chapters. (This technique of using the Bible to gain insight into the language and beliefs of “target cultures” points to nondenominationals’ understand-

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ing of the Bible as absolute revelation, even when, as with the local Bible, its translators and the conditions of translation are known.) Phillips said he found something interesting: in the local language there is a suffix—a lot like the suffix -ana in Kiswahili—that illustrates reciprocation. (For example, in Kiswahili tutasahau means we shall forget, and tutasahauana means we shall forget one another.) Phillips found that there are degrees of reciprocation, from less to more binding. For example, the most binding act of reciprocation was a blood oath that required blood sacrifice. On the basis of this less-to-more scheme of sacrifice—from agreeing with words to agreeing with blood, and everything in between—he recorded a set of criteria for what he called “the perfect sacrifice.” The perfect sacrifice, he said, required the presence of four conditions: the perfect animal (cow or goat), the perfect person to do the slaughtering, the perfect place for the slaughter, and the perfect means for and technique of slaughter. He also said, however, that it was in fact impossible to have a pure sacrifice, because, as he put it, “you can never find the perfect goat, person, place, or means of sacrificing. A man is always impure, the goat is never quite right, the way it is slaughtered is ‘off’ ever so slightly. And where can you find a pure place where children haven’t played and things haven’t gone afowl?” In his ministry he spoke with local leaders about the impossibility of perfection. He gave the example of “a local man who agreed and confirmed” that it was impossible to ever find the perfect conditions for a sacrifice. He said to the man (and to me in a way that conflated the act of telling the story with the act of missionizing) that the perfect sacrifice, the only perfect sacrifice, was that of Jesus. “I don’t know what could have been a more perfect sacrifice. Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead. That’s the perfect sacrifice,” Phillips said. He continued: “I [the missionary] told him [the Luo man] that if he wanted the perfect sacrifice, he should not look to local tradition but follow Jesus.” I objected that his example moved far from the mainstream of anthropology. It used a descriptive-analytic theory to prescribe what other people should think and do. Phillips rejoined that his work employed anthropology as a comparative framework and methodology. It cracked the code of what on the surface appeared illogical or meaningless. To illustrate, he continued with his example: “The amazing thing was that it turns out that in the local language the promise of a perfect sacrifice is called Muma—the title of the Bible!” The fact that the word promise or covenant was the local language’s word for the Bible signaled a dynamic equivalence between Christianity and the local culture. Yes, he distinguished between Christianity and local culture, suggesting that they are not the same but that “all cultures” share key concepts that are revealed absolutely in the Bible. I would say that his argument is logically circular. It posits Muma as an unknown

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entity, introduces the concept of sacrifice, and then presents as revelation the fact that Muma means “the promise of sacrifice.” Also, his narrative attributes expressions of human agency (including translating and preaching) to ominiscient, suprasocial forces of divinity, which makes it difficult to identify his argument with anything in the mainstream of social theory. In fact, his quest for equivalences beneath the surface of difference is itself different from an anthropological grasp of comparison, which seeks to understand social conditions that contextualize change rather than corresponding points of similarity. What is interesting, however, about Phillips’s use of dynamic equivalences—which draws on Ralph Winters’ E-series of evangelism to leverage conversion—is that it uses and circumscribes secular-humanist thinking (in this case, the rationality of anthropology) with what in the mainstream of anthropology would be seen as reductive logic (the attribution of translated texts to divine will, not human agency). In missionary discourses, this reduction is externalized and seen as a sacrilizing force. That is, the moral framework of Phillips’s argument conceived of anthropology as a tool for unlocking hidden meanings, for seeing what is invisible beneath the human surface; but it also held that these hidden meanings are absolute evidence of “the divine.” From Phillips’s view, equivalences among cultures are neither chance happenings nor evidence of human interaction—nor even expressions of the common capabilities of the human mind. They are indications of a higher-order planning, of what he later called intelligent design. Phillips offered a brief second example to support his argument. He explained that another word for “sacrifice” in the local Bible was ölo, and that it also meant “emptying” or “charring.” Etymologically, he said, the word holocaust derived from ölo, and that “for Jews, the holocaust was a sacrifice.” Whether he meant to say that the local language precisely encodes, or even foreshadows, historical events is not clear; but he did indicate his absolute belief that the local language shares equivalences with other languages, and that these equivalences speak to a relationship among diverse peoples and events over time. These events are not the result of human decisions and actions but are evidence of (again) divine planning.16 I asked Phillips several times whether he was not attributing divine agency to human abilities to read, write, and translate text, and he replied that such a question is already misguided in that it starts from a secularist rationality. It is not that nondenominationals are opposed to rational inquiry, he said—quite the opposite: rational thinking serves their purposes. However, the framework of inquiry must be theistic—singular and external to human agents. By way of helping me to understand better exactly how anthropology has informed and organized missiology, Phillips advised that when I returned to the United States I should track down and

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read a master’s thesis called “The Relevance of Covenant Concept in Developing a Strategy for Christian Ministry Among the Luo People of Kenya” (Bolden 1994). This thesis, he said, had recently informed his own understanding of anthropology. Written in partial fulfillment of requirements for a degree in Christian Ministries for Wheaton College in Illinois and Daystar University in Nairobi, Bolden’s thesis includes a subsection titled “Anthropological Evidence of Covenant Centrality in Luo Ethnography and Language Studies” in which the author reviews ethnographic works by Gordon Wilson (1968), A.B.C. Ocholla-Ayayo (1976), B. A. Ogot (1967), and E. E. EvansPritchard (1949), with the purpose of understanding how these works reveal and discuss Luos’ biblical concept of covenant, Muma (which Phillips translated as “sacrifice”). Muma, the thesis begins, organizes Luo politics, marriage practices, and conceptions of the supernatural. The thesis goes on to argue that there has been a breakdown in traditional Luo modes of social organization. Bolden draws evidence from Ocholla-Ayayo’s dissertation that traditional Luo concepts of “ethical truths” (Bolden 1994: 41) have been violated by secular schooling: “With the advent of the secular primary education system of the Luo people,” he writes, summarizing Ocholla-Ayayo, “the grandmother has not only lost her status in the society, but the children have lost their link to traditional society due to failure to learn the system of ethics” (41). Bolden’s thesis equates this loss of culture to a situation of “limbo” in which Christian, secular, and Luo concepts all “mix to create confusion in covenant understanding” (41). He argues that Christianity was first planted in western Kenya in a secular way that failed to translate and contextualize biblical concepts of covenant adequately to Luo children and families. Reminiscent of Professor Block’s and Professor Amory’s point that previous generations of missionaries had been “extractionist” in “getting rid of culture” rather than using it to leverage conversion (this is how Van Rheenen’s text frames the errors of early missionaries), Bolden’s thesis suggests that the purpose of Bolden’s own research was to align indigenous and biblical concepts of covenant and sacrifice so that missionaries might use these alignments to re-traditionalize society using Christianity. Based largely on interviews with Luo elders living in Nairobi and western Kenya, Bolden draws several conclusions from his observations. First, “sadly, with the coming of the secular education system,” the cultural value of the grandmother as moral force has diminished and “been bypassed” (Bolden 1994: 123). Second, polygamy and a brother’s marrying of a widowed sister-in-law (a practice known as the leviratic care of widows) are practices that violate the New Testament principle that a woman be “free to marry anyone she wishes” (from 1 Corinthians 7:39). This principle, Bolden

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says, overrules Old Testament leviratic practice. He argues that health issues—most notably, high rates of HIV transmission—require missionaries to preach against the levirate (124, 129). Third, Bolden identifies “the menace of boarding school education” as encouraging students’ “promiscuity” (124). He calls for Christian parents to take charge of their children’s education—“Christian parents must reassume the responsibility of training their own children in Christian standards” (124)—a call that informs Luo elders’ own decisions to start Christian academies in western Kenya (see Chapter Five). Related to this idea, Bolden notes, is that boarding schools foster a “barnyard mentality” (125) that fails to teach either that which is good about the traditional system or the New Testament expectations of monogamy. As a recommendation, he offers that traditional Luo concepts should be used to reintroduce marriage as a “covenant.” He notes that whereas bridewealth used to be exchanged as part of Luo marriage rites, this practice has waned as cattle have become luxuries that few can afford. Instead, money is replacing cattle-based bridewealth, and “mothers will often negotiate the daughter to the highest bidder” (125). To counsel against what he regards as poor decisions, Bolden suggests that it would be wise to reintroduce the third-party mediator—the jagam— to serve as a negotiator with young men and women desiring to marry (126). The jagam would be better than the current mediator that young Luo men say marries them. Bolden regrets that Luo men declare, “I am married in the marketplace,” meaning they have taken wives in the course of day-to-day business, and that the marketplace is their moral authority. He concludes that it might be appropriate for the church to step in and begin to reteach Luo “their traditional culture” in a Christian way (127). Bolden’s master’s thesis gives evidence to several points I have been making in this chapter. It demonstrates missiologists’ intellectualist method of framing their work for an academic community—a method that employs concepts of cultural anthropology to guide and inform analyses and findings. It also demonstrates the sociotemporalizing modes of nondenominational Christianity. It presents a view of the world as epochal: a traditional era has been destroyed by secularity. In order to supplant secularity, Bolden persuades, missionaries need to be part of developing an authentic Christian modernity. Christian modernity is itself temporally oriented. It conceives of other cultures as cyclical or linear, and it is itself future-oriented and change-driven. Bolden also inspires missionaries to work in the interest of preparing the world “for Christ.” This call to work enjoins missionaries to be part of a world that is globally connected. In its joint production at two colleges, one in Kenya and the other in the United States, Bolden’s thesis stands as its own testament to a project that encompasses and supersedes state nationalities.

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Several faculty members at Stinton College and Lindstrom Christian University, including Tim Block, told me they are familiar with this thesis. Standing outside his office, Block pointed to a pin stuck into a map of Kenya. This location, he said, had been the site of Bolden’s study. The map, which was much like the anthropology department’s map at my own university, paled in scale compared to the rotating five-foot-diameter globe with backlit points showing mission sites that hung at another Christian college. When I mentioned the back-lit globe to Block, it evoked for him the phrase “a thousand points of light,” an image used frequently by George H. W. Bush and that inspired volunteer service in the early 1990s. Here, in the early 2000s, Block took it up to mean a thousand points of Christian mission work. In Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench, Vincent Crapanzano argues that Bible-believing evangelicals, whom he calls fundamentalists, “justify their faith in the authority of Scripture on the basis of Scripture itself” (2000: 75). In this view, the Bible constitutes its own authority by directly self-proclaiming it. “A proclamation of textual authority is a performative claim: through the very act of proclamation, the proclamation is accomplished.” For the fundamentalists whom Crapanzano interviews, Scripture is “sufficient unto itself” (77). The text alone contains all that a Christian needs to know. For the nondenominational missionaries about whom I write (most of whom do not call themselves fundamentalists but who by Crapanzano’s definition would be), the Bible likewise stands alone; it is a perfect text. Contradictions or obscure meanings within the Bible indicate human limitations in grasping divinity; but for these nondenominationals, the Bible, though sometimes cryptic, is neither abstract nor outside lived reality. Its veracity is grounded in experience, and its revelations are revealed through points of contact that simultaneously articulate and transcend cultural equivalences. The Bible makes good sense intellectually. It tests well against what, for instance, Phillips observes ethnographically. Phillips’s search for equivalences—or rather his success in finding them—confirms the Bible’s truth. Seeing the correspondences— witnessing them firsthand—is for Professor Block a positive outcome of an empirical test.

Summary Stepping back from these details, I’d like to reflect on how anthropology, in the form of theory and method, provides missionaries with a mode or style for conducting fieldwork. Anthropology does so not by transcending the temporal or human world. Spiritual transcendence is something religion

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“does,” and in this regard anthropology and religion remain distinct projects for missionaries. However, anthropology provides these missionaries with a framework for engaging with and changing the world. Anthropology for Christian witness is a language for framing missionary experience in the field. Some readers might object—and I would agree—that missionaries’ use of anthropology is not anthropology—that anthropology is more invoked than used in any rigorous way in nondenominational missiology. This is the case, but it’s not my point. It is also the case that there are significant differences in organization, logic, and use of evidence for argument between missiology and anthropology. The example of the Muma/Bible clearly demonstrates this. My point is that the blurring of participant-observation and Christian witness, of the field with various understandings of points of light—the blurring of the evangelistic and the pedagogic, of faith work, fieldwork, and service-learning—not only makes it difficult to distinguish between private religion and public secularity, but also evinces a socioculturally generative dialectic between categories that typically are kept apart but that are in fact mutually produced. These categories “belong” to and are differentiated by those who are socialized into the tenets of secularmodernity, including—although in different ways and paradoxically for the first and last groups—American nondenominational missionaries, cultural anthropologists, development workers and international policymakers, and East Africans in the church. Pointing out the interrelation of religion and secularity is hardly new. What is novel about my point is that through the co-production of witness and observation, and of fieldwork and evangelism, we can see how nondenominational missionaries with this transnational church engage their religious work with that of public projects. I have focused in Chapters Two and Three on how evangelical faith in schools is expressed in U.S. nondenominational church settings and contexts. Next, in Chapters Four through Six, I look at the religion-education entanglement in three East African settings where nondenominationals work: public schools in northern Tanzania, a Bible college and private academy in Kenya, and a private academy and computer school in eastern Uganda.

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Teaching English in Tanzania

In the previous two chapters I examined the history and context of a nondenominational missionary movement. I also described how these missionaries are typically trained. In this chapter and the next I explore what American missionaries working in East Africa have encountered, and the projects into which they have been drawn. Through a set of examples, I introduce different inflections of Christianity and education. Christianity, I argue, acts as a mobile and shifting signifier that structures and valorizes divergent perspectives of what it means to belong to a global community. People from geographically distinct places who share to some extent the same religious heritage draw on different spiritual histories and cultural sensibilities to organize and shape their geo-spiritual perspectives. In northern Tanzania, as across much of East Africa, spiritual forces and the gifts of Jesus are central to churchgoers’ sensibilities. East Africans say they have been born again when they have “received” or “gotten” the holy spirit. This quality of receiving gifts evokes a range of ideas about forces that exist beyond people’s control. Some churchgoers regard spiritual forces as unchristian when these forces are associated with ancestors or with cwezi-kubandwa (spirit possession). Others qualify such a view by regarding spirit possession as compatible with rites of Christianity. However, whether they are skeptical or assured about spirit possession and mediumship, many East Africans question these missionaries’ ideas about surface forms and hidden meanings. East African Christians conceive that Jesus lives in and through what people do, not beneath an artifice of reality, and that Jesus’ force exists in struggle with Satan’s, but this struggle has nothing to do with so-called stages of culture or culture-to-Bible proximity. Blessings and spiritual connections, East Africans conceive, are offered in many ways, including through gifts of food, in glances and touch, and in whispers of Shiru, or “God bless you,” in letters and e-mails. When reality turns out to be not as it appears, East African Christians say that Jesus’ blessings have been forged or contaminated; that true gifts and blessings have been corrupted, taken over, inhabited by Satan.

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This sense of Jesus in struggle with sinister elements is not unlike missionaries’ notion of spiritual battle. However, whereas the missiologists introduced in the previous chapter conceive of salvation as a matter of lining up human and biblical beliefs, East African Christians conceive of deliverance in terms of being possessed and dominated by an intense force or agency. An expression that comes up often in Tanzania is wameshapata mwanga, “they’ve already gotten (or received) the light.” This expression is used interchangeably to refer to people who have, so to speak, already gotten or received Jesus as Savior, and to those who have already gotten or received development or education. Jesus and education, in this formulation, are considered (at least among Christians) part of the same victory. This sense of having already been blessed through the Church and given enlightenment through development and schooling is central to East African Christians’ concepts of well-being and security. Christians in Tanzania see Jesus’ spiritual presence as having been hijacked or forged when social security is risked or reality is clouded. Whereas missiologists talk about the presence of hidden values, East Africans frame unseen forces in terms of fakery and malicious entities. Allow me to give an example that illustrates how East African conceptions of religiosity overlap but differ from these Americans’ views of surface meaning and manifestations of God. Sitting in the living room of a Chagga businessman, sharing a meal at the end of a workday, a second Tanzanian businessman started the conversation by saying that the young American missionaries working with Chagga are not Christian but “worship Satan.” The problem, he said, is that these college students pray quietly late at night; they pierce their ears and tattoo their arms; many are vegetarian; and they do not worship or present themselves properly. Thieves, smugglers, murderers, and adulterers all operate in the dark; and uneducated people like the pastoral Maasai, in his characterization, pierced their earlobes and scarred their bodies. How could good Christians live such a life? And who but Indian-Hindi shop owners did not eat meat? Certainly not well-educated Christians. His point, he said, was to call out and expel evil. “If they are allowed to preach in the name of Jesus, we will have disaster on our hands. They will plant the church of Lucifer, not the church of Christ.” Like missiologists, this Tanzanian identified as Christian. He judged these missionaries’ efforts to be fake. His fellow businessman was less concerned about the unusual ways of these missionaries. This man relativized the missionaries’ behavior, explaining, “they’re just being American” and “that’s what young people often do.” However, he shared his friend’s sense that threatening powers fought stealthily with Jesus. One of this second businessman’s personal cars displayed a sticker on the windshield—“God hates corruption”—placed to inform and ward off traffic police who used inspecting cars as an opportunity to collect bribe

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money. This sign was similar to those I described in Chapter One as placed inside buses and vans and declaring “Jesus is Savior” and “My Redeemer lives,” and similar to another posted on a cross-country bus: “It is better to live with a witch than to haggle with someone who reduces friends and family to money.” Such signs are not unlike the medicinal gourds that some truck drivers hang on the grill of their engine to protect themselves against dangerous encounters. Each sign infuses the social setting with affirmative powers that bless and channel reality. They bring to light positive spiritual forces, much as schooling brings to light the positive forces of development. Regarding education, both friends wholeheartedly embraced formal training as a powerful energy for battling Satan. Like nondenominational missionaries, they pressed for better schools and valued English instruction. “English is a universal language, and when you’re dealing with the global economy, the number one language is English” was a sentiment shared by both the missionaries and many Christian East Africans. These particular men, however, did not see the missionaries as more advanced or as further along on a pagan-to-saved trajectory. Their sense of end days and of Jesus’ return—which their regular prayers entreated God to bring about—was framed in a manner that saw trickery expelled and uncertainty cast away. The mandate of the Great Commission was, in their formulation, to preach the Bible to all peoples equally, not only to those located at one end of an evangelical scale that, to paraphrase their point of view, mistakenly equated poverty with lack of salvation. To understand East Africans’ conceptions, I compare missionaries’ and East Africans’ views of evangelism. In the following sections I present three broad takes on these missionaries’ activities. First, I offer mission­ aries’ accounts of how they obtained official permission to teach. Second, I highlight Tanzanians’ accounts of the missionaries’ work. Third, I show Kenyans’ involvement with American missionaries, including their teaching of English to Tanzanian youth and adults after school and work. (As readers will recall, Kenyan evangelists were part of what Americans called the Zebra Team.) Throughout I illustrate how different groups leverage change through teaching English. I argue that modern, global Christianity, like schooling, is a utopian social field, differentially inflected with competing ideas of social vision and morality.

To Assist and Endear: Missionaries’ Approach to Teaching English In 1996, Frank Bolton, who had been working on a faith mission in Kenya since the 1970s, submitted a proposal to his sponsoring church in the

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United States to begin a new twenty-year program in Tanzania. His plan included the “development of some sort of community-based project that would (1) assist with real needs in the community and (2) endear us to the people.”1 This combination of “assist” and “endear” was an objective that Bolton had developed in western Kenya and hoped to build on in northern Tanzania. During a visit to Kilimanjaro in 1999, Bolton “discovered a need to improve Tanzanians’ spoken English.” He was struck that their English was (as another missionary later put it) “atrocious,” and he attributed the comparative economic underdevelopment of Tanzania partly to Tanzanians’ poor English skills. “We determined at the time of our visit,” Bolton wrote some years later, “that our forté would be assisting Tanzanians at all levels (primary school level, secondary school level, university level, adults, and educators), and helping them learn conversational English using Biblebased materials.” Plans were made with the Tanzanian Ministry of Education to establish a four-week language program to develop the speaking and listening skills of students in Standards 5 and 6. (Students in these grades generally range in age from twelve to fourteen years.) Approval was facilitated, as Bolton saw it, through connections with “Tanzanian Christians, some of whom had gone to college in the United States.” The project was approved in late May 1999, after which the missionaries began a busy week of curriculum development. The program opened the second week of June, and classes were held in the public school. Local authorities scrutinized the mission­ aries’ work closely the first year, Bolton said, “looking for ways to shut us down,” because not everyone supported the program; many were wary of the missionaries’ motives. “They watched us to make sure we were teaching properly and not talking about Jesus to kids.” As a precondition to teaching in the public schools, the missionaries were forbidden to preach, could not reference the New Testament, and could not mention Jesus in any of their lessons. Even Kenyan evangelists working with the missionaries agreed that doing so might offend non-Christians, particularly Muslims. American missionary presence in public schools was, and remains, unusual. Not only were these missionaries the first religiously affiliated group (of any nationality or religion) to receive a permit to teach English in an independence-era government-funded school in Tanzania, but they were also one of the most vocal external, non-Tanzanian groups to suggest changing the language of primary school instruction. That is, they were among those who advocated the use of English as the instructional medium for other lessons. The missionaries intended their own English-medium program to provide an alternative, or choice, within the Kiswahili-medium system of education, and they hoped that parental interest in this program might lead the government to change to an English-only system. “Hopefully we

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can persuade more people to see the benefits of using English to teach other classes,” said one missionary. English instruction was supposed to promote greater awareness of and facility within an international world. During the first year, the missionaries set up a program at Musoma Primary School. One hundred twenty students participated. The missionaries taught two three-hour sessions per day, one with Standard 5 students in the morning and one with Standard 6 students in the afternoon. They set up seven learning centers—TV and video, story charts, drama, oral reading and art, games, songs, and filmstrips—each of which offered visual media and creative activities. The students were divided into six teams, each of which was led by a shadow missionary teacher and each of which spent twenty-two minutes at each of the seven centers. Because each center was led by two missionaries (one male, one female) and because each team, or group, of Tanzanian students had a shadow missionary-teacher, the student-to-teacher ratio was just a little more than three-to-one this first year—two missionary-teachers per center, one shadow missionary-teacher per group, and approximately ten Tanzanian students at each center. The following year, the missionaries expanded their program to a second public primary school and taught more than eight hundred students at the two schools that year. They taught about that many again in 2001 and 2002, and in each of these years the student-to-teacher ratio was much higher, with about eleven students per missionary in centers with about thirty-three students each. Sometimes these ratios and numbers were much higher. In 2002, the missionaries’ program was delayed because the government of Tanzania hired Tanzanian primary school teachers to assist with the national census, held during August and September, with a twoweek training session prior to the start. To make up for the fact that the next school term would likely be delayed, the Tanzanian teachers extended the first semester’s regular instruction to the third and fourth weeks of June. (The Tanzanian school calendar starts in January and runs through December, with about an eight-week break in June and July.) The result was that instead of providing a summer program in which students specifically attended the English program, the English courses became part of the regular school day, held from 7:30 to 10 a.m. at one school and from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at the other. The details, parts, and integration of the missionaries’ program—the specificity of exactly twenty-two minutes of activities at seven centers and a series of thematic lessons led by a male-female team—gives some indication of the American missionaries’ degree of organizational rationality. Notwithstanding their wariness of governing bodies and bureaucracies, they reproduced a tightly wrought system of instruction. More than this, however, their methods evinced their underlying hope for change through

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social action. They employed what they called the Jesus method of instruction, with the hope of developing and transforming society. Bolton put it this way: We do what we call the Jesus method, which says that 50 percent of Jesus’ time was spent doing Kingdom of God churchy things, teaching, and half of his time was spent touching, weeping, helping, whatever. So we really think that a balanced missionary ought to spend 50 percent of his time doing some kind of community development, and 50 percent of his time ought to be spent in church development.2

In their teaching, the missionaries did not reference Jesus or use any lessons from the New Testament, nor did they ask students directly to engage with questions about religion. Technically they were in harmony with the government’s rules, yet the Jesus method, the missionaries hoped and prayed, created the conditions for religious engagement and conversion. It did not primarily involve the cognitive grasping of information about religion, but it introduced the basic points of Old Testament stories and created a space for Tanzanian students to inquire further. Anticipating a range of academic abilities, during the first week of the program the missionaries evaluated the students; each was tested orally on the subjects the missionaries would teach. The students were asked to identify eight colors pasted on a sheet. Next they were asked to read six numbers written below the colors, and then to read four analogue clocks that appeared below the numbers. At the bottom of the page were pictures of half a dozen items for students to identify: a man, a truck, some vegetables, a baseball cap (although baseball is not played much in Tanzania), a star, and an egg. Additional questions were asked about animals, geography, and opposites. Scoring was high-middle-low, and a similar test was administered at the program’s end. The missionaries organized their English lessons into six topical units— days and numbers, colors, animals, geography, time, and money—and with the exception of the lesson on time, they framed each of the units with an Old Testament story. Each day or two the seven learning centers mentioned earlier reflected a new topical unit, and each topical unit in turn corresponded to a Bible story. For an example of how the missionaries’ program worked in practice, on the ground, consider the following description of a day in June 2002 when the student group named Brown Ostriches (each group was given a color-animal name) was sent to the reading center first. On this day, the Brown Ostriches were shadowed by Allison, and Walter and Elizabeth were the paired missionary-teachers. The topical unit was geography, and the Bible story was about Jericho. Walter started the center by reading the following story:

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The Fall of Jericho God told his people to go to a new land. There was a city called Jericho in the new land, and the people who lived in Jericho were very bad. God told Joshua to destroy the city and all the bad people. The people in Jericho were afraid of God’s people, so they closed the gates of the city. All the people hid behind the walls of the city. God told Joshua to march around the city with all of his people. So Joshua told God’s people to march around the city one time. Everyday for six days they marched around the city. Seven of the priests carried trumpets, and they played the trumpets every day as they marched around the city. But Joshua told the people not to speak. He said, “Do not say one word until I tell you to shout.” After God’s people marched around Jericho, they went back to their camp. On the seventh day, God told the people to march around the city seven times. Joshua led the people, and they marched around Jericho seven times. The seventh time the priests blew their trumpets, and Joshua told all the people to shout. Then the walls of Jericho fell down, and God’s people won the battle against the people of Jericho. Joshua led God’s people for many years. God blessed him because he did what God told him to do.

Walter translated parts of the text into Kiswahili to ensure the students’ comprehension, then asked each student to read portions of the story aloud. He did not interpret or unpack its allegory, nor was geography mentioned as the subject, except that Jericho was noted as a place. Instead, geography—and specifically the idea of nation-state territory—was introduced at the next center, art, where the Brown Ostriches sketched and colored a picture of the quintessential territorial symbol, the national flag. Initially Jeremy, the lead missionary at this center (usually it was the man on each two-person team who led the way), drew the Tanzanian flag upside down, but Allison, again, the teacher designated to shadow the Brown Ostriches, corrected the drawing so that the green was on top. By the end of the lesson, each student had made his or her own flag using crayons, paper, tape, and plastic straws—supplies that each missionary had packed into his or her second suitcase—and the Brown Ostriches sat together on the school’s front steps holding their flags. Jeremy and Allison took photos of the group and promised to send copies to the students in the mail (which they did). At the drama center, the Brown Ostriches enacted a play about the fall of Jericho in which half of the students played the walls of Jericho and the other half marched around them in circles and yelled to make the walls fall down. Outside, the games center involved playing soccer—most of the boys and only a handful of girls participated. This center’s lesson in relation to the topic of geography was ostensibly about defending and taking

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territory, although such a connection to the unit was never made explicit. At the conversation center, the students discussed grammar lessons (again, neither Jericho nor geography was announced) and were taught that adjectives are words that describe nouns. The students had difficulty understanding this lesson until one of the missionaries asked one of the regular teachers, who was sitting just outside the classroom, how to say describe in Kiswahili, and then the students seemed to understand. In the songs center, the students sang, “He’s got the whole world in his hands” and “Sing for joy o’ Africa, the Lord above has risen among you.” Although the latter song indirectly referenced Jesus (as Lord) and all of the songs had strong religious content, there was no clear or overt evangelizing. Yet the very act of translating religious text into ordinary language reveals an orientation; sacred Islamic texts, for example, are rarely translated into everyday language (Sanneh 1994). On another day, also in June 2002, the topical unit on animals worked in much the same way, tying the English lesson to the content of a Bible story. Walter began by reading the story to all of the Musoma students before they were divided into color-animal groups: Noah’s Ark Once there was a good man named Noah. He lived a long time ago, when people began to do many bad things. God was very sad and wanted to start the world again. God said, “I must find a good man who will do special work for me. I will choose Noah. Noah, will you work for me?” Noah said, “Yes, God. What do you want me to do? I will do everything you ask.” God said, “I want you to build a very large boat. I am going to send a great flood. I will wash away the bad things on Earth and make it new again.” So Noah built the big boat. Noah did everything God told him to do. He was happy because his work made his family strong. God said, “Noah, take the male and female of every kind of animal and put them on the boat. Take your whole family on the boat. Bring food for the animals and for your family.” Noah put the animals and his family onto the boat. Noah said, “It is raining and the world is flooding. Thank you, God, for protecting us in this boat.”

On this day, two events and an activity happened on which missionaries later remarked. First, two Muslim girls—Amina (mentioned in Chapter One) and one of her friends—came to school not wearing their headscarves (hijab). The missionaries did not know why, yet they said they were pleased that the girls “had made this choice.” To the missionaries, scarfless

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heads signified that these students had shifted away from identifying with Islam—although most of the Muslim girls at Musoma School, as across most of the northern region of the country, did not wear the hijab; only those from more conservative families did. The other event was less affirming from the missionaries’ point of view. On this day the students in general were restless, and apparently two of them got into a fight during games and openly talked back to a missionary. The missionaries attributed the students’ bad behavior to the large size of the subgroups (about fifty each, because students from other standards had joined in the lessons), and they perceived that the regular teachers at Musoma School were not helping to keep the students in line but instead sitting in the teachers’ room and talking about their upcoming roles in administering the national census. The Musoma teachers’ disconnection from the program contrasted with their support in previous years, and the students’ bad behavior foiled most of the missionaries’ first impression that Tanzanian students were “angels” because they stood and greeted the teachers in unison with “Good morning” and “Good afternoon.” One of the missionaries even joked, “Now we know why Tanzanian teachers call the cane their best teaching aid!” His implication was that the bark-stripped stick that some regular teachers displayed served symbolically to enforce order and assert authority. Perhaps ironically, by the end of the week this missionary and some others were carrying sticks (“but not using them,” they stressed). The most popular activity of the day—indeed, the most popular center of the entire program—was drama. Here the students had the excitement of wearing animal masks and acting out the story of Noah’s Ark. Several male-female pairs were assigned to the roles of the animals. One missionary read the text while another directed the students’ movements. Two by two the students boarded a pretend boat. A boy and a girl, hidden behind elephant trunks, led the cast of characters, which included more than a dozen pairs of animals, many of them from the African savannah (giraffes, crocodiles, lions, hyenas, and so on). The boat—a circular space marked out on the soccer pitch—was filled to overflowing as the students crowded in and eventually pushed and nudged one another to find room lest they “fall out.” The whole exercise hinged on the border between chaos and fun and was all the more exciting to the students because of its extraordinariness. When else had they dressed up and acted out a play? Few of their regular teachers taught in such an enlivening way. Indeed, the missionaries’ appeal to these primary school students lay primarily in these foreigners’ willingness to involve the children in activities, not just have them sit and read and write. In this regard, the missionaries’ tactic of endearing through action

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and of assisting by offering practical knowledge was well received by the students at Musoma. Assisting and endearing unfolded through activity, was developed through relationships, and was measured in the quality of fun the students had while singing and dancing the Father Ibrahim song, or in the degree of closeness and informality they seemed to experience when they were learning to speak colloquial English (Hey, what’s up?), as discussed in Chapter One. The Tanzanian students were affectively drawn into the missionaries’ lessons by the content of the activities. They learned while participating in amusing events. Sometimes the Tanzanian teachers questioned whether their students were in fact learning anything; all of the activity seemed to come and go without any concrete or documented evidence. Occasionally, however, the children’s work was captured in material form. One such form was portfolios.

Student Portfolios Each Tanzanian student created a portfolio of artwork for the session. For the missionaries, portfolios were an important form of documentation. As education majors in their home institutions, the teacher-leaders of the missionaries were deeply schooled in the value of such projects. Reminiscent of the scrapbook Allison had made of her experiences in the program the year before (described in Chapter Two), the portfolios spoke to the Americans’ sense of personhood and of their students as unique agents—individuals with personal accomplishments that could, and should, be cumulatively documented. One day after school, Allison and the head Tanzanian teacher of Musoma School, Mrs. Ulomi, were looking at the previous year’s portfolios, which the students had made of brightly colored construction paper decorated with crayon and cut-out figures. The first page of each portfolio consisted of a certificate of completion that included the student’s name and the signatures of the Tanzanian head teacher, the American project director, and each of the several missionaries who had taught the student’s group. To my surprise, at the top of all of the certificates, the program was described as “The Christian Program for English Training”—a direct reference to religion. I commented on this to Allison, who answered that it was not in violation of the agreement: “They did not say we could not call ourselves a Christian group, only that we could not preach or mention Jesus.” Clearly this was an interpretation of the spirit, not the letter, of the stipulation. On one certificate—that of Aisha Mohamed—a missionary had written a personalized message: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.

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John 3:16.” Aisha had been touched by the missionaries, Allison said. She had begun to “know the word of God,” as evidenced for Allison by several other documents included in Aisha’s portfolio. One of these was a drawing of “my family,” which included Aisha’s sister, brother, “me,” and another child, smaller, dressed less distinctively, and positioned separately from the other members. For Allison, it was noteworthy that Aisha identified only one mother, despite the possibility that her Muslim household might include an additional wife or more for her father. The nuclear, monogamous family was for Allison a foundational unit for a Christian community. “Aisha is learning to think about herself as a family member” and as someone who “has the chance of moving beyond” her local community, Allison said. Toward this end, she noted, Aisha had depicted herself wearing high-heeled shoes and with her hair (uncovered) in a pulled-up style. “Education should move students beyond their local worlds,” Allison said. “Tanzanian students have got to use education to see more of life, not just stay here [in Kilimanjaro Region].” After the page on “my family” came a hand-drawn world map with the land colored green, the oceans blue, and each labeled in black crayon. The only country outlined on the continent of Africa was Tanzania; in fact, it was the only country named on the entire map. In the lower right-hand corner was a coordinating compass with cardinal points and subdivisions. Like cartographic depictions displayed at the missionaries’ own colleges, these maps located the students in a wider geographic world. They represented a global whole in one instant of visual time. Indeed, next in this personal archive of students’ work, time was learned and documented. Following the map in Aisha’s portfolio was a clock made from a paper plate on which numbers had been written and hands drawn. After this was a “house”—a piece of paper containing seven numbered doors behind which stood what God had created each day—which Aisha had created as part of a unit on the Creation story. Under the flap of the final day was written, “And on the seventh day God rested.” The final page in the portfolio was a picture of Noah’s ark that had been photocopied from a coloring book. The students had colored in the matching pairs of animals. All of these materials—what French sociologist Michel Foucault (1986: 26) might have called “heterotopic juxtapositions” of “several sites that are themselves incompatible,” including Christianity, Aisha’s life, Tanzanians’ ordinary school day, and missionaries’ rich material worlds—were neatly packaged inside a pocketed cardboard folder. Aisha’s had a yellow smiley face sticker beaming from the upper corner. Allison noted that the collection of folders through which we were looking were those that had not gone home to the students’ parents—either because the students had forgotten them or because they had been “put on

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hold” by the school’s staff members. One reason for such a hold was that staff may have anticipated that the Christian label would disquiet Muslim parents. That Aisha’s remained indicated to Allison a minor failing. One of the missionaries’ objectives was to use the school as a steppingstone for broader contact with the students’ parents, yet Aisha had not invited any missionaries to meet her family, nor had the missionary who had written the inscription from the book of John kept in touch with this particular student. According to Allison, the missionary had been concerned that writing to Aisha directly would jeopardize Aisha’s relations with her family, for reasons similar to those I discuss later in this chapter regarding Abdin. Ideally, missionaries would have contacted Aisha’s parents after school. Indeed, at various moments in conversation they identified parents as important points of contact: We work through interpreters to try to tell parents that this program will make their children more international, more likely to get a job after graduation. . . . We don’t evangelize in the schools. We keep the schools and our mission work separate. But we do invite parents to join us at our services. . . . It’s a matter of educating the parents too, of getting them to see the value of English for getting their kids up and out of the home.3

Parental involvement figured prominently in the missionaries’ rationale for offering English instruction; getting parents involved and giving them the choice for their children to study English was one of the main reasons for entering the government primary schools. Allison described the missionaries’ interests in working with parents this way: [One] advantage to the program is that the kids will invite us into their homes, and by doing that we can meet their parents and their families, and we can open doors for the missionaries that stay here full-time. And they can go in behind us and say, you know, “Oh yes, we’re friends with Miss Allison” or Mr. Walter, or whoever. And a lot of times we will take them; if we know for a fact that the family doesn’t speak English very well, we’ll take one of the missionaries here that speaks Swahili [Walter or one of the Kenyan evangelists] and we’ll take them with us to act as a translator and so they’ll get to meet families and we’ll get to invite them to church.4

Allison conceded, “I’m not sure how many parents have come to our church through these students,” but she and the group of missionaries that year were especially pleased about “two really good success stories.” I briefly recount these two cases next before discussing Tanzanians’ views of missionaries’ work, and I use these cases to suggest that what missionaries envisioned would be one of their primary points of contact—communication with students’ parents—was eclipsed and virtually disappeared in the face of varying ideas about the value of English versus Kiswahili.

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Victoria and Abdin: Two Stories In general, the missionaries’ work that year was not going as well as they had planned. The census job for which the Tanzanian teachers had prepared was taking priority over the language program. In the face of this slow pace of work, the missionaries reminded themselves of past successes. Two conversion stories involving their former students seemed to bolster their resolve. Adrienne, one of Allison’s classmates at Stinton College who had attended the summer program in previous years, told the first of the missionaries’ success stories this way one morning over coffee: One of our students, Victoria, was Lutheran at first and she started going to church with us, every few Sundays. Now she’s a regular member. We know very little about her. Some people say she got pregnant out of wedlock and had a child on her own and that her father kicked her out of the house, telling her to go and live with the baby’s dad. Others say she married young and was now raising her daughter all alone and that in exchange for [janitorial] work Victoria has a place to live and raise her daughter.

In part the missionaries’ lack of knowledge about Victoria’s life was because they did not speak Kiswahili. Except for Walter, few among the college students could do anything more than rudimentarily greet people in the language.5 Nor did Victoria know much English, despite her schooling and participation in the missionaries’ program. Notwithstanding the heavy emphasis placed on cross-cultural communication in missionaries’ prefield anthropological training, their limited knowledge about the lives of their students’ families—and about Tanzanians’ practices in general—facilitated a space for imagining students’ circumstances. This space of imagination was important for sustaining the missionaries’ hope in the outcomes of their work, but it did not always correspond to the realities of the Tanzanian students’ lives. As it turned out, for instance, the missionaries had not met Victoria’s mother or father, and Victoria’s situation was different from what the missionaries had imagined. According to Musoma’s teachers, Victoria was the firstborn daughter of a woman who had grown up on the eastern part of Mount Kilimanjaro; Victoria’s mother had borne Victoria without herself being “fully married.” That is, Victoria’s mother had moved to Victoria’s father’s paternal lands, in the western region, in what constituted a first step in an extended-time customary marriage process (see Stambach 2000: 63–72). However, that man was not able to pay bridewealth to Victoria’s mother’s family. Victoria’s mother was then returned by her father to her natal household, because he could not fulfill the requirements of exchange: more beer and a live goat. Victoria’s mother was later married to a Lutheran Chagga man living in the central region.

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This marriage occurred in a church and was enacted, as it were, in a single ceremony. Victoria grew up in this Lutheran household. However, as the oldest daughter (and as full daughter to her mother only), she held greater responsibility than her half-siblings for chores and child care. Victoria entered primary school late, at age nine (seven years was the official allowable starting point), and was sixteen when the missionaries first taught her in their program. When Victoria herself became pregnant and her partner was unable to pay bridewealth to Victoria’s mother’s husband’s family (following principles of patrifocality), Victoria turned to the missionaries’ church for assistance with her life. I have changed the specifics of Victoria’s case to ensure confidentiality, but the general picture of customary marriages unfolding slowly and sometimes defaulting, and of siblings holding differential status within households, is familiar to many people living around Mount Kilimanjaro. Indeed, it is a general picture of marriage and family life regionally, across much of Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. What is noteworthy about Victoria’s case for understanding missionaries’ take on their own work in Tanzania is that they saw the church as rescuing Victoria from her own traditions, which they equated with poverty. Generally, such a view of rescue is found in the imagery of development policies. Here, however, the missionaries took the idea further in seeing Victoria as rescued from poverty and from a particular brand of religion, that is, from another form of Christianity: Lutheranism. It was not enough, one of Bolton’s senior American assistants said, that as a young child Victoria had been baptized and confirmed; it was crucial that she be rebaptized and born again. With others, Victoria had been immersed by Bolton in the nearby river and baptized this time in the name of the “one and only church.” Victoria was now another “true Christian” who could be counted as going to heaven. This was clear to the missionaries, but it was also evident from their discussions that some souls were more challenging to claim than others. To wit (to put it more directly than the missionaries did but to capture their general sentiment), Muslims were more difficult to convert to Christianity than pregnant schoolgirls. The historical annals of American missionaries in Tanzania record the idea that “Muslim souls” counted more than “animists” as converts to Christianity (American Augustana Lutheran Archives, 1947–1956). Such calculation continued and was evident in the missionaries’ narrative of “saving Abdin from his family.” Adrienne described Abdin’s story this way: There was a little boy in my sister’s group two years ago. His name was Abdin and he was a Muslim. We kept telling him to come to the church, just to come and visit with us on a Sunday, and he said, “Oh, I can’t come to church. I’m Muslim. Oh, I

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cannot love you and I cannot be around you because I’m Muslim.” And we said, “But that’s OK, we love you anyway. Come to church on Sunday with us.” But he kept protesting, telling us, “No, you know I cannot be with you.” But at the same time, he was always around. He was always tagging along with us wherever we would go. We’d see him everywhere.

Some missionaries surmised that Abdin had a poor relationship with his father and that his father had abused him and kicked him out of the family’s house. Others said it seemed that Abdin had been fostered into an extended relative’s family as a domestic helper and not been well treated as a houseboy; or perhaps that he had been a migrant worker and forced to move to this comparatively wealthy part of the country. (The first version was in fact closest to the case: Abdin had been on poor terms with his father, whom the missionaries had never met.) The salient point, from the missionaries’ vantage point, was that Abdin, who eventually converted from Islam, did so at great physical risk to his own life. Once he was baptized, his original community spurned and turned away from him. The missionaries paraphrased some teachers at Musoma as explaining that avenging Muslim family members of converted Abdin could beat or mutilate him. This possibility deterred the missionaries less than it made more important Abdin’s complete conversion, including his social incorporation into the church. “Last year we walked into church on the first Sunday [of the program]. We got here on Saturday night. Sunday morning we walked into church and Abdin got up to serve communion!” Adrienne said. “We were completely floored—and I mean all of us!” Adrienne’s sister continued the story: Abdin is now a baptized believer; he is absolutely wonderful. He’s one of the most faithful members of the church. He changed his name to Jonas [a change that ­Walter surmised might have been necessary to protect him from avenging persons]. He is now fifteen or sixteen years old, and he’s so funny. We went up and asked him how he is doing. We still haven’t gotten exactly the complete story of what happened with his family, but he told us that if he ever did become a Christian, his family would kick him out. And we don’t know [there was an uncertain pause at this point]. We know that he’s healthy, he’s living well. He’s staying with somebody, and he’s eating well. So, well, he’s doing great enough.6

If it seems that the missionaries’ ends are singular—conversion—and that the details surrounding the lives of Victoria and Abdin are cloudy, these impressions reflect how the missionaries presented Victoria’s and Abdin’s cases to me. English instruction was a means to an end, but a means that unfolded mysteriously. At best, as the missionaries considered it, their work was partial and incomplete; the remaining, unseen part, the unknown, was “in the hands of God.” For that matter, the more unseen

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yet successful their work was, the greater was the conversion victory. From an all-things-equal perspective, Muslim-to-Christian was of greater value than conversion of denominational-to-nondenominational Christian. The missionaries learned this in classes they took and from the books they read for those classes, including a page in Van Rheenen’s text Missions: Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Strategies (1996, introduced in the previous chapter). In a subsection titled “Illustrations of Receptivity,” Van Rheenen presents an example of Tanzanian Muslims. He contrasts “the resistance of most urban Muslims of Tanzania” (218) with the accessibility of rural groups, among which he identifies the Sukuma tribe, who had been missionized by Catholics. Van Rheenen conveys an image of Muslims as calculating and dangerous. “They militantly oppose Christianity in all spheres of life. . . . Muslim wholesalers seldom sell to non-Muslim retailers, particularly those who are Christian. Funds from oil-rich Arabic nations help build mosques and training institutions” (218). He advises missionaries to “prioritize” their efforts among those who are more receptive. Doing so, he suggests, will slow the tide of influence by foreign-funded Muslims in the region: “Once Tanzanians become Muslim,” he writes, “they are much harder to reach” (218). In the context of Van Rheenen’s text, Abdin’s baptism converts an enemy. It is a direct, not a preventative, intervention that is as difficult as it is successful. For the student missionaries, Abdin’s salvation was a memorable achievement. Yet from a leadership vantage point within the church, Abdin and, for that matter, Victoria were not strong anchors socially. Mission leaders deliberately sought to attract middle-class professionals. Socially marginal people such as Victoria and Abdin gave the impression that the church was full of outcasts; in the grand scheme of things, such persons did not attract others to the mission. The more secure approach was to build the church around an issue that spoke to secure groups and carried social clout. For this reason, as mentioned earlier, American missionaries attempted to reach a broad spectrum of Tanzanians, including parents and teachers affiliated with two public primary schools. Their focus on English rather than Kiswahili touched on a crucial aspect of Tanzanian nationalism and immediately gained the Tanzanian officials’ and teachers’ attention to and interest in the program. Yet the missionaries appear not to have considered that the point of contact they provided—language training— was received in ways other than what they intended. Their error was in overlooking the intersection of language policy with Islamization, and the privatization of English-medium primary schools in the region at the time. As I show next, Tanzanians connected the value of English not only to the missionaries’ logic of global Christianity and the importance of developing a world language for participating in global markets, but also to logics

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of power that had saturated previous contexts in which English had been used, including politically contentious colonial and religious contexts. To help the reader understand the polyvalence of English language learning in public primary schools in Tanzania, I present an overview of language policy in the context of national and regional politics. This overview sets the stage for understanding historically a confluence of international issues in the region, and for going more deeply in the following section into the cultural ramifications of missionaries’ work locally.

Power, Knowledge, and Education: Tanzanians’ Views “Power and knowledge directly imply one another,” wrote Foucault (1977a: 27). “There is no power without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” Whereas Foucault identified universities as institutions that legitimized the production of knowledge, German sociologist Max Weber (1958a) earlier framed this legitimization in terms of modern institutions, including schools. Schools, Weber argued, create an “aristocracy of education.” Academic institutions substitute “the certificate of education” (241) for what had previously been social status as nobility by birth. Like Weber, Bourdieu (1996) maintained that education is credentialing. It operates through a moral economy of providing a degree for lessons learned. However, because it is a restricted good, not everyone has the same access or receives the same quality; education masks social distinctions, even as it re-creates them.7 Generally speaking, such insights derived from and applied to developments across twentieth-century Western Europe. To the extent that formal schooling was an extension of European colonial power, these explanations carried over to events in eastern Africa. Early Christian mission and European boarding schools created new cohorts of Africans who distinguished themselves on the basis of the Western schooling they received. As in Europe, education provided access to markets, people, ideas, and resources; reorganized Africans’ daily routines and annual calendars; and set up new social distinctions. Those who had been to school were at the head of the line for civil service jobs and paid labor (Chande 2000; Hemed 1996). In Tanzania, as in many places, by the mid-twentieth century schooling served as an institutional nexus for political and popular debate about opportunity; but in Tanzania, discussion began to pivot around a larger question about the language of instruction. Should Tanzanians speak English or Kiswahili? Should they learn one or the other or both in school? By the twenty-first century, Kiswahili was widely regarded as a unifying national

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language, yet questions arose recurrently among parents and educators and in the media about the relative merits of English versus Kiswahili for connecting Tanzanians to the global economy (Mushi 2005: 12; Omari 2007). In a sense, the question was, and remains, What is the extent of Kiswahili’s field of power? How broadly ramifying is Kiswahili when it is spoken only regionally? How does students’ knowledge of English differently situate and constitute them socially and economically? Of the 34.4 million people living in Tanzania, 70.5 percent aged ten and above are literate in either or both English and Kiswahili (United Republic of Tanzania 2006: 52, Table 5.1), including 89.5 percent of those in Kilimanjaro Region, the highest literacy rate overall (United Republic of Tanzania 2006: 57, Table 5.7). Likewise, by region, Kilimanjaro declares the highest percentage of persons aged five and above attending school: 32.5 percent in 2002 (United Republic of Tanzania 2006: 66, Table 5.18); this includes preprimary through adult education, with primary rates of enrollment attaining nearly 98 percent in the region (Ministry of Education official interview, June 2002). On the mainland, Kilimanjaro reports the third largest number of business operations and office workers; and although such data are at best general approximations, they have come to represent what many Tanzanians consider to be Kilimanjaro’s distinction and privilege in schooling and employment. In primary school, Tanzanian students learn that Kiswahili was the language of nineteenth-century Arab slave traders from the coast to the interior, and of the German East Africa administration until Germany surrendered in 1918. In 1922, by League of Nations mandate, German East Africa was renamed Tanganyika and granted to the British to rule. Under the British, Kiswahili was the language of instruction in the first four years of formal education (Standards 1 through 4) and was taught as a subject of study in the middle school years (Standards 5 through 8). In high schools, English was the medium of instruction and Kiswahili was taught as a separate subject. Beginning roughly with the founding in 1954 of the national independence party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), and ending with independence in 1961, national leaders, including the eventual first president, Julius K. Nyerere, promoted Kiswahili as an African language. The first constitution, ratified in 1962, declared, “The languages of Tanganyika are English and Kiswahili.” In 1967, when the Nyerere administration began promoting nationalist policies of education for self-reliance and ujamaa (African socialism), the second vice president, Rashid Kawawa, declared Kiswahili the medium of instruction in Standards 1 through 7 (Brock-Utne 2005: 56). Plans were laid to make Kiswahili the language of instruction from Standard 1 through university, including plans to expand its use as an instructional medium to secondary schools by 1974. These

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plans were never implemented, however, and by the early 1990s Nyerere, succeeded by Ali Hassan Mwinyi as president of the Republic, was reputed to have had second thoughts about the national value of Kiswahili. “English is the Kiswahili of the world,” Nyerere is reported as saying (Rugemalira and others 1990). The comment, widely circulated in the popular media, raised more questions about Kiswahili’s value. In the early twenty-first century, Kiswahili came to signify national parochialism as well as African pride. The “political winds of change” (upepo wa mageuzi)—as people colloquially referred to the transition to multi­ party democracy in the 1990s—had blown to the fore alternative views of history and government. Indeed, the decade leading up to the historic multiparty elections of 1995 and to presidential elections again in 2000 and 2005 might be characterized, as some observers have done, as years of growing awareness of social class stratification according to education among religious groups. As historian Abdin Chande notes (2000: 350), this awareness was a regional East African phenomenon; Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania all experienced “increased Islamization” in the 1980s and 1990s, and Muslim efforts to mobilize communities emerged progressively over time. In Tanzania across the 1980s and 1990s, the end of the one-party state controlled by Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, successor to TANU)8 created conditions conducive for religious groups to speak and organize more freely, even though no party based on religious affiliation was allowed to register. Most of these groups were Christian and Muslim; the latter were centered on the coast and in Zanzibar, the former on the mainland, and a newly privatized media allowed both to gain greater access to new populations. Schooling was arguably the single greatest issue about which religious groups wrangled, and related to it was language of instruction. Chande (2000: 350) argues that the colonial education system set the tone for contemporary political and religious conflict. “The educational structure perpetuated . . . social and economic divisions in East African societies, thus privileging certain ethnic groups with the longest and deepest contacts with Christian missions.” For the first time since pre-independence, when the All Muslim National Union of Tanganyika asked the British government to “delay independence until Muslims acquired sufficient education to be able to share equitably in the fruits of independence” (Chande 2000: 360; see also Mbogoni 2004), educational attainment levels began to be broken down openly according to religious affiliation.9 Student activists, including members of the Muslim Student Association at the University of Dar es Salaam and of UVIKITA (the Union of Muslim Youth), claimed that the ruling political party, CCM, had systematically denied Muslims assembly and equal access to public schools. Contestations between ­Christians

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and Muslims took the form of interfaith debates and skirmishes on the streets. Muslim missionaries (umwadi) publicly questioned the “divinity of Christ,” angering Christian passers-by and in one case resulting in two days of rioting, more than one hundred arrests, and the deaths of two Muslims “considered martyred” (Chande 2000: 363). This incident is remembered as Mwembechai, named for the area in the national capital where it occurred beginning on February 12, 1998. Leading up to the 2000 presidential campaign, the political party Civic United Front (CUF) increasingly gave voice to Muslim groups’ dissatisfaction. Although not registered as a religious party, CUF came to stand nationally for a politicized Muslim community. For some in this group, English instruction came to signify Tanzanians’ ongoing subordination to the West. Concomitant with the formation of these political parties were debates about language policy and the rapid growth in number of privately registered English-medium primary schools. Public demand among those who could afford it seemed to be for English instruction at the primary levels. Billboards such as one displayed by Standard Charter Bank advertised financial savings schemes for families to pay for private primary school. “Secure his future, make his dreams come true today,” read a billboard looming over a major intersection in Dar es Salaam. Written in English, it featured a schoolboy, pencil in hand, sitting at a stand-alone desk.10 The desk and the boy’s manner of dress (not a uniform but high-end street clothes) signaled social privilege in the making. Brock-Utne (2005: 73) reports that “of the eighty-five English-medium primary schools registered by the year 2000, sixty-seven (almost 80 percent) were registered in the 1990s.” The 1995 Education and Training Policy of the country had allowed for all levels of schooling to be open to private sponsors. That policy had also affirmed Kiswahili as the language of primary school instruction, yet not all in government supported it. With rhetoric that conflated religious stereotype and choice of language instruction, the minister of education in the Mkapa administration called supporters of Kiswahili “fundamentalists.” In a view taken up in the English language newspapers he declared, “Tanzania needs to use English as the language of instruction in order to catch up with the West in the fields of science and technology” (as paraphrased by Brock-Utne 2005: 73). The minister’s idea played on a phrase also popularly attributed to Nyerere— “they are running while we are walking,” the former being Western students and the latter Tanzanians—and it used the idea of “catching up” to link science and technology development to language of instruction. Regardless of the rhetoric or political perspectives behind the views of the minister or his critics, however, debate about the value of language of instruction attests to the Bourdieuian notion that academic credentialing

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is most powerful when restricted and externally oriented. The English language, supporters maintained, was more socially, politically, and economically powerful than Kiswahili, to which Kiswhahili advocates responded that the field of knowledge of the English language is the geopolitical West, which to them signified “colonial” and “Christian.” Locally, where the missionaries worked, the politics of language and religion had particular dimensions and ramifications. Musoma School had formerly been owned by the East African Muslim Welfare Society (EAMWS), a regional organization formed in the 1940s to promote economic and educational opportunities for Muslims. Nationalized in the 1960s, the school now “belonged” to the Ministry of Education and was open to everyone. However, in the context of international calls for public-private partnerships in the education sector (including from the World Bank, for government partnerships with religious groups),11 some Muslim leaders associated with this school moved for its return to Muslim ownership. The hall where Walter read the story of Noah’s Ark and where Tanzanian students sang the Father Ibrahim song (described in Chapter One) had been the madarasa hall, where Muslim students recited daily prayers and where adult members of EAMWS held ibada, Friday service. In the early stages of the missionaries’ plan, Muslim parents supported English-medium instruction. Indeed, teachers at Musoma School had begun to create an all-English calendar year. The head teacher supported this move on the principle that ordinary people, not only those who could afford private schooling, should have the chance to educate their children in English. However, in the context of national election campaigns, English became clouded by competition for seats in government. It also became conflated with the interests of administrators at private English-medium schools. During the second year of the missionaries’ work, opposition political parties mobilized to promote and elect candidates. Large trucks careened around the streets, blaring campaign ads and loud music. CCM held most of the incumbent positions; its strongest challenger in the region was CUF. In a conversation about the elections, one teacher described the national election this way: “CUF is the, ah, Muslim party. It’s a very harsh one. And in fact, if you’re not careful with them, their people are very harmful. I think you understand the issue. They are in that way, their movement and so forth.” This teacher said that during the campaign “politicians were busy trying to win teachers. CUF was using our school to their own political advantage. They were challenging CCM party members to take a stand on our school. [CUF was saying that CCM] was selling Tanzanian schools to out­siders”— an allusion to the missionaries’ English program at the school. “That was untrue,” the teacher continued, “but they told everyone that was the

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issue.”12 More to the point, she added on reflection, was that religious identity converged with the privatization of schools. During a time of economic restructuring and policy changes that were oriented toward the market, the number of private, fee-based primary schools in the area had doubled in number, to eight, near Musoma School, an extraordinarily high concentration compared with other areas. Administrators of for-profit private schools worried that free public English schools, including such planned at Musoma, would drain students from their classes, which were already competing fiercely for students. To quote again the earlier-mentioned teacher who qualified her argument about religion: The conflict in fact was not caused by the Muslims; it was caused by private Englishmedium schools. You know, [critics of our English-medium program] told us if our [public] school was going to be a free English medium—theirs is a private one and people have to pay—then they won’t get market. So [these critics] associated with the conflicts of making sure that [our English-medium public] school was no longer going on. That was the main reason we shut down. . . . Now, this group [of opponents to our English program] was run by members of those private English academy schools, along with some of [the] Muslims who are very close to this school. Yes. Impressing them [to] dislike our school to become an English medium.

According to this teacher, the calendar-year English-medium program was shut down as a result of this politicking. The public school, partnered with the missionaries, came face-to-face with the private school sector. Yet parents at the school, Christian and Muslim alike, continued to support aspects of the missionaries’ program, albeit with qualification. One ­Muslim parent whose daughter attended the program said, “English gives light [mwanga] to my child but missionaries should not insist on Bible reading. Doing so can cause conflict between Muslims and Christians [because] using the Bible to teach English to our children is mzungu [European-American].” A Musoma teacher whose child had participated argued that although as a Christian parent she liked the program, she could see why Muslim parents would withhold their children. Muslims, she said, are afraid that students will become “attracted to the missionaries.” She conceded that most Muslims saw that their own children were enjoying the program and found it valuable. “One nation should be able to communicate well with another nation,” she said, equating English speakers and Muslims with separate nations. “But Muslim parents don’t want to have their kids singing Christian songs. It makes no good relationship in public.” The issue was the Bible content, she suggested, not the English language instruction. Teachers at Musoma generally supported the missionaries’ program, although like parents, not uniformly. What they most liked was the mis-

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sionaries’ interactive method. “The program is especially strong,” one said, “because the missionaries are using a technique whereby they teach students through playing and singing, not only reading and writing.” Indeed, professionally, American missionaries and Tanzanian teachers shared ground in espousing the pedagogic value of child-centered instructional methods. Learning by doing was a technique widely endorsed by both teachers and missionaries. Such a method, associated generally with the educational philosophy and works of John Dewey (1939), is organized around the idea that learning occurs through children’s own discovery. Teachers are merely facilitators, not authorities, of students’ learning. Yet although many Tanzanian teachers thought that the missionaries’ methods were pedagogically effective and defensible—indeed, Deweyan methods were a component of Tanzanian teachers’ own training and certification— others thought such methods were foreign and another example of enduring colonialism. The missionaries’ emphasis on fun and games, some said, eroded teachers’ moral authority in that the cultural principle of child-centered learning was at odds with Africans’ cultural views of adult authority. Teachers, they said, not students should be at the center of classroom instruction. Parents’ and teachers’ skepticism of the program hinged on an awareness that the missionaries’ own ethical reality was not one that these parents and teachers wished entirely to share. Explicitly, in conversations off school grounds I heard some parents and teachers say that the mission­aries were secretly hoping to convert and recruit Tanzanian schoolchildren. In teaching students Bible-based songs, some worried, the missionaries lured children to their church. “They want to steal our children and make them mzungu” was an extreme way another parent put it. He continued, “The missionaries are like witches in our village; they make our children turn against us.”13 Some people laughed because witchcraft and sorcery were to have been put aside, especially in church and school. Others used witchcraft as a metaphor for characterizing the political dimensions of these missionaries’ work. Some Muslim groups, for instance, considered foreign missionaries to be a proxy for the U.S. war on terror, an opinion voiced in an Islamic weekly reporting on the use of religious curricula in primary schools as part of “President George Bush’s plan to fight terrorism in East Africa.”14 Were missionaries secretly converting students? Were they drawing them into a U.S. worldview? In teaching children how to speak English (a language most students’ parents did not know), were missionaries trying to influence and change Tanzanian society? These were the questions some Tanzanians asked. They were also questions to which missionaries unequivocally had answers. Yes, their goal was indeed to convert students to Christianity. Yes, they did invoke a moral

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authority that was greater than their own and, for that matter, greater than that of any human being. And yes, they believed that the Bible was a holy text that could and should be translated and used in the everyday, and that English should become the official language for economic reasons in linking East Africa to global finance markets. No, however, these missionaries (their leader, Frank Bolton, said) were not working for the U.S. government even though, yes, they naturally shared aspects of their president’s religious views.15 From the missionaries’ perspective, these views were not secrets. They were simply points they had agreed not to discuss publicly for reasons that, as the college students only vaguely understood, had to do with the history and current politics of religion and language policy in the region. (The senior leaders on the mission had a clearer picture of the reasons.) In fact, the upshot of the missionaries’ elective silence was to cast a longer shadow on their work; their participatory methods and partly muted agenda added intrigue and mystery to what they did. Before exploring the perceived ramifications of missionaries’ work in this region in later chapters, I look here at an added dimension: Tanzanian teachers’ and parents’ ideas about learning and interaction.

Ambiguity and Deception: Keys to Morality I have suggested that Tanzanians’ experiences with language policy and religious politics provided references for them in assessing the value of the missionaries’ English program. Before that I suggested that the missionaries’ points of contact were based on their own partial understanding of religion and politics in the region. In this section, I argue that in the midst of their experiences with privatization and religious escalation, Tanzanians drew yet other analogies. Among the most salient of their metaphors were those invoked around concepts of secrecy and deception. These concepts, which articulated ideations of interaction and agency in forms that were culturally foreign to missionaries, provided Tanzanians with lenses through which to view the history and current opacity of education. Since the precolonial period, residents of Kilimanjaro Region have recognized the power of interactive learning in two realms. In a realm invisible to an ordinary person, interaction with social forces was structured so as to reproduce adults’ and powerful persons’ authority. Parents taught their children to imitate what older siblings and adults did. Bruno Gutmann, an early twentieth-century German chronicler of social life around Mount Kilimanjaro, described an imperative voiced by Chagga (the main ethnic group) living in the area: “Tehele!” (Imitate!). Gutmann (1932: 230) quotes Chagga grandmothers as saying, “A child who does not imitate can-

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not be called a child.” Grandmothers, he says, tell a story of a child who takes up a wooden hoe, plays and pokes around in the ground, and throws in a handful of seeds. When the seeds sprout, the child’s mother is astonished at what the child can do, for she and not the child’s grandmother had scorned the child’s disorganized ways; but the grandmother, who has provided seeds, has done so in order to teach something meaningful to her daughter and her grandchild. To her daughter the grandmother has taught the lesson of seeing that some of what is planted, including unsystematically and playfully, will grow. Nothing is too haphazard; even indiscriminating actions produce results. To her grandchild she has taught a lesson that Gutmann (1932: 231) translates as “A child who never imitates will never become a human.” Imitation, it would seem, is an important aspect of human growth. The grandmother too learns from her grandchild: When she eats cooked food from the crops her grandchild has cultivated, she learns that “this child [may] again imitate something tomorrow, so that I may again eat my fill” (231). In salient ways, Chagga experiences with imitation and play provide metaphors for explaining and modeling education and social reproduction. In a parallel realm, interaction obeys a different logic. At one extreme, it involves embodying and becoming other agentive forces, including those associated with deceased ancestors (kupandwa na wazimu) and the illicit forces of witchcraft (uchawi). Only a healer or sorcerer can discern whether a person is so possessed. Less extraordinary but also unseen are everyday acts of trickery and deception. Along these lines, Gutmann describes another aphorism attributed to Chagga grandmothers. He recounts that grandmothers advise, “Look, my grandson! You should pile the idiot’s plate high, to make him think he’s loved” (1932: 75–76). Gutmann’s use of the word idiot reflects his own early-twentieth-century European sensibilities, for to him the idiot is a physically or mentally disabled sibling. His translation, however, captures Chaggas’ sense of the dangers of socially marginal people. Gutmann recounts that in one scenario the idiot’s parents withhold his food. Why should they feed a disabled person when others can benefit more fully? The child falters and dies, but on his deathbed he first curses his parents and then destroys their home. To avoid such tragedy, the grandmother recounts another scenario and advises the everyday play of deceptive strategy. The grandson to whom the story is narrated is told that to avoid his brother’s curse he must “pile his brother’s plate full with food,” that is, he must give his brother what he wants. He must appease his disadvantaged sibling so as to make him think he is loved, although this need not necessarily be the case; and he must also keep his dishonest support for his brother secret from his parents.

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Whether cruel or pragmatic, the story about the idiot hinges on a sociomorality that is more openly calculating than that with which visiting American missionaries are familiar; yet calculation is itself a universal, albeit differently manifested, human social feature. A social environment that is deliberately “piled high,” in the sense that not all that is valued is fully disclosed or openly discussed, presents itself as a dominant and socially prevailing backdrop in Kilimanjaro Region—including in the present day, when stories such as that of the idiot and embodied deception continue to be told. Allow me to give an example from the recent ethnographic record before I connect missionaries’ implicit agendas back to Tanzanians’ perspectives on missionaries’ work. One of the lessons taught to Chagga boys during rituals of initiation up through about the 1940s (roughly the era when Musoma students’ grandfathers and older uncles would have been initiated) was that they, as men, were never supposed to defecate in public, and they should never reveal to girls, women, or boys that men’s anuses were open like everyone else’s. This ngoso precept, as the lie was called, complemented processes that developed earlier and later in the life cycle (Raum 1940: 295ff; Gutmann 1926) and constituted a means for transferring procreative powers from one generation to the next. However, as Sally Falk Moore (1976) notes in an essay titled “The Secret of the Men: A Fiction of Chagga Initiation and Its Relation to the Logic of Chagga Symbolism,” “as far as many women were concerned,” the closed anus was “an open secret.” Women learned about ngoso during their own initiation rites and even used male feces as part of their ritual. One of the lessons that girls were taught at their own initiation, for instance, was that they were the original owners of ngoso, that they had had knowledge about ngoso well before men had, and that it had been stolen from them. “In ancient days, that which now pertains to men was ours,” writes Dundas (1924: 225), paraphrasing women and female initiates as saying, “but those possessed of horns came, and by force robbed us of our manhood.” Moore suggests that the ritual closing of men with ngoso corresponds to their sexual opening and to their capacities to close and impregnate women, and that Chagga secrets surrounding initiation might be interpreted as “a matter of some kind of ritual collusion, of collective mythmaking, of open secrets, the meaning of which lies as much in the underlying mystery as in the surface representation” (1976: 364). This interpretation accords well not only with the available historical data but with others’ views of African male and female initiation regionally (see, for example, LaFontaine 1977; Richards 1956; Turner 1967). The ngoso example is not intended to divert my broader discussion away from missionaries’ work. To the contrary, it is meant to introduce how

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social life around Mount Kilimanjaro—and across East Africa generally— unfolds against a moral landscape of common deception and ambiguity.16 Moore’s analysis of ngoso as “open secret” implies that despite analytic focus on initiation, secrecy, and as I will develop here, ambiguity is not only a feature of highly formalized social encounters, not only a component of extraordinary ritual discourse, but also a mode of explaining phenomena and events as they pertain to ordinary, everyday exchanges and encounters. Ambiguity, it would seem from the open nature of people’s denial of ngoso, is a way of engaging routinely with the world, a way of treating as absent things that are known to be present, and a way of controlling and, indeed, of creating what is believed and what is taken (or not) for fact. It is not that such ambiguous engagements are below the surface or hidden from view but that they are present but not seen. They are felt and intuited but not known. As such, indefinite engagements with ngoso or the unseen are similar to but different from missiologists’ sense of vision and surface meaning. Both ngoso and witness articulate an absence. In this regard they correspond. However, in another sense Chagga ideas of deception call into question the ontology of sublevel meanings. Where missionaries see intentions undergirding human actions, Chagga see human actions as possessed by a vitality of force—good or bad, and sometimes disguised. Thus the secrecy of ngoso embeds a vision of the world playing out through ambiguous actions and meanings, and it differs from these missionaries’ sense that witness gives evidence to realities’ scaffolded forms. A social environment that is deliberately “piled high” in the sense that not all that is valued is fully disclosed or openly discussed also presents itself as a dominant but disguised operational mode in the missionaries’ language program. It is this backdrop, as discussed further in Chapters Five and Six, that partly foils what missionaries intend to do: to win new converts to their church and build a single Christianity. In openly evangelizing but claiming in public settings and schools that they are not proselytizing, missionaries undermine their own positions as unequivocally agents of good, not malevolence. This is because Tanzanians hear them saying one thing and doing another, which, as anywhere, leads to questions. Such a backdrop of ambiguity, however, is not necessarily seen as bad or immoral. Indeed, it frames the setting in which Tanzanians themselves selectively say yes to English language instruction in public school but no to these missionaries’ religion. This general principle of selective give and take, of accepting some things but not everything, of showing but not entirely disclosing, is the basis from which many Tanzanians, including some Muslims, allowed their children to participate in the missionaries’ English program without being afraid that their children would reproduce

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themselves as Americans or take up these missionaries’ faith. It is also a principle that missionaries misunderstood as ungodly, because deceptive and insincere—and in some instances as evil—rather than as an aspect of humans’ (including their own) sociality.

Kenyans’ Views To step back from these specifics and look again at nondenominational missionaries’ work comparatively, consider finally the views of Kenyans on the significance of education and Christianity. Kenyans working with the American missionaries understood and knew full well from their own cultural variations of ngoso about Tanzanians’ conceptions of ambiguity; they also shared the missionaries’ commitment to building a collective form of global Christianity. Two Kenyan husband-wife teams had moved from western Kenya with Bolton and his wife shortly after the language program was approved. The couples had studied and trained at a missionary Bible college in Nairobi. Their intention in coming to Tanzania, they said, was to expand the nondenominational church regionally. From the missionaries’ perspective, the Kenyans were there to assist; from the Kenyans’ view, which I develop further in the following chapter, the Kenyans were leaders of an independent African church. In day-to-day operations, these differences meant little. In the bigger picture, however, they effected different understandings of education and Christianity. The Kenyan evangelists ran two English programs associated with the nondenominational church. They offered an after-school program called Youth English Services, or YES, which they advertised on a poster using a series of questions: Would you like to improve your English speaking skills? Your English reading skills? Your English listening skills? Would you like to socialize with other youth from elsewhere in the world? Would you like to improve your relationship with your Savior? The answer offered on the poster to each question was yes. The placement of the poster in urban Internet cafés reached a cadre of secondary-school-aged (that is, roughly aged fifteen to twenty-one) students who would stop in to check e-mail and meet with friends. The Kenyans’ English classes were held at the church, located on the main street of the regional capital. When that site was closed, when the missionaries were working to secure a license to relocate to a defunct national bank, classes were moved to the Kenyan missionaries’ house. By then the Kenyans too had moved into the Americans’ rented house, where unlike the Americans they stayed year round.

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The Kenyans’ second English instructional program began a few years later; it was designed for adults. In part because the youth English program had not been successful in attracting many new members (the handful of students who attended already identified with a church and were interested in free instruction, not conversion) and in part because the Kenyans had learned from the Americans that a new church could most successfully be built with economically and socially secure groups, not with the marginal and poor, the Kenyan evangelists opened a program for the urban elite. They targeted especially those with full-time jobs. Their brochure advertised “five reasons why you can’t afford to miss” the course, each of which was bullet-pointed with a symbol of the Cross. The first reason was that “we are all soldiers in God’s army” and “need not only to know our enemy but also to know our fellow soldiers in the battlefield, lest we fall victim to a friendly fire.” The second reason was that the program was in fact an English language worship service that would appeal both to international tourists and businesspersons and to “locals who yearn to learn the language and interact.” Indeed, when American college missionaries were present, they attended the English service, although few international travelers did. The third reason was the time of the meeting—Friday after work, when “members of the Lord’s family” come together and pray. Most Tanzanians would have known that Friday evening was also when the muezzin’s voice carried from the loudspeaker lodged at the top of the mosque to call the Muslim faithful to the Friday service. Like YES before it, the English program was timed to coincide with and potentially attract people from Muslim events. The fourth reason was that “Christ is truly the son of God,” and the fifth reason cited Ephesians 4:12–13, regarding “preparing God’s people for the works of service.” The poster included a final reference, Proverbs 27:17—“As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” The Kenyans led the Friday worship program and most of the church’s Sunday services. Although they shared the American missionaries’ belief in the singularity of the Bible’s message and the eventual return of Jesus at the “end of days,” the Kenyans criticized the Americans’ views about the necessity of simplicity and asceticism. One evangelist, a student of ministry in Nairobi, said that the reason nondenominational restorationist churches in East Africa counted so few members compared with Pentecostal and mainline Protestant groups had to do with the missionaries’ views of African belief. “Many churches fall to the ground because people see Americans wanting to keep African things out of Christianity,” he said. Indeed, Bolton had just preached the week before that African “superstitions” were “bad” and should be forgotten. He had given the example of

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two people seeking to marry in the traditional way of exchanging bridewealth, which for Chagga involved sharing in the drinking of traditionally brewed banana beer, mbege. He said that this practice encouraged drunkenness and misogyny, that drunken people were dangerous to families, and that women married through bridewealth were treated like commodities rather than as independent, agentive persons. The Kenyan evangelists in this group argued that the missionaries on the Zebra Team did not understand the cultural significance of such practices. They tried to persuade the missionaries that the purpose of bridewealth exchange was not to get drunk and violate women but to solidify relations among extended families. Hadn’t the missionaries learned this in studying anthropology? Weren’t they as Christians compassionate because of knowing that “God worked in many ways?” The Kenyans used the language of courses they had taken at the Nairobi Bible school, including courses taught by Americans on “spiritual warfare” and “cross-cultural communication” (see next chapter), to question the Americans’ views. They also questioned the cultural contexts of gender relations among missionaries. They did not want to accuse the missionaries directly of ignorance and insensitivity. Indirect speech was better, more appropriate and Christian, in these evangelists’ view. To accuse anyone directly was a misstep that bordered on the practice of cursing. Instead, the Kenyan evangelists politely assisted the Americans yet held different views. The Tanzanians in turn expressed mixed views about these Kenyan evangelists. A general stereotype among Musoma parents was that although the Kenyans did not speak proper Kiswahili, their English skills were stronger than the Tanzanians’; and Luo Kenyans, the ethnic group from which the evangelists on this mission team came, were well-schooled and strong in education. From the Tanzanians’ perspective, these were strengths. On the whole, however, the Kenyans were seen, as Americans were, as people out of place. One Musoma teacher said that it was reasonable that Kenyans should want to travel for business or on holiday or to visit friends, even to teach for a semester. However, to live in Tanzania and evangelize was odd. It was more understandable that Americans would do so, for they were seen by Tanzanians as an enterprising, always traveling people. Buses plying over the nation’s roads were nicknamed “American Invader” and “Scud Missile.” In contrast, Kenya was seen as a nonexpansionist country and Kenyans were seen more as equals than as outsiders. All this is to say that in Tanzania Kenyan evangelists were fish out of water, although familiar fish. Whereas Kenyans saw Tanzanians as comparatively poor and less well connected globally through Christianity and English, Tanzanians saw Kenyans as less independent and more under the

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influence of Americans, including of these missionaries. Tanzanians had a self-image of independence that stemmed from the history of education in their country. In the 1960s, President Nyerere championed a policy known as Elimu ya Kujitegemea (Education for Self-Reliance). Its goal had been to make Tanzania economically independent of any external agencies. Although this vision was more rhetoric than reality (at least as Tanzanians had come to see it by the early twenty-first century), it had helped to shape Tanzanians’ view of themselves as independent and nationally cohesive.

Summary I have shown how in practice these missionaries went about developing what they referred to in their colleges in the United States as points of contact; and I have shown how, through these points, they sought to leverage conversion and conduct their work. Whereas in their classroom models and formal theses these missionaries had conceived that points of contact would occur through cultural equivalences—that is, they believed they could match up comparable beliefs and ideas across cultures and then through those matches nurture and develop beliefs closest to those based on the Bible—their work in Tanzania was more subtle in relation to what Tanzanians believed. Tanzanians were active, not passive, in interacting with the missionaries. They were not the waiting recipients of Christ that the missionaries had envisaged. Instead, many Tanzanians had already been converted, and many considered the missionaries to be “lacking Christ.” Even more to the point, many Tanzanians saw the American missionaries through a framework that differed from the missionaries’ framework. In this chapter I have pointed out two ways that Tanzanians framed their interactions with these Americans: first, through a historical lens of colonialism and postcolonial nationalism, through which Tanzanians considered religion and language politics to be salient; second, in terms of the cultural understandings of morality by which the Tanzanians living around Mount Kilimanjaro openly accepted that deception, although not always desirable, is everywhere a part of life. Whereas the missionaries saw secrets as immoral and as evidence of immaturity, Tanzanians saw these missionaries’ own supposedly hidden agenda (to convert through English instruction) as deceptive and part and parcel of politics globally. That is, Tanzanians, who are hardly childlike, recognized that the missionaries were extending a U.S. cultural and political hegemony by teaching English to Tanzanian students. My point, in short, is that both the missionaries and the Tanzanians brought different, active frameworks to their interactions, and that both groups framed their starting points differently: the

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­ issionaries in terms of equivalents, the Tanzanians in terms, generally m speaking, of ngoso and their experiences of colonial history. But what about my own analytic framework? What about that of anthropology? I have just identified the views of Tanzanians and missionaries; what about my own? To the extent that today the world is popularly regarded as all of a piece and multiply connected, one might wonder why I, like the missionaries, focus on contact zones at all. In a sense they are a thing of the past. Whether used analytically or as a descriptive model, the idea of zones, like that of culture contact, posits the existence of geographically and culturally discrete social groups—hardly what we see today in the global coming and going of people and ideas (although I hasten to add that not everyone comes and goes; not all of the world is connected globally). Yet one need look only to the missionaries’ ideas about contact and equivalences as evidence of how interactions structure what people do; or to the Tanzanians’ debates about English versus Kiswahili to see distinctions between global world and national ground. My point in focusing on contact zones is to understand how these zones are mutually created and how people come together through these arenas to form religious and school-educated communities. As Mary Louise Pratt (1992: 7) recognizes in looking at the coeval production of Europeans and their other through the Europeans’ travel writing, people’s historical and cultural trajectories intersect and are formed in interaction: “Subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures” formulate “interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” She also notes that language is a contact zone within which subgroups formulate their identities (Pratt 1987). Thus, although Tanzanians and Americans have different orientations, their interactions produce a common ground; language instruction brings disparate groups together and gives rise to their relationality. The dynamics of this church’s instructional zone—which is heterotopic and dispersed to other locations—reveal different inflections of a transnational religious community. Hardly new, this community grows out of a colonial-era history. Peter Pels (1999: 234) notes that in East Africa struggles over education “depend on the prior establishment of a contact zone” constructed historically “in the cooperation between missionaries and Africans.” However, whereas colonial-era missionaries simply worked with government, the present-day missionaries infuse their relationship with government with a particular form of Christian witness. Nondenominational missionaries seek to transcend, not merely complement, the apparatuses of the state, to be present in public life all the time, and to find key concepts through which churchgoers can “incarnate” a transnational and transcultural church of Christ. In this regard—that is, in looking for cultural equivalents and not

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for universal laws derived from human reason—their mode of operating and ways of thinking differ from those of missionaries associated with Europe’s civilizing mission. In looking in this chapter at three takes on contact among Americans, Tanzanians, and Kenyans, I have illustrated how education and religion serve as sites for working out social meanings and enacting differences. Whereas nondenominational missionaries sought to improve East Africans’ lives, East Africans associated with this church saw the need to missionize the other way around: to evangelize and improve the lives of Americans. Kenyan evangelists working closely with colleagues in Uganda held qualitatively different images of development, Christianity, and the future, as we shall see in the next chapter.

5

Planting Church Schools in Kenya

East Africans and Americans associated with nondenominational churches have different ideas of what it means to be educated, and different ideas about agency, transparency, and culture contact—points I began to discuss in the previous chapter. In this chapter I relate my previous discussion about ambiguity and deception to competing conceptions of ownership and governance. A primary theme of the following pages is that of autochthony—the state of being indigenous and of owning or belonging to a place—used here in relation to questions about to whom the church belongs. The theme of autochthony speaks to how Americans and East Africans in these churches go about “claiming Africa for Christ.” The territory they conquer, as it were, is a global ecumene. All involved see as important the church’s project of “paving the way for Christ,” yet what this means in terms of everyday work takes different form depending on who is involved. Americans in these churches suggest that Africans are not yet prepared to run the church independently. Africans, in contrast, regard such assessments as mistaken and as reflections of missionaries’ poor judgment and lack of education. In the broadest of terms, such differences reflect different perspectives on knowledge and power. Depending on one’s vantage point, the church is more or less an indigenous or foreign institution. Of course all involved consider the church to be theologically universal, but in the matter of administration and governance, church ownership is often framed in terms of who has more and better schooling. Americans imply that Africans are never educated enough, not even those with degrees from Europe or the United States. On the one hand they speak about turning over the church to African leadership, but on the other hand they refer to the church in Kenya as developmentally stuck in the adolescent stage. “I am not saying we look at our people as children,” one American outreach director in Nairobi put it, “but a transition is taking place. [We are] asking, what are areas in which we need growth? There’s a point at which, just like teenagers, they make their mistakes and learn.”

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It was this kind of analogy to childhood and adolescence that Kenyan evangelists found so disdainful and condescending. “We’ve got different ideas,” said Douglas Onguto, a Luo church leader from western Kenya. Whereas, for instance, Americans saw as a form of mismanagement, even nepotism, Kenyans’ tendencies to distribute and lend money from church coffers to needy members, Kenyans were inclined to see these gestures as expressions of Christian care for the poor. Also, many Kenyans regarded dependency on American missionaries as a micromanifestation of international-scale inequities. “Most of our evangelists get their support from America, from a missionary [sponsored by an American congregation],” Douglas Onguto continued. “What the missionaries are doing is reproducing dependency that exists on a global scale in the form of dependency in our church.” By analyzing control of church work from a perspective that takes into account both missionaries’ and evangelists’ views without reproducing either one of them, I here frame church members’ concerns about governance in terms of their varied ideas about what it means to “claim Africa for Christ.” In the following section I focus on nondenominational leaders’ work at the Nairobi Bible College. I next juxtapose American missionaries’ views of ownership with those of the East African evangelists whom missionaries teach, in order to show some of the ways in which Christianity and education are differently regarded as universally transcending. Evangelists’ ideas of education for independence confound missionaries’ sense of accountability. One of the things that East African leaders identify as impeding church independence are the cultural conceits—the hegemonic secrets “piled high” if you will—that missionaries use to justify and continue their control of the mission. I conclude this chapter with reflections on what East Africans say they know that American missionaries either do not know about themselves or do not admit: that their goal is not just to convert Africans to Christianity but also to link East Africa to a specific worldview through Christianity. Luo-Kenyans’ understanding of the U.S.-centered character of this enterprise is evident in the Kenyans’ arguments about the territorial reproduction and extension of the church through Americans’ preferences for empowering American missionaries’ sons rather than independent Luo to govern and run the church. It is also apparent in Kenyans’ awareness of Tanzanians’ concerns that English-medium schools’ instruction folds into a U.S. view of English as globally predominant economically.

A Bible College in Nairobi Nondenominational restorationist churches in Kenya, as in other locations, are organizationally heterotopic and utopian. That is, their collectivist

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and idealizing work materializes in other places in addition to the church. Collectively these churches call themselves the original Christian Church. They renounce administrative hierarchies, including bishoprics and dioceses such as are found in Catholic and mainline churches; and they disdain the freewheeling manner of revelation that they associate with faith healers and Pentecostalism. Americans and East Africans alike in these churches take a rational approach to divinity and salvation. They share a sense that systematic Bible study will reveal and unlock deeper meanings, or as mission anthropologists within this church call them, “cultural equivalences.” Theirs is a church of seeking and finding, of studying the Bible and discerning its meaning. In Kenya, this Christian Church serves as a broad umbrella to a disjointed history and range of beliefs. On the one hand, nondenominational congregations there are administratively dispersed and independent. On the other hand, such congregations are a part of regional and international consociations that nurture new followers and develop global networks. One institution working in the name of these churches is the Nairobi Bible College (NBC).1 Regionally, NBC is a focal point for the work of nondenominational churches and their missionaries. The institution trains, employs, ministers, and places new evangelists and teachers throughout East Africa. It does so by offering diplomas in mission studies and ministry, and certificates of study in business and vocational training. Most of the approximately fifty students attending annually are Luo men from western Kenya. A handful come from other provinces and countries, including Ghana, Botswana, Uganda, and Tanzania. All of the fifteen teachers at the college except two are American, and all of the American teachers except one are men (the woman teaches family lessons). One Kenyan teacher is a graduate of a U.S. nondenominational Christian college; he teaches courses on culture and communication, and evangelism and discipleship, and he has sent at least one of his several sons to the United States to study intercultural education. The other non-American teaches English at the college. Members of the faculty hold doctorates or master’s degrees in mission studies, cross-cultural communication, African studies, and education. All are paid with funds donated by individuals and congregations in the United States and generated through tuition fees. Boarding students pay about $1,400, and day students pay about half of that.2 Not all those who wish to can attend. In a country where the gross domestic product per capita is US$1,700, costs are exorbitant.3 To offset expenses, American administrators recommend that applicants consider “selling a cow”—a strategy that Luo counterparts also support but with greater recognition of the cost of converting family wealth to school fees. “It’s not so easy to just sell a cow; what will your parents back home use for wealth?” Cattle are both

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symbolic and material resources; they provide milk and meat, and in some cases are transferred to a bride’s family in the Luo practice of bridewealth. For years, NBC offered diplomas only in mission studies and ministry, but starting in the late 1990s it began to offer training in business and management. In part this vocational orientation derives from the fact that the founding missionaries began to liken the work of the church to that of corporations. Van Rheenen (1996: 197–198), whose textbook American missiologists assign to their mission studies students, writes, “The development of globalized missions reflects what is happening in international business.” The first phase is “marketed through local distributors”; the second involves “marketing” the religious product abroad; the third and fourth phases move further afield; and the fifth “transcends national boundaries.” East African evangelists embrace these market metaphors. In Kenya, they couch “development” in terms of Christians’ business opportunities. As NBC’s Kenyan bursar put it, “We need more Christian professionals in the country, and for this we need to teach business and ICT [information and computer technology].” This new focus, he stressed, does not come at the expense of Bible study and ministry; rather, it complements and gives a “practical focus” to courses on evangelism and church doctrine. Indeed, requirements at the college include several courses on “mission practicum.” This outreach component requires students to extend their Bible knowledge to the practical needs of communities. Toward this end, some African students work at the church’s downtown site, in what Kenyan and American church leaders refer to as a “ghetto” of Nairobi. Bible college students organize youth groups and establish microenterprise schemes. Other NBC students set up Bible study groups and “church cells” (as these churches call grassroots congregations) in rural and urban areas of poverty. NBC’s diploma program includes courses on communication and culture and on spiritual warfare, two classes that draw on anthropology. In printed materials assigned in these classes, anthropology is presented as a secular tool that can itself be used to combat secularism. The syllabus for the spiritual warfare course includes a reading list, on which is included Symons Onyango’s Set Free from Demons: A Testimony to the Power of God to Deliver the Demon Possessed and Ensign and Howe’s Counseling and Demonization: The Missing Link. The course contrasts what it calls “western naturalistic” with “African animistic” worldviews and identifies “good and evil personalities”—the latter of which are said to be dispelled using “weapons, strategies, and disciplines” described in the book of Ephesians. Anthropology emerges in this course as a sort of field technique for learning to think cross-culturally. It is presented to Africans as a matter of ministering in a cross-cultural relationship with their neighbors. Whereas in the United States, at Stinton College and Lindstrom Christian University,

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the point of anthropology was to discern “cultural equivalences,” here in Kenya the Americans’ emphasis is on the need to reform and Christianize “pantheistic” Kenyans. As the reference to warfare suggests, anthropology for Christian witness is aimed at winning souls in a battle for Christianity. “The biblical foundations of spiritual warfare will be examined along with how to minister to those under attack,” reads the NBC course description. Notwithstanding the different construals of anthropology, NBC faculty, like nondenominationals in the United States, stress the importance of practical fieldwork. Indeed, in the lobby of NBC—as at Stinton and Lindstrom—hangs a map with pinpoints locating the sites of students’ field placements. Western Kenya—an area east of Lake Victoria known at different times as Luoland, Nyanza, and Kavirondo—is full of such pinpoints. Nyanza is also a place where across the twentieth century many independent Christian churches have been established, some as part of an African independent revival of Christianity and, as such, predating the work of these American nondenominational missionaries. F. B. Welbourn and B. A. Ogot (1966) detail the history of independent churches in Nyanza. Here I briefly review their account to show how western Kenyan and American nondenominational institutions, which historically are separate in their origins, overlap and partly merge, and how the practical work of East African evangelists in western Kenya has taken a turn that differs from what these American nondenominational missionaries intended.

A Brief History In broad brushstrokes, a Luo-led revival began in areas east of Lake Victoria in the late 1930s as a protest to control of the Anglican Church by British missionaries. (As background, the Church of England sent Anglican clergy to East Africa via the Church Missionary Society, which as early as 1844 had begun work on the Kenyan coast.) Luo leaders distinguished their church from jolango, a Luo spirit-possession complex that was broadly similar to cwezi-kubandwa in Uganda. They also differentiated their work from the “European ways” of British missionaries. So successful was this early movement that thousands of Luo joined the revival. Yet when the leader, Ishmael Noo, was accused of misconduct (Welbourn and Ogot 1966: 30), a second, more moderate and deliberately disciplined revival unfolded. In the 1950s, a group calling themselves Wahamaji—“people who leave a place”—split from the Anglican Church and from Noo’s group. These African-led churches of Christ (as Welbourn and Ogot call them) withdrew from those they deemed “nominal” Christians, including baptized Africans and Europeans. Wahamaji “recognized only Christ as the

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leader” (Welbourn and Ogot 1966: 34) and eschewed ecclesiasticism and church hierarchy. Like Kenyan members of nondenominational churches today, they practiced adult immersion baptism and sometimes called themselves “born again.” For the next twenty years these churches were independently organized and led in western Kenya by Africans. In the 1970s, American missionaries from U.S. nondenominational churches arrived in Nyanza Province. They too called themselves the original Christian Church, though in their case the name referred to churches derived from a 1830s revival meeting in Lexington, Kentucky. They too believed in church-state separation and that mission work should focus on preaching, not on church hierarchy or political questions of governance, because the latter were worldly and mundane. These U.S. nondenominational churches, like African churches of Christ in Nyanza, “sought to be the spiritual aspect of a community whose secular affairs [should] be left safely in the hands of the state” (Welbourn and Ogot 1966: 7). Although there is some indication that these American missionaries’ theological views preceded them through churches associated with the Africa Inland Mission (AIM),4 the first American nondenominational mission-church established as a “true Christian church” was “planted and watered” in 1974 (Kenya Mission Team, n.d.). Between the 1970s and 1990s, nondenominational missionaries from U.S. restorationist churches focused on “the planting of New Testament churches in Kenya” (Kenya Mission Team, n.d.: 2) and on developing Bible correspondence courses through the World Bible School (WBS). Correspondence courses, such as the Bible study course for which pamphlets were distributed (described in Chapter One) linked rural Africans with U.S. Christian pen pals. The Africans filled out worksheets about a series of Bible readings and then sent their completed work to missionary contacts in the United States. These contacts in turn corrected and returned the students’ exercises along with letters of support and praise. After finishing the twelveweek course, each Bible school student received a certificate of completion. In this way, an exchange of letters connected Americans and East Africans, although apparently the system was not strong enough to keep all Luo members in the church. Across the 1980s, many Luo left nondenominational congregations. “At present we have been losing about one out of every three converts,” wrote American members of the mission team (Kenya Mission Team, n.d.: 109). Americans blamed the Luos’ apostasy on the powers and strength of “polygamy,” and on “unfaithful friends,” “beer,” and “adultery” (110–111). Whereas the Luo themselves had different reasons for leaving the American-led mission church (as discussed later), the missionaries blamed declining numbers on the Africans’ lack of discipline. “When a Christian begins to add wives” or when Luo are “drawn back into the fellowship of

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old friends and beer-drinking parties,” wrote a leader of the American team in the 1980s, “there is a fellowship problem” and Luo “must be disciplined” (110). He continued: “Before we can begin to make our message and methods truly effective, we need to look into the world of our Luo people and see what is there that most affects their spiritual lives.” In the 1990s, church work shifted from ministering to the rural poor to developing technical skills among the urban middle class. “This allowed us to work from positions of strength and build the church from a solid base,” said the American outreach director at NBC. The argument was that these middle-class Luo would in turn minister to their less fortunate brethren. “We were not getting many reliable followers when we ministered initially to the poor. People just came and went. But by working with the educated middle class we could begin to sustain our mission.” It was at about this time, in the 1990s, that NBC registered as a nongovernmental organization and began to expand its course offerings in information technology, vocational training, trauma counseling, and business administration—in addition to continuing to offer courses on cross-cultural ministry and evangelism. By the late twentieth century these churches estimated that they had more than eight hundred congregations with twenty thousand adult members across western, central, and eastern Kenya. By the year 2000, the churches were managing more than a dozen primary schools, a secondary school, a polytechnic (vocational training) school, NBC, and extension programs across East Africa. Projects included veterinary work, literacy campaigns, family relief, and trauma counseling. Clearly, the work of the church had shifted from preaching to teaching and much more. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, when nondenominational American missionaries and Kenyan evangelists began expanding into northern Tanzania, a new revival of a sort was emerging across East Africa and internationally. This awakening had nothing to do with independent churches or self-government, but everything to do with how best to educate modern nation-state citizens in an era of globalization. This revival of interest was in universal primary education, including how best to involve religious groups in new education-related public policies. As noted at the beginning of this book, the World Bank’s World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) met in Nairobi in 2000. At this meeting, members of the group discussed the benefits of partnerships between faith groups and governments to provide social services, including and especially education. WFDD conversations occurred at the same time as Catholic and Protestant churches, working together, held a series of “Jubilee,” or celebration, events in recognition of “Christ’s New Millennium,” the twenty-first century. WFDD conversations and Jubilee events focused on how religious groups could better contribute to mass schooling. In Kenya, “the deterio-

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rating quality of public education . . . created demand for private alternatives” (Baurer, Brust, and Hybbert 2002, quoted in Tooley and Dixon 2005: 3); and in 2003 the Kenyan government’s call to revive free primary education added to the logistical problems of schools’ overcrowding. The work of faith groups in schools at this time was newly seen by some in public policy circles as an asset that could compensate for the shortcomings of public schooling. Luo evangelists shared this view—that church schools could fill in gaps in the public system. On their trips to the United States, several Luo evangelists appealed to U.S. congregations to help fund private church initiatives, including the building of a new primary school in western Kenya and a school for training in computers to be located in Nairobi. Funds followed facts—including the fact that most students in Kenya had no textbooks or desks and often had to walk long distances every day. American congregations seemed willing to support private Christian education in Africa. As a crude measure of U.S. financial support for Protestant overseas missions in 2001 (crude because it includes denominational and nondenominational contributions alike, and funding for all projects, not just education), consider that between 1998 and 2001, U.S. funding for Protestant overseas missions increased 17.3 percent, to about $3.8 billion (Welliver and Northcutt 2004: 13), and from 2001 to 2005, such income increased 26.7 percent (adjusted for inflation), to about $5.2 billion (Weber and Welliver 2007: 13). For the first time ever, nondenominational congregations about which I write began to fund building projects for private schools—including, in at least two cases, large philanthropic donations from retired CEOs to start new private Christian academies. The turn of nondenominational churches in this direction is a remarkable indication of their movement into what Americans and Kenyans alike, on this point, had seen historically as the domain of government. Although involved for several years in providing technical training and English language skills to adult learners, including those enrolled in Bible college programs, nondenominational churches and missionaries—in contrast to ecumenicals—had heretofore shied away from involvement in basic education. Because of the Kenyan government’s requirement to missionaries to register as development agencies, and in response to international policy calls for faith groups to dialogue and partner with government, by the early twenty-first century these missionaries and evangelists were at the forefront of community development, at least in up-country areas amenable to Americans’ philanthropy. Before returning to the programming at NBC and to an analysis of how missionaries and evangelists differently frame ownership of the church and its projects, I would like to describe a Kenyan community school that some

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members of Pathway Church (see Chapter Two) help to sponsor. Although it is particular in its qualities, this academy resembles another Americanfunded school that I describe in Chapter Six. Rongo Christian Academy, as I call the school I discuss here, is less American-indebted than funders might desire or imagine; and although it is evangelical and millennial in terms of outlook on the future, it is more “rational” and enterprising than its “God-fearing” language might connote.

Rongo Christian Academy Let’s travel to Rongo Christian Academy. The primary school is indicated by one of the pinpoints on the NBC map of students’ field placements. Rongo Academy is located in western Kenya, about twenty-five kilometers east of Lake Victoria. The land is lush and green, the rainy season has just begun, and a few tethered sheep are grazing on new grass. It’s May 2003. Rongo Church is fenced off from the dirt road and framed by two pillars of brick and mortar. The building stands at the edge of Zechariah Ndisi’s dala (compound), which includes his house and those of two grown sons. All of Ndisi’s five children now live elsewhere in the country. Three daughters “are married”—Luo speak of women as “married” and of men as “marrying”—and have moved to nearby villages. His two sons reside in Nairobi but maintain houses on their father’s land and return for holidays. Ndisi is a mzee, elder, of the church and one of its founding members. Some Luo neighbors say he invited American missionaries to Rongo in order to bring new money into the community. Others say that he had been a “stuttering man” whom missionaries had rescued from the irrational tongues of Pentecostalism. In any case, by all accounts, Rongo Church flourished and “grew to the sky like the weeds” in the late 1970s, and then “fell” from about one-hundred-fifty to fewer than ten adult baptized members ten years later. When asked “Why? Why did the church fall to the ground?” Mzee Ndisi responded with two reasons. First, another church, a Pentecostal church, came to Nyanza. Pentecostal missionaries from Meru promised to take boys and girls to their schools and to pay evangelists full salaries to lead new congregations. Eighty percent of Rongo’s residents moved to that denomination. Most of those who went were poor and unemployed, including many women. Converts sought not only material prosperity but also spiritual rescue and affirmation. Mzee and his neighbors said that the Pentecostals’ demonstrative worship and ecstatic message of deliverance appealed to many people in the area who saw the nondenominational churches’ rules as emotionally stymieing and culturally repressive. In con-

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trast to restorationists, Pentecostals positively valued African traditions, including dancing and drumming, which are forbidden among the nondenominational churches. Moreover, women from around the Rongo community found new opportunities with the Pentecostal church. The Pentecostals allowed women to preach and participate equally with men. By contrast, in the nondenominational churches women could only teach and preach to children.5 The second reason for nondenominationals’ earlier failure was related: Luo in Rongo had particular expectations about what it meant to be a church member. “People equated American missionaries with education, health, and spiritual guidance,” Mzee said, but nondenominational missionaries did not offer material things. Missionaries told Luo elders that their sponsoring churches in the United States had sent them to preach “the Gospel of the Church, not the Gospel of the building” (as Mzee’s sons translated Mzee’s words from Luo into English), and that if Americans built schools and clinics, people would come for handouts and subsidies, not because the Holy Spirit had called them to “see Jesus.” Naturally, Mzee said, Luo people stayed away. All of this changed in 1999, when Rongo Church elders themselves started a school, Rongo Christian Academy. At first classes were held in the back of the church and only a handful of students attended, but by the second year the community had raised enough money to build a separate cement structure of one classroom for each cohort (although preschool classes were still held in the church), and eventually nearly two hundred students were enrolled in prekindergarten through grade 4. In contrast to the nearby public primary school, which had a per-classroom studentto-teacher ratio of more than fifty-to-one, Rongo Academy claimed half that ratio, with about twenty-five students for every teacher. The studentto-textbook ratio at Rongo Academy was likewise in the students’ favor compared with that of the public primary school; and the building and facilities at the Academy had been recently built and thus were newer than the buildings at the public school. A less attractive element, although typical of differences between private schools and public schools throughout East Africa—was that teachers employed at Rongo Academy were less credentialed and less experienced than public school teachers—and less well paid. Yet what Rongo teachers lacked in training, they said, they more than made up for in moral standing. Their “abilities to lead as Christians” were skills they said they could use openly at Rongo Academy. The teachers’ religious modes of instruction paid off, according to Mzee, in Rongo students’ fine behavior. Not only were Rongo students more orderly and well-disciplined than students at public schools, as evidenced by the polite manner in which they greeted visitors, but the school also reported fewer suspensions and absences than

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the public school did—facts that Mzee and Rongo’s teachers attributed to Rongo’s grounding in Christianity. Finally, with regard to programming, both Rongo Academy and the public school followed the national curriculum, and students at both institutions took national examinations in their seventh year to determine qualifications for matriculation. To matriculate to public schools, however, students needed higher passing scores than for private schools. Fees, not test scores, were the primary determinant of admission to private schools. To counterbalance the stereotype that only wealthy students attended private institutions, the schoolboard at Rongo offered scholarships to students from poorer families. Many of these scholarships came from funds raised from American congregations. When asked what the missionaries contributed to the school, Mzee Ndisi reported, Onge, nothing. Luo, he said, had raised up this church on their own and had recruited the missionaries into their project. Mzee’s own son, for instance, had gone to the United States to raise money directly from churches there, plus some Luo friends working in Nairobi had made generous contributions, Mzee said. Whereas the missionaries reported church development the other way around—as a matter of Americans engaging Luo elders in Americans’ church projects—Mzee Ndisi made it clear that Rongo Church had been established and developed and was run by Luo. He and his sons and other church leaders saw it as a “calling” to establish the church and school. In administering and managing the work of the church, Mzee conceived that he and other Luo in the community now “owned” the church and school. Asked what the purpose of education is, Mzee continued by asserting that the point was to “evangelize the community.” In an extension of evangelical reasoning, he pronounced that the work of the Luo church and school was “to train and send missionaries overseas.” In particular, elders of this Luo church anticipated the day they would “evangelize the U.S.A.” The point of the school, in addition to educating children, was to educate graduates who would lead the development of the local village and the growth of the Christian Church internationally. These Luo believed that the United States in particular was in need of evangelization in that American missionaries currently coming from the United States were “uneducated” in understanding that Luo tradition was not backward or evil but part of “God’s world” and Luo history. Mzee Zechariah Ndisi anticipated that it would take some time before Luo could evangelize the United States, but he was clear that he put the seeds of hope for Luo evangelization in Rongo Christian Academy. Already members of his church were working to start congregations in other villages. In the 1980s, leaders planted new congregations in the nearby village

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of Kanyamkago, and from 1999 to the present they sent evangelists to teach English in Tanzania, including to work with the Zebra Team that was introduced in Chapter One. Although no fieldwork map hangs in Rongo Academy, unlike what seems to be typical at nondenominational mission centers, Rongo Church is supporting something of its own evangelical diaspora. Already students from Rongo have visited U.S. churches, and one of Mzee Ndisi’s own sons is a Bible college student in Louisiana. Today the church and school sit at the crossroads of small snack shops and other kiosks that have developed near the school. Church membership has grown to more than three hundred, and the church supports a salaried Luo pastor and a part-time youth minister—both of whom hold certificates from NBC.

Evangelizing the United States Having in mind Luo elders’ views that schooling is the work of the church (not of the government), that the work of the church is the work of elders (not of American missionaries), and that the work of Luo elders is to plant churches that will expand internationally, I’d like to consider first how Luo in Rongo present Christianity in terms of ownership and belonging, and in the process comment on Geschiere and Nyamnjoh’s observation (2000) that political-economic liberalization leads to the intensification of debates about who belongs where. Second, I comment on how Luo leaders’ sense of open horizons—of the expansion of the church internationally, particularly the evangelization of the United States by Luo—circumscribes Americans as an “other” (another culture, another people) within a model of Christianity that is refracted now through a Luo lens. Third, I examine how American and Luo nondenominational Christians share and pivot on a theme—for it is this commonality, I believe, that makes their differences appear to be similarities. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh (2000) note a fascinating byproduct of democratization at the turn of the twenty-first century: a growth in intensity of debate about who is autochthonous versus who is foreign. Their argument is that political and economic globalization results, paradoxically, in greater localization. In theory, markets know no bounds; they are open to everyone. However, under conditions of competitiveness and privatization, social goods (including, they observe, land, businesses, and commodities, and I would add here, schools) are controlled in terms of “us” and “them” and in terms of who owns and benefits from what. The us-them dimension of localization is typically cast in terms of ethnicity. No less in the wake of the December 2007 Kenyan presidential elections than in elections held after Kenyan independence in 1962, Luo, Kalenjin, and Kikuyu in rural

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regions bordering and near Rongo clashed over who had rights to land and, through land, to leadership (Gettleman and Kyama 2008; ­Wanjohi 2003). The land-leadership connection in western Kenya is enmeshed with residence and land use conventions, including those of ownership that grant rights to descendants living on ancestral lands.6 (This is why Mzee Ndisi’s sons built houses on their father’s land: to mark their continued claim in Rongo even though they lived in Nairobi.) However, compared with political elections and ethnic strife, the clash of claims to ownership and belonging is less overt between Luo and American nondenominational Christians than among Luo and other Kenyan groups. To most people living in and around Rongo, the land on which the nondenominational church and school rest belongs legally and culturally to Luo—and specifically to Mzee Ndisi. However, to all involved (Americans and Luo alike), the work of the church supersedes that of any one person or group and is not limited to, nor specifically identified with, a place. The work of the church belongs to an ephemeral collective (as it were) of believing Christians who are themselves known, as most see it, by “only God himself.” This ephemeral element of these Christian churches—again, heterotopically everywhere yet specifically nowhere all at once—has implications for understanding disagreements over who directs church operations. The maximization of resources and organizational efficiency under conditions of privatization triggers a general obsession, to take Geschiere and ­Nyamnjoh’s point one step further, with rivalry, ownership, and continual expansion. As Geschiere and Nyamnjoh (2000: 425) put it, the flow and enclosure of wealth and capital “promotes the ever greater mobility of people,” on the one hand, and “a tendency towards protectionism,” on the other. Luo leaders’ sense of protectionism—of claiming the church and school as their work—is directly related, I contend, to their claims for control over the assets of the church as a measure of their belonging in the region and of their standing nationally and internationally. To put my point more succinctly: Luo ideas of open horizons and hopes for the evangelization of the United States are refracted through a Luo lens of social reproduction through alliance and patrilineality. Rongo Academy marks Luos’ ongoing claims to this part of western Kenya. As a contemporary social institution, the private school represents a novel way to reproduce generationality in an era of liberalization: through the formal education of children and the geographic expansion of Luo ideas through schooling and evangelization. As anthropologist Parker Shipton notes of Luo in South Nyanza, Luo political organization represents “a classic case of . . . a segmentary lineage society in which kin groups divide and subdivide like branches of a tree; . . . [and] patriliny, bridewealth, and polygyny all reinforce each other” (Shipton 1989: 19). It is thus not far-fetched, I

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contend, to suggest that contemporary church and schooling are also organized and charted through this lens. The church and school effect reproduction and social growth in this part of South Nyanza, and reproduction is locally understood in terms of patrilineality and agnatic corporation. Yet I am mindful of Cohen and Odhiambo’s caution against seeing patrifocality as the sine qua non of Luo life. Cohen and Odhiambo (1989: 13)write of Luo living in western Kenya that “one finds little indication of corporate action of agnatic groups, little evidence that segmentation [is] a prime process of group formation, or that patrilineality [defines] the modes of recruitment” to existing families. Instead, they consider that “alliances of unrelated individuals and alliances marked by affinal [that is, marital] connections” describe Luo forms of social incorporation and reproduction. Both Shipton’s and Cohen and Odhiambo’s points apply to what I discuss. Land and lineage are undeniably central to Mzee Ndisi’s and his sons’ authority. So too are the alliances that these Luo leaders sustain with exogenous American missionaries, and with unrelated parents of Luo schoolchildren. Together, corporate agnatic social action and the incorporation of “others” chart the possibilities of expansion through education and evangelization. Moreover, this particular frame of social expansion—of social alliance and patrilineality—does not fully exclude women leaders, despite what some American missionaries considered to be Luos’ chauvinist practices of bequeathing land and property through men. Women are producers of lineage children and are associated with powers of moralizing and storytelling. Luo women in the church, like men, are in positions of moral authority over parents, parishioners, and schoolchildren. In fact, some Luo evangelists who work with Ugandans (discussed further in the next chapter) regard American missionaries themselves as “sexist” for excluding women from preaching and leading the church. Nonetheless, Luo elders in western Kenya and Luo evangelists working at NBC conceptualize American missionaries’ expansionist work—that of “claiming Africa for Christ”— in terms of Americans’ own reproduction and their exclusion of Africans from ownership. The Luos’ picture of Americans’ schooling is of Americans reproducing ethnocentric models of Africans as backward. Notwithstanding these differences, a common theme of congregations across the country—a point of contact—is that “satanic” forces afflict the world. The job of the church is to identify and discover, and then to keep at bay, these bedeviling agents. This may seem hard to believe in light of the fact that nondenominational Americans and East Africans alike take a strong rationalist approach to their theological work. Theirs is not a church of high-tempered spirits but of organized inquiry and methodical study. However, bureaucratic rationality and spiritual belief are hardly antithetical (a point Weber discusses in myriad ways, including not least in regard

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to the rationalization of the Protestant ethic in the American spirit of capitalism [Weber 1958b]). Anthropology as American missionaries teach it is regarded by Luo evangelists as Western; Luo consider Americans’ mission anthropology to mistakenly frame satanic forces in terms of African belief rather than, as the Luo see it, as a combination of global inequalities and malicious spirit. The secret that the Luo see Americans holding (to return to my theme of transparency and lies), and perhaps not even knowing themselves, is that mission Christianity is not only monotheistic but also ethnocentrically monocultural. Historian E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo (1973) discussed Kenyans’ similar concerns years ago in regard to AIM. Today Luo leaders ask openly, Are Americans in Kenya working to save lives or to create something for their own children? In teaching about Christian witness and culture, are missionaries reproducing a hegemonic view of Christianity that comes from secular Europe? To illustrate contexts in which such questions arise, I present the American outreach director’s description of anthropology, then focus on how Luo students and administrators at NBC reframe this director’s perspective.

Anthropology at NBC En route from NBC’s health clinic in Nairobi to its main campus in the suburbs, NBC’s American outreach director offered several thoughts on mission anthropology. In addition to providing a bibliographic list that included The Gospel: Its Content and Communication—An Anthropological Perspective (Loewen 1979) and “Different Views of Sociocultural Change: Towards an Awareness of Our Own Socioanthropological Presuppositions in Mission and Church Growth Studies” (Paredes 1981)— the director described two courses that formed the backbone of NBC’s anthropology: Spiritual Warfare 101 and Cross-Cultural Communication 320, both taught by American missionaries to a largely western Kenyan student body. Spiritual Warfare, as the syllabus describes, conveys that the “realities of Christian battle” occur in the hearts and minds of ordinary people and in “pre-Christian superstitions.” Evil manifests itself as “the demons of your relatives who died prematurely and are avenging their deaths,” according to a reading on the syllabus (Onyango 2001: 22), and manifests itself as “our sexual drive and need for food,” as another author on the syllabus puts it (Moreau 1997: 67). Such characterizations make perfect sense from the perspectives of these American and Luo churches. Cien and chira—“ancestral cursing” and “wasting as a consequence of being cursed,” respectively—have long been described by and used to describe people living in Nyanza (see, for example, Evans-Pritchard 1950; Ndisi

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1973: 88; Shipton 1989: 25, 52). Parker Shipton (1989: 25) describes jachien (plural jochiende) as “an unhappy spirit or demon that haunts or troubles people.” Evans-Pritchard, writing mid-century, notes that “troublesome ghosts [jochiende] are usually those of grandparents who afflict their grandchildren” and that when a person is killed in war, “the ghost of the dead man is thought to cling to his slayer until it is released by ceremonies” (1950: 86). Indeed, the “bad spirits” about which Luo historian John W. Ndisi (1973) writes in a chapter on religion sounds a lot like the afflicting forces described in nondenominational missionaries’ materials. The Catholic priests of the St. Joseph’s Society translated jochiende as “devil” in the early twentieth century (Evans-Pritchard 1950: 86); and nondenominational missionaries in the late twentieth century translated chira as a “wasting disease” (Bolden 1994), the manifestation of a deeply held cultural belief in the presence of jochiende. Notwithstanding different idioms and different translations, both American and East African nondenominationals consider unseen forces to have real social significance. The points on which they differ, however, concern what these forces signify and what people should do to deal with them. For the missionaries, one way to “uncover” these forces is to study and use anthropology—to see these forces for “what they are,” which for these Americans are “African superstition,” not Luo ancestral spirits. As one anthropology syllabus at NBC reads: African conceptions of sacrifice must be radically reinterpreted. Africans often view sacrifice as human efforts to placate and coerce spiritual beings. However, biblical sacrifice is prescribed by God and is not due to human initiative.

Elsewhere the syllabus states: Culture shapes who we are. It is pervasive and often unexamined. Coming to an understanding of culture is vital for effective missions. First, we need to understand our own culture and worldview. Second, we need to understand our target culture and how we can best communicate the eternal gospel to people different than ­ourselves.

Clearly the model of mission anthropology taught in the United States was imported to Kenya. In translating cien as “superstition” and “false notion,” American missionaries objectify culture and distance themselves from African practices. Indeed, lessons on “the character of culture” and on “cultural validity” precede a lesson on “cultural distance” in Spiritual Warfare, and the lesson on distance is itself divided into nine topics, each of which explains how to measure the cultural distance between the missionary and those who are to be converted. In the Cross-Cultural Communication class, mission work is conceptualized according to the E-scale

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of evangelism, introduced in Chapter Three (Van Rheenen 1996). E-0 evangelism involves preaching to comparable Christians and keeping them in the fold; E-1 evangelism is characterized by nearly complete cultural correspondence between the evangelist and “his target community,” which has not yet declared a faith; in E-2 evangelism the views of the evangelist and the evangelized partially overlap; and in E-3 evangelism there is nearly complete cultural difference, an example of which is, the course syllabus states, “an African evangelist going to China.” This highly rationalized scheme, I suggest, fights spiritual warfare with secular rationalism. Anthropology—here in a highly modified form—again becomes a tool for advancing Christianity. However, whereas historicism lies at the root of anthropology (early anthropologists saw Europe’s past in other people’s present), a kind of biblicism here comes into view, by which I mean that the Bible serves as a standard measure of cultural evolution. American missionaries stand toward the finished end; East Africans are in process. Luo church members find this model offensive, not least because it portrays African culture (“pervaded by ancestors, gods, ghosts, and spirits”) as more distant from the Bible than Western culture is, and American culture as “naturalistic” and “linear,” the way science is described in school textbooks and curricula—as ruled by the “laws of nature, studied by experimentation, and understood by scientific analysis.”7 (It is no wonder, perhaps, that religious studies professor John Mbiti in the 1950s responded to an American church’s questionnaire by writing, “I beg to inform you, some of the questions you ask are relevant only to the American educational set up!”8) In outlining the course’s argument, the syllabus asks its own obvious question: Because language and cultural distances exist, why not bypass missionaries and have nationals do all the work? To answer this question, India and the Western church are presented—as though India, in characteristic historicist form, were the intermediary of Africa and Western Europe: “Because abuse of the system in India has led to people building little empires which support family and friends” and because “the Western church needs to continue sending both people and funds or the mission drive will die.” 9 Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and other sociologists through the early twentieth century generally regarded India as more developed than Africa but less so than Western Europe. As evidence for this, they pointed to the complexity of religious symbolism in India and to the caste system as an expression of social order, although they regarded these aspects of Indian cultural life as less rationally organized than in European culture. Since the time of Durkheim and Weber, the paradigms of social theory have shifted from using Europe as a standard for understanding the historical and political processes that give rise to a disparate world landscape. Nonetheless, social theory of the early twentieth century informed colonial-era governments,

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and colonists looked to India as a “more advanced” model of culture and government than Africa. (In a sense the Raj was the master template for imperialism, although in the end it was not able to be followed.) In a similar vein, and drawing on a similar logic of social evolution, American nondenominational missionaries figured India to be the test case for evangelism. If India fails, then certainly Africa will fail because of its practice of nepotism and corruption, the missionaries’ argument went. One missionary in Nyanza suggested that “the Devil is at work in Luoland in bringing jealousies, divisions, in splintering, and all together preventing a united body of people.”10 He offered this comment as an explanation of why the mission’s work was not yet done. In response to such descriptions of Africa as “half-developed,” a Luo Bible college administrator said in an interview, “Oh come on! When you hear American church leaders speak like that, it hurts. It does not create good relationships between us and our missionaries.” Noteworthy again is that the Luo claim American missionaries as theirs, not vice versa. Whereas American missionaries speak as though “they” are “missionizing East Africans,” the Luo frame church work the other way—in terms of owning the mission project themselves. This administrator’s point is not to rule or govern the missionaries but to clarify the purpose of evangelization. He agreed that Satanic forces do indeed pervade the everyday. These forces are not necessarily ghostly vengeance or lineal splintering—although he did not entirely discount them, because they too were aspects of Luo life in Nairobi and Nyanza—but ignorance, fear, and poverty are the greater evils of the present day, he maintained. It was mistrust and inequality, he said, that fostered dependency and kept Kenyans underdeveloped. “Satan dominates some Christian people,” he stated to an audience at a church conference he attended in central Texas. “How can we work together to overcome this spiritual warfare? Why can’t we work together to train our members and leaders in the Bible?” He viewed this warfare not as battling the malevolence of traditional culture, as missionaries saw it, but as having to do with conquering the fact that “many missionaries do not accept that they can learn from Africans. They think we are backwards in one way or another compared to Americans, educationally. There is cultural baggage that missionaries have; some come here when they are, I’m sorry to say, still young and they don’t have a lot of experience. . . . Others come and stay as though they are trying to keep the profession going for their children.”11 As the American missionaries did, this leader envisioned education as a means for overcoming spiritual affliction. “Education and a close reading of the Old Testament in cultural and historical context,” he said, were the best way to “plant” and “grow” Christianity. Reading the Old Testament was important because, he agreed, this part of the Bible would speak

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to and attract Muslims to Christianity. However, whereas American missionaries saw education as never enough to justify leaving the church in ­Africans’ hands, this Luo leader, like Mzee Ndisi in Rongo, saw education as having already created success. As the Luo saw it, to Americans, the education of Luo was not enough, because educated Luo were not westernized, at least not in the way or to the degree that missionaries understood westernization: as an absence of animistic spiritual belief, of polygyny, and of “cyclical” time. Again, Americans framed African development in terms of child development and immaturity. As Americans saw it, the Luos’ schooling was in the formative phase; educated Africans “still believed” in cien and chira, and schooled Luo were sympathetic to polygyny. “But many of our own fathers have second wives; my own mother is one of three,” protested one daughter-in-law of a church elder in Rongo. “Would missionaries want us to forsake our own families?” This daughter-in-law and her husbands’ colleagues took at face value the NBC college motto: “Africans claiming Africa for Christ,” as stated on college publications (Shewmaker 2001). A continent is claimed for Christ, and Africans in the process become Christians. She and others remarked that Luo and Americans held different views of evangelism. Luo wanted to pass Christianity across cultures, Americans wanted to pass it down. The missionaries’ model of passing health and education down reflects their E-3 conception of evangelism: American and African cultures are disjunct, and the former is more advanced. This is the model that American missionaries use, and it is the one that Luo evangelists do not like. By contrast, evangelizing through education and passing Christianity on to people who have not yet, as it were, declared Christ as Lord but who have a sense of common culture (as in Rongo) evangelizes in an E-0 fashion, in which cultural models are conjunct. E-0 evangelism—which is perhaps exemplary of “Africans claiming Africa for Christ” undiluted, unrated, uncensored, and unmediated (by Americans)—seems to be exactly what these American missionaries (at least in theory) want, and what Luo evangelists and educators do. According to this model, “Christ is the only leader,” and missionaries bear witness to this and serve. “Africans claiming Africa for Christ,” however, threatens Americans’ overseas role. Charges from American missionaries that South Asians in India (for example) are “building up little empires among their friends and family,” as well as the excuse that “education is never enough,” become ways in which these Americans continue to legitimize their presence, their lifestyle, and their identity as foreign mission­aries.12 In short, culture becomes a means for reproducing these missionaries’ conceptions of American superiority. In arguing that Americans “keep the profession going for their children,” Luo leaders frame American predominance in terms of generational

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lineality, that is, in terms that are similar to Luo concepts of descent and patriliny. More than this, however, is that these Luo leaders see the need to fool people as not particular to African culture; nor do they see ignorance and deception as part of “Satan’s work,” independent from what people do anywhere. The question for these Luo leaders is whether these Americans see and articulate this ambiguity, or whether they always interpret “lies” as “Satan’s work.” The Luo Bible college administrator speaking to his audience in Texas suggested that people by nature are acquisitive and self-interested; Americans no less than, let us say, “imperialist Indians” protect and conserve their resources. However, dishonesty—or better, duplicity—is admitted in different ways. Thus, in a sense this Luo speaker was more aware than his teachers were at recognizing that shared human tendencies have different, though no better or worse, cultural and material manifestations. To the extent that these missionaries were to have “seen the light,” according to the Luo they were surprisingly blind to discussing and teaching about politics and schooling. Missionaries were astonishingly unaware, Luo said, of the historical and cultural effects of education (for advancing Christianity, colonialism, and commerce, as the three Cs of European expansion are generally known), and of the way schooling offers new concepts and strategies for thinking about belonging and legitimacy, including who claims Africa for what. This argument is made even more pointedly by East African evangelists in the next chapter, where Africans with MBAs and other professional degrees question the transparency and knowledge base of some of their collaborating Americans. For now it is important to note that some East African leaders at NBC saw these missionaries as an extension of America’s foreign policy. They shared the missionaries’ notion of Christian love through evangelization and aid. However, they were wary of the strings attached to church ownership and independence.

Summary What each of the various players and vignettes in this chapter—from congregations to Rongo Christian Academy to NBC—share is a commitment to education as a means for combating evil and delivering the spiritpossessed. Like the secular banishing of disease and ignorance, but with emphasis on divine rather than human intervention, churchgoers in all settings of this group recognize knowledge as the power to liberate people from poverty. The stories of Americans and Luo alike collectively illustrate that education and religion are many things. In Nairobi and western Kenya, Luo regard education as a prerequisite for claiming Africa for Christ. Both

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Luo and Americans see schooling as necessary for knowing how to control and run the church. For Luo, being educated means connecting local and international versions of cultural history. For American missionaries it means knowing how far or near individuals and groups are to the perfection of biblical life. What both groups share is the idea that religious belief is inseparable from the public domain. Both conceive that “God’s spiritual reign” is publicly pervasive at all times. Americans see God’s work as evident in the equivalences that pattern social life; Luo see it as indicated through moments of Americans’ unconditional generosity and through the positive economic outcomes of schooling and development—outcomes that Luo churchgoers regard in themselves as blessings and gifts from God. The fact that both groups regard religion as always publicly salient reminds me of the need to qualify an argument made by Talal Asad. In Chapter Three I discussed Asad’s work in relation to missiologists’ interpretivist approach to anthropology. Here I draw on Asad’s thinking to inform my own point about the relation of religion to secular governance. In an essay titled “Secularism, Nation-State, Religion,” Asad (2003) refuted the “deprivatization of religion” argument, which holds that religion has a role to play in contemporary public life. Associated with the work of sociologist José Casanova (1994), the deprivatization of religion argument describes religion as inherently public, not private, and as connected historically to the formation of the secular-modern nation-state. Asad declared that Casanova’s argument is neither specifically right nor wrong. It is partly right, Asad said, in recognizing that some expressions of religious belief are historically tied to secular government (the history of establishment churches gives ample evidence of this). It is wrong, however, in failing to recognize that other forms of religious expression have no historical or cultural connection to the nation-state. Asad discerned that it is precisely, and only, those religions that espouse faith in the power of rational debate and belief in the liberalist “sifting and winnowing” of ideas that move successfully into modern public life. His argument implies that ecumenical and moderate forms, not certain kinds of spiritisms and orthodoxies, go public. Here, however, through examining the work of these missionaries and East African believers, we can sharpen Asad’s point. We can see that spiritism and orthodoxies also sometimes inform collective life. The secularization of knowledge—that is, the explicit recognition and use of forms of knowledge liable to human error—exhibits, as does religious belief of any kind, an ingrained skepticism of the world and of self and other. Ecumenical Christianities, no less than nondenominational forms, posit the limits of human perception and put some degree of faith in human reasoning. The difference between ecumenical and nondenominational churchgoers,

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however, is that nondenominationals recognize more openly and publicly the limits of human knowledge and the limits of empirical investigations. American missionaries, as we have seen, explain the unknown in terms of hidden forces; and Luo churchgoers and local leaders explain Americans’ limitations in terms of human ignorance and irrationalities. Thus, through these transnational Christians’ views, we can see other forms of religiosity besides ecumenical-liberalist forms animating public life. In these missionaries’ highly rationalist worldview, spiritist forms animate their public work, whereas logical forms of human reasoning invigorate East Africans’ spiritism. Asad’s position that secularism supports some religious views (and the other way around, that some religious views support some kinds of secularism) implies that secularism should not be seen as the antithesis of religion. Rather, secularism should be viewed as the reorganization of religion with respect to other concepts, notions, and institutions. The discreteness of religion and education—or of economics and law, and so on—is called into question by this position, as are the terms of debate about education. For if education is a matter of learning to embody a certain kind of knowledge and sociomorality, then surely contests over religion and education are not about whether but about how religion and education are connected. They are about how to engage, what to embody, what to define, and of course what to teach as orthodox and given—and what, in some cases, to identify as the object of spiritual warfare. I take up this issue from another angle in the next chapter, on technical training and private schooling in Uganda.

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If, as we have seen in the previous chapter, nonliberalist forms of spiritism and orthodoxy inform collective public life, the question arises: How do these forms move into the realm of education and social knowledge? How do they inform the moral logic of governing structures at the turn of the twenty-first century? The church’s faith-based public work in Uganda partly illustrates an answer to these questions.

An Incident “Chicken parts, locks of hair, and small bottles of medicine are what we found upon arriving at this nondenominational church early one morning. This may seem strange to Americans, but anyone living in Uganda immediately knows that the building and the church have been cursed. Someone doesn’t like the fact that the church is setting up their meeting place on Main Street.” So opens a letter from American missionaries to sponsoring church members in the United States. The letter explains that a series of near-fatal accidents that occurred during the building’s construction prompted Ugandan townspeople to consider that the church was asking for a human sacrifice. “You see, when you begin a building project in Uganda it is customary to make a sacrifice of some kind to protect yourself from evil spirits,” wrote the American missionaries. “Since we had not made that kind of sacrifice, some people said the building would make a sacrifice for itself.” The truth of the matter, however, the letter continued, was that “Jesus is our building’s sacrifice.” The church did not need to make any concessions to evil; Jesus had done it years ago.1 Ugandan leaders in the church agreed with the missionaries that Jesus’ death was a holy sacrifice. They also agreed that some people in the town did not like the church’s work, but they objected that the missionaries made too big a deal of the series of accidents. Missionaries, they said, fetishized African witchcraft (uchawi) to the point of irrationality. In contrast, East Africans considered the missionaries themselves to be unreasonable in call-

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ing witchcraft “evil.” From the Ugandan church leaders’ point of view, the bottles of medicine and other sortilege reflected the discontent of a socially disenfranchised person. Like the Luo administrator who spoke about Satan in Chapter Five, the Ugandan leaders considered witchcraft to be at once sociological and psychological: a symptom of macropolitical-economic effects as well as of everyday injustices. Ugandans, like Kenyans, spoke of this incident in explanatory terms, not as backwardness or superstition. The Ugandan administrator near whose office floor the objects had been strewn determined that one of the construction workers had done the deed. “People don’t want me here,” he concluded and contemplated filing his resignation. However, his Ugandan coworkers persuaded him otherwise— at least for the time being. Drawn to his office by the noise of surprise, a head Ugandan elder told those who had gathered not to be afraid. He calmly cleaned up the objects and threw them in the trash. “Look at me!” he laughed reassuringly. “If after some time you do not see me die [from the presumed powers of these medicines], be comfortable again!” Becoming serious, for he did not really believe that death flowed directly from these artifacts (though he did consider that the perpetrator’s methods could intensify), he recalled that some American missionaries had once accused him of trafficking in witchcraft. “I grew up in a community where witchcraft is a big thing to people,” he said. “People treat witchcraft as real. So I believe that whoever put these bottles here must think these things really work.” He recognized that the missionaries mistook his own understanding for foolishness and lack of faith, but he felt that it was the missionaries who were wrong in not recognizing witchcraft as a sign of hurt and need.2

Marginality, Mutuality, and Ambiguity I take this vignette as an evocative place of departure for continuing my discussion of different understandings of education and Christianity, and to develop more fully an analysis of the reorganization of religion and secularism with respect to public life. My point here as in previous chapters is to show how the religious values and educational practices of East Africans are conceptually linked to those of Americans in this transnational church, and to illustrate how both groups interrupt the totalizing identity of the other. In addressing this issue I find it useful to borrow from preceding chapters a trio of concepts that I identify here as marginality, mutuality, and ambiguity. Marginality is the manner in which churchgoers cultivate the sense that their work is on the fringes; it helps us understand how the church transcends without replacing key public, moral values, including by representing their work, as we shall see, as rational

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and as valuing equality. Mutuality is the way East Africans and Americans define themselves in relation to one another, including along the lines of gender, generation, and cultural identity. Ambiguity is the mode by which churchgoers go about evangelizing and proselytizing to non-Christians. Christian witness is intentionally polysemic; it is meant to convey meaning in more than one way. Analytically, marginality, mutuality, and ambiguity overlap. They help us think about how religion and education coincide and combine to make something bigger: a utopian space that is endowed by churchgoers with the potential to usher in (or at least better prepare for) the end of time. Ethnographically, these concepts help to connect the minutiae of everyday life—the witchcraft medicines left on doorsteps, for instance—with the force of global norms that appear, in the institutional realms of church and school, to exhibit high degrees of standardization. In other words, these concepts help us square cultural particularity with what appears transregionally. My intent in using these concepts to examine the partially overlapping spaces of religion and education is to move this analysis beyond facile dichotomies of sacred/secular, center/periphery, global/local, North/South, American/African, and saved/unsaved. Whereas such dichotomies assume asymmetrical relations of power between two locations or states (states of being and of territory, which are linked),3 my analysis highlights the interlocking utopian spaces of religion and education that simultaneously create, dissolve, and blend differences. These utopian spaces produce values that communities find necessary for reproducing and transforming themselves. Because the contours of international relations and the place of religion in public life are at stake, it is worth examining how transnational groups carved out new civic arenas at the turn of the twenty-first century. In nondenominational church histories, the era is portrayed as one of opportunity: post–Cold War shifts in international alliances gave mission work greater urgency (Broom 2001: 24; Cole 2002; Van Rheenen 1996; Yelton and McVey 2001). This sense of urgency is echoed in public policy accounts in which government partnerships with religious groups were considered “safety nets” for poor communities (Cnaan and Yancey 2000; Marshall and Keough 2005; Streeter 2001); and in comparative studies where the “new world order” was seen to facilitate the formation and implementation of global policies, including Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals (Casanova 1994; J. Meyer 2004; Ramirez 2003).4 Instead of following or simply critiquing any of these narratives, I offer a more qualified and ethnographic image of transnationalism in recent years—an image that, as previous chapters have shown, attends to the interactions of social actors and explores how their concurrent self-productions are linked through the interlocking zones of religion and education.

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In looking at the religion-education nexus via this church’s work in Uganda, I return to the questions about governmentality with which this book began. That is, I discern the political-economic and spiritual rationalities that inform the church’s activities in education. What are the implications of this religious group’s work for the ongoing construction of an educated polity? How does the work of this transnational church call into question nation-state-centric theories of knowledge and power? In addressing these questions, I find it useful to remember that the work of nondenominational groups is spatially and temporally dispersed. The administrative structure of these churches is decentered and borderless. In seeing themselves as composed of people from many different countries, churchgoers use this internationalism to reintegrate themselves into national life. For not only do all participants in this church come together through a shared though varied conception of Christianity, they also undergo a transformation—a marginality in their respective home communities that, paradoxically though not unpredictably, they then use to claim the need for representation and mainstream integration. In the United States, members claim exclusion on the basis of an antireligious strand of secularism and then keep alive claims of exclusion and bias even after receiving accommodations (Apple 2006). In Uganda, as we shall see, members of this transnational church stand outside the popular waves of Pentecostalism that have swept over East Africa in recent years (this was also the case in Kenya). They spurn Pentecostals’ emotive ways, which nondenominationals consider to be fleshy and fake, and instead believe that religion is expressed rationally, through ordinary activities and acts of faith. In both the United States and East Africa, women and men in these churches complement one another in what is considered to be a natural division of labor, with women in positions of caregiving and nurturing, and men as leaders in church and business. With regard to gender, relations of mutuality underpin churchgoers’ identities; women and men are seen as holding mutually compatible differences at the core of the Christian family. Also, the gendered landscape differs among and between East Africans and Americans. Generational tensions divide Americans in this church. (One year American student missionaries, mostly young women, walked out of their summer work, claiming that women, like men, should be able to pray and preach and lead congregations.) Differences of opinion about the merits of schooling also differentiate Americans and East Africans. Americans take a more socially conservative view, seeing schooling as beneficial largely for increasing the quality of parenting. In contrast to what the missionaries consider to be their entrenched traditions, East Africans are more progressive in seeing schooling as augmenting people’s (men’s and women’s) social standing. Indeed, it is not unusual for women in this part of East Africa to

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serve as head advisors within religious communities, even though it is not officially permitted in this church.5 Moreover, the concept of mutuality applies to relations of identity between Americans and East Africans. Within the church, Americans and East Africans are seen to hold different yet complementary positions: Americans tend to work as external consultants and advisors to East Africans, and the latter serve as students and recipients of aid and expertise. Some Americans see themselves as “closer witnesses of Christ” on the scheme of E0 to E4 evangelism (described in Chapter Three). Some Ugandans see themselves as “more educated” than Americans in their abilities to link Scripture to the tensions of personal life and the legacies of colonial history. Notwithstanding these differences, the moral order of this church— whether pedagogical, socioeconomic, or spiritual—advances categories and ideas about groupness and identity that both reinforce and disavow incommensurable differences between groups and among individuals. That is to say, the interlocking spaces of religion and education both structure and transcend the internalization of societal norms, reinforce and challenge the politics of religion, and economically develop and politically marginalize Africans from Americans, precisely because spiritual encounters among Americans, Africans, Christians, and non-Christians anticipate and figure a politics of difference and representation.6 Although religion and education are meant to ameliorate tensions, they also reproduce them. Given different expressions of marginality and mutuality, the institutionally diffused efforts of this church—again, its heterotopic qualities—disperse the effects of members’ work onto other-than church domains. This dispersion introduces an element of ambiguity into members’ work—an element that helps to minimize marginality by allowing religious orientation to spill over into historically secular domains. In Uganda the ambiguous effects of Christian witness are partly visible, we shall see, in the fields of secondary schooling, technical training, and health care sponsored by the church. In Kenya, the church’s work manifests itself in psychological counseling and vocational training offered to workers in private and governmental settings. In Tanzania it appears in the form of teaching English to public primary school students and to adults at the end of the workday. In the United States, in addition to working in mainstream life (although as separate from what they see as the areligious, secular norm), members of these nondenominational churches organize and fund international world evangelism and “parachurch organizations” such as Helping Hands Foreign Missions and the International Health Care Foundation (formerly known as African Christian Hospitals). Of course the interlocking of social service and spirituality is hardly unique to this particular religious group or church. What is unique is,

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as I have stressed in this book, is the novelty of their presence in what heretofore they had typically eschewed as the “secular, governmental” landscape. In this final ethnographic chapter, I examine how this particular church frames its public outreach work as a social service to which every resident has a right, which is to say church members regard education and technical training morally, as everyone’s entitlement. I observe how this educational right is framed in a way that mutually constitutes the social boundaries of and between Americans and Ugandans, and as well between Muslims and Christians. First I describe a Sunday service held at one of the sixtyplus restorationist congregations in the Eastern Region: the church where the witchcraft event referred to earlier took place.7 I focus on a Bible study session, a confessional, a sermon, and a baptism. I show how leaders’ literalist but also figurative speech frames the meaning of Christian witness in shared but also competing ways. To help explain how religion plays out unevenly in a multifaceted social context, I examine a computer training center and a private Christian academy, both of which aim to educate “God-fearing citizens for tomorrow.” These settings illuminate how the church advances its mission in secular contexts through American connections, and gives insight into how spiritual forms of knowledge arise from and further develop religious communities that span nation-states. The greater theoretical import of this chapter is the argument that the shaping of these new spiritual-pedagogic mutualities has bearing on conventional understandings of the place of education within the modern nation-state. Weber (1958a) and Durkheim (1938) classically argued, and Pierre Bourdieu (2005) much later elaborated, that nation-states use schooling to control and organize the routines of citizens and to inculcate a sense of collective investment in tomorrow. This formulation holds that nationstates are naturally positioned to reproduce the future. However, states’ control of education has changed in recent years. Their functions have been highly influenced and transformed by the positions and projects of other agents in the field. I contend that through the work of this transnational church we can see a broadening of groups responsible for education. The task of educating has been divvied up and adopted by nonstate organizations, the result of which is that for churchgoers of this group in Uganda, “tomorrow’s nation” is “tomorrow’s church.”

Sunday Events in Eastern Uganda The administrator who had been “bewitched” in the earlier vignette about the bottles of medicine was a highly educated and comparatively well-paid Ugandan administrator.8 According to his colleague, Alysia,

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whom I sat next to in church one April Sunday, he was no longer a member of the congregation; he had eventually come to believe that his prospects for professional advancement in the church were limited and he had left. Alysia had taken over part of his work and was so far, she said, in the congregants’ favor. She kindly took me under her wing that Sunday and guided me through the service. The morning began with a Bible study session led by an American from California who had been living in Uganda for nearly fifteen years. When I arrived, everyone in the group was bent over their Bibles, focusing on a worksheet that asked several fill-in-the-blank questions. The worksheet identified “steps” to follow “to experience God’s love” and “to feel good about ourselves.” The American missionary prompted these adults to fill in the blanks by formulating answers to the question, “How do you increase the capacity to love?” Three of the seven sentences offered were, “Draw ____ to God,” “Feel His ____ within us,” and “Do more than we _____ we can.” The answers were, respectively, “nearer,” “presence,” and “think.” The missionary asked the students to turn in their Bibles to Corinthians 2, chapter 4, verses 16–19, and read it to them: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” He rephrased the passage to make the point that what seems real is often not. In calling into question faith in the everyday, he used a style of teaching similar to the style used at Pathway Church in Texas, which we read about in Chapter Two, in which the speaker (an American who had recently returned from Uganda) downplayed the significance of the here and now and spoke of the future as inevitable. Like the speaker at Pathway, this American missionary straightforwardly expressed Christian truths grounded in the Bible. In the study group and in his sermon, which he soon delivered, the missionary reinforced an image of community that shaped Americans and East Africans as paradoxically separate but together. The ambiguity of this mutuality provided ground for effecting change. When the church bells rang, the study group ended with a prayer offered by one of the Ugandan participants, himself an evangelist from a rural church. For a few minutes, the large, open-air sanctuary was abuzz with conversation and activity. Chairs were rearranged and people greeted one another as they settled into seats. The baptismal font—the size of a bathtub and sunk into the cement floor of the sanctuary—was filled partway with water. The service opened with an a cappella song led by a Ugandan elder, who then welcomed everyone—about a hundred people in a church

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that could have comfortably held twice as many. A second Ugandan leader read several announcements having generally to do with the hours of service and with the amount of money brought in through offerings and pledges. A third Ugandan read two Bible passages: Proverbs 23:1–5 and 1 John 3:7. The first reading advised against craving others’ luxuries. The second admonished people to avoid sin.9 In a stylistic register that again indicated that both Ugandans and Americans valued literalist preaching, this last Ugandan commented directly that “these words are true” and that “we must abide by them faithfully.” Without much ado the service turned to what this third leader announced would be the “the confessions of two sinners.” The American missionary’s son took the microphone from the Ugandan minister and called on “sinners to confess.” He introduced himself as a “student of Bible” studying at a nondenominational university in Los Angeles. Compared to the mild voice of the Ugandan reader, his words filled the room and were carried toward the streets. Having already selected persons in advance (through a process that involved American and Ugandan leaders identifying people “in need of prayer”), the American missionary motioned to a Ugandan man in the center who introduced himself as a day laborer skilled in bricklaying and carpentry. The man stood in front of the congregation and admitted to stealing cars off the streets of Kampala. He did not specify the details of what he had done or identify others who were involved, but he admitted that his behavior had been wrong and not befitting of a Christian. In response, the missionary’s son underscored the man’s inappropriateness; he reminded the worker of the need to serve always as a “witness of Christ.” Identifying 2 Corinthians 5:20, he recited, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” He implored the man to “be Christ-like” at all times and to serve as a model for others. Without flourish, and again in the direct speech style that characterizes instructional preaching in this church, the missionary’s son portrayed church members as different from “ordinary folk,” as “sheep in God’s chosen flock.” Like his father, who had led the Bible study group, he suggested that churchgoers needed to stand apart and not be drawn toward the temptations of popular culture or luxuries. To become too centered in the attractions of the world, he said, was to be “pulled away from Christ.” The man who had confessed sat down next to his wife and “a second sinner” took the floor—a Ugandan woman who confessed she had cheated countless customers out of change at the food kiosk she owned. The missionary pointed out that many of her customers were sitting in the congregation and that she had stolen not only from them but from their “hungry families.” He called her actions “selfish and sinful” and noted that like the first sinner she had broken one of the Ten Commandments. His chastising

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words carried out onto the city’s street via his amplified voice. It was clear from his emotion that he regarded the behavior of both persons egregious. He asked “God to forgive them” but noted that their lack of witness deeply “breached God’s covenant.” It was up to both of them, he advised, to fix the problem, and “up to God to decide your fate.” Notwithstanding the degree and extent to which these church confessions are like modern witch-finding movements (and paradoxically so given the missionaries’ rejection of witchcraft) in their calling out, accusing, and driving persons to confess,10 they portrayed sinners as “being away from God” or “outside of Christ”—as marginal to “God’s mission.” They transposed personal mistakes onto a sociomoral map that differentiated sinners from the saved; and they used the assertive words of the leader to declare the guilt and failings of individuals. This declarative form of spiritual speech that is common in the evangelical tradition of which this transnational church is a part (Crapanzano 2000; Soskice 1985) validated the leader’s points through assertions and with reference to an authoritative text: the Bible. The lesson provided key prescriptive statements of how churchgoers should behave. In presenting the Bible, the speaker declared the world as being a particular way, and in so declaring he shaped the world according to such an image. This shaping of reality through words and witness carried the effect, I suggest, of performing belief and morality through assertion (Parkin 1984). Directly correlating meaning and words gave spiritual rationality a degree of realism, and in turn realism imbued spiritual expression with a logic of practical reasoning. This form of literalism differed from ecumenical churches’ liberal-interpretive frames, and contrasted in tone and tenor with Pentecostals’ speaking in tongues and mysticism. Compared with both, it was more direct. Following another a cappella song, the missionary’s son again stood to give the Sunday message. He chose as his inspiration Acts 16, about Paul and Silas’s own missionary journey. Their imprisonment by Roman authorities, he said, was no deterrent to Paul or Silas, who continued to missionize while in prison and redoubled their efforts upon release. The missionary’s son stressed the need for all Christians worldwide to persevere despite exclusion. His words were directed to members sitting before him but they again spilled out onto the street. An image on which he dwelled was one we have already seen (in Chapter Two): that of tentmaking and of the church as both itinerant and everywhere all at once. The figurative meaning of the tent complemented the speaker’s literalist rhetoric; it extended and ornamented his otherwise unvarnished speech in a fashion that is again typical of this kind of Christian evangelism (Soskice 1985). Citing Acts 18:3, the missionary’s son noted that Paul himself had been a tentmaker and traveler, and he used the image of a tent to compare Uganda and the United

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States.11 “In America,” he said, “we take a tent on a trip, we use it to go camping, while here in Uganda a tent is widely regarded as a makeshift house for nomads. In either case, however, a tent is like our body, everywhere. Whether in Uganda or in America, we live in a tent—our house, our body—built by God.” Citing 2 Corinthians 5:1, which follows from 2 Corinthians 4:18, which had been recited during Bible study, he extended his point to include the promise that today’s body will live in heaven: “Now, we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.” He implored his listeners to use their bodies “as a tent” to carry and convey God’s word. In discussing the tent, this missionary son asserted a spiritual reality at the heart of this church in all its locations. He tied this theme to a common text, a common cultural, common Christian ground. His linguistic mode of shaping the world extended to his description of the future: “If we find inside us a desire that nothing can satisfy, then we have no other choice but to believe that we are made for another world,” the missionary continued. This hopeful, highly desirous vision that “life is temporary, it is nothing compared to eternity” fed into his further assertion that “what the mind attends to, it believes; and what the mind believes, the body will do”—again a connection of faith to witness, and the mobilizaton of belief and faith into social action. The much-anticipated future of “heaven on Earth” was a glorious process of traveling “to God’s home,” he said. Not unlike the message of the speaker at Pathway Church who drew connections between returning from his trip to Uganda and journeying “to the Holy Kingdom” (see Chapter Two), this missionary envisioned that the future was a matter of realizing what “God has already planned.” In his use of the metaphor, thought and action went together; what a person said was what he or she became: “Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind. Words keep you from seeing reality. But words as well are productive stimulants; they can inspire you to become more like Christ.” Pointing emphatically to the Bible, he declared, “This book requires great mental discipline. Reading it is no trivial matter; if you want to know God you must know the Bible.” The missionary closed with two verses—James 4:8, “Come near to God and he will come near to you; wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded”; and James 4:14: “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” The spirituality of his words had nothing to do here with politics or international relations. It spoke a truth claim that was at the core of belief in this highly rationalist—and through rationality, highly spiritualist—transnational church. He briefly

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summarized points about controlling actions through deliberately chosen words and thought, and then stood aside to make room for the next event: the baptism of a new Ugandan member. While the congregation sang several hymn verses, the soon-to-be baptized man was escorted down the hall to an interior office, from which he soon emerged barefoot and wearing different clothes. A green cotton shirt and trousers, not unlike those worn by medical surgeons, replaced his T-shirt and khaki pants. To clapping and singing he was returned to the sanctuary and escorted to the pool of water. A Ugandan leader prayed and asked the congregation to welcome the man, who was immersed bodily and then reemerged, dripping from head to toe. Again, the sounds of the church clearly carried onto Main Street, where the voice of the American missionary (the father this time) declared the value and sanctity of adult baptism. “It is the knowing acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior that determines our future. Only baptized Christians will be rewarded and saved; all others will be condemned.” The service concluded with an offering collection and the singing of two more songs. Members dispersed to the back of the sanctuary, where a women’s group was serving tea and snacks.

Christian Witness, Colonialism, and Pedagogy: Ugandan Churchgoers’ Views I have described this service at length to illustrate some of the expressive visions of spiritual life that churchgoers in this setting share. Irrespective of the (often structured) asymmetrical relations of leadership between the Americans and the Ugandans, the spiritual encounters of Americans and East Africans are American led but not American determined. Engagement triggers a point of commonality that plays out in an ambiguous state of “no return” such that participants undergo an alteration, an experience of marginality from the everyday and reentry in a new form. Specifically within this church, religious experience, itself pedagogical, facilitates and encourages a return to ordinary life through Christian witness. Believers serve as a “witness of Christ” who can testify to the unseen but known spiritual forces that direct and guide the world. For Americans, witness is an embodied form of self-expression that articulates religious belief through behavior and provides a rationale for social action. In the East Africans’ sense, witness is more on the order of a translation of the literal meaning of the Bible into development programs, social work, and economic projects; witness is not teaching or preaching alone (nor is it for Americans) but rather a matter of putting into productive play some of the insights and faith—and especially the resources—that the church

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lays claim to and controls. These measures of development and schooling are themselves blessings and gifts from God. East Africans regard development and schooling as God’s force made manifest. In the sense of both Americans and East Africans, witness differs from older, puritanical ideas of “good works” and “civilizing mission.” In older formulations, salvation and grace were demonstrated through the deeds or projects that people had done (Weber 1958b). In the churchgoers’ shared space in this transnational church, witness unfolds in the present tense and is future-oriented, looking toward a telos of heaven and of perfect justice, and in the meantime toward a better, more “God-fearing” life on Earth. The question that this focus on witness begs, however, is on what assumptions did utopian ideals of religion and education rest? More specifically, how did Americans and Ugandans in this church variously understand the purposes of, among other things, social work and preaching? As I have already suggested in Chapters Three and Four, East African participants in this church sometimes desired a more historically grounded and context-related biblical reading, including broader interpretations of polygyny, time, and community. In Uganda, this call for expanded vision included broadening Americans’ views of witchcraft. Before I return to a discussion of witchcraft, allow me to say more about Ugandan church­ goers’ views of these missionaries’ work. Some Ugandans in this church described the American missionaries’ work in no uncertain terms as a form of colonialism. Indeed, Ugandan churchgoers, no less than the Kenyan evangelists (who worked in Tanzania and also made occasional trips to this location in Uganda), made explicit connections among religion, colonialism, and politics. Several saw the missionaries’ course of action as extending Americans’ economic control over East Africans. Americans use their money to divide and rule. Sometimes they say that where there is American money there should be American leadership. But if funding came directly to Ugandans, we could pay Ugandan evangelists a living wage, instead of paying missionaries the equivalent of $75,000 U.S. dollars annually, which is what they get, apparently.12

Funding, this evangelist suggested, operated in a polarizing way. It “turned the Americans into masters and the Ugandans into slaves.” Like other evangelists, he preferred that the Americans would permit Ugandans to run and manage the church’s projects: its school, health clinic, and Internet café. He described the problem of American management as one “of fostering dependency” and as the result of missionaries’ shortsightedness and greed, although like other evangelists he was unsure as to whether the Americans’ actions were deliberate or unintentional. As he put it, “Missionaries don’t

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want church projects to develop fast. They want their own children to come back, and they want the African church to grow at a very slow rate.” Putting it another way, this evangelist’s close Ugandan colleague argued that “American missionaries are not transparent. This is especially true of the young men who come. They are just making up their life”—meaning they are not thinking clearly or planning rationally but are inventing a strategy as they go. He continued, “If things grow slowly”—which is to say, if the work of the church progresses poorly—“missionaries will have an excuse to keep returning. As it is, new cohorts of missionaries reinvent the wheel instead of starting where their parents left off.” This generational imagery of father and son—similar to that expressed by the Luo in Kenya— reveals cultural ideas about patrilineality. Whereas the Americans sometimes accused the East Africans of nepotism and of employing family members in the church, the East Africans accused the Americans of doing as much themselves in passing authority from fathers to sons. The difference was that in East African contexts there was a normative, and acceptable, channel for doing so, provided that the son moved beyond his father’s work. In drawing out these points of difference I do not mean to suggest that there existed any easily determined cultural or theological divisions. Ugandans generally shared the missionaries’ image of the church as a source of salvation and, like these missionaries, regarded the church as secondto-none in effecting change. However, whereas the Americans stressed their own roles as teachers, the East Africans looked at pedagogy another way, as a matter of working and engaging in debates and putting knowledge into practice. Among some Ugandan leaders, the difference between themselves and the Americans was reduced to different understandings of the historical effects of mission education. In standard East African history narratives, which East African students read in school, the church is characterized as a powerful force that transformed—both positively and negatively—local communities (see, for example, Bujo 2003). This view is echoed in African-authored literature (such as Ngũgï wa Thiong’o 1981; Okot p’Bitek 1984; Mang’enya 1984) and by historians of African Christianity (such as Hastings 1994; Ludwig 1999; Summers 2003). This church’s Ugandan leaders, many of whom were secondary-schooled and a few of whom are university graduates, are generally well versed in a critical framework that analyzes and unpacks the church historically. They are skilled in articulating the contradictions of a colonial legacy that simultaneously liberated and exploited the continent, and that according to some of them continues to do so today. Awareness of history’s paradoxes is evidenced in the words of another Ugandan assistant who in the course of discussing church dynamics answered thus:

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Missionaries came here and told us that education can change our lives. So we went to mission schools and studied hard. We got really educated. [Some of us] even went abroad. Now here we are, knowing how to run the church, and in some cases we have seen more of the world than these missionaries. But as soon as some of these missionaries realize we Ugandans have more education, they really feel unhappy.13

Another put it metaphorically, “Missionaries don’t like to see shoulders grow taller than heads,” meaning that missionaries see themselves as the head of the church and Ugandans as overreaching “shoulders.” (Some Ugandan women in this church used a similar analogy to describe their place: qualified to teach and preach but structurally pressed down.) With regard to these missionaries’ lack of recognition of educated Africans’ insights and abilities, the Ugandan assistant quoted earlier considered that the only way to account for inequities was to consider that these American missionaries were the ones who “had failed to become educated.” His coworker, a business school graduate who had recently returned from traveling in Europe, put it more directly: “American missionaries read literature about Africa that was written in the 1950s! They read that old literature about tribes and witchcraft and they think every black man is still like that! Historians back in the U.S.A. need to update missionaries about that!” This Ugandan was not alone in condemning the missionaries’ fascination with witchcraft. In discussing his thoughts on the missionaries’ letter presented at the beginning of the chapter, he said it was another example of Americans’ lack of knowledge. Notwithstanding these Ugandans’ concerns about Americans’ poor understanding of history, not all Ugandans in the church were of one mind about schooling or religion. Many saw education more generally as a matter of embracing a particular sociomoral orientation toward the world. Indeed, the church itself worked to claim and redefine the meaning of moral citizens by working new values into the hearts, minds, and daily routines of the country’s ordinary citizens. In Uganda, to a greater extent than in Kenya or Tanzania, this church operated indirectly to redefine the meaning of nation. It did so by operating independent of, but often in tandem with, development projects and state programs. The pedagogical role of the church in this context unfolded at the intersection of international relations and everyday practices—by bringing distant people and delegates of the church to Uganda to help finance and provide health care, technology, and education.

Using the Promise of Technology to Build the Nation and the Church After the church service described earlier ended, Alysia introduced me to Ugandan evangelists who had worked with American missionaries

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in establishing a computer training school. In the arenas of education and computer training, these evangelists said, the church endeavored to prepare Ugandan citizens for “tomorrow’s nation.” Churchgoers’ idea of tomorrow’s nation echoed a nationally oriented and state-sponsored campaign to improve and develop the country and to connect Uganda internationally. Promoted in the national media and in public schools, “tomorrow’s nation” encouraged people to participate in the making of a better tomorrow by making changes in their daily lives.14 Schoolchildren sang songs about the need to “catch up” with students in other countries, and the national media ran stories about the importance of developing sound minds and bodies in youth in order to build the nation. Health education and technological training were frequently emphasized.15 Ugandans and Americans in this nondenominational church took up this challenge in a particular way: by working to ensure that tomorrow’s nation was also a Christian community, not exclusive of other religions, but one informed by a Christian morality that was in keeping with churchgoers’ understanding of a biblical view. In Bourdieu’s terms (2005), the Ugandan state, American missionaries, and East African evangelists struggled for domination in the field of tomorrow’s nation.16 The nondenominational churchgoers stressed their own rational and logical approach to educating tomorrow’s citizenry and portrayed others—especially Pentecostals—as lacking clear thinking and discipline. Their focus was on a direct and well-reasoned reading of the Bible and on the need for the church, school, and government to work more effectively together. In this frame of reasoning, education was a methodical enterprise aimed at developing practical skills that would meaningfully occupy people and ease their suffering “until God’s return.” To develop and connect Ugandan nationals with Christians internationally, the church emphasized technological education. In 2000, American churches helped to fund a computer training school that served as a free public library full of both Christian and nonreligious resource books; as an Internet café with a snack shop; as a classroom site for computer training (with courses taken mainly by secondary school graduates and young adults); and above all as an income-generator for the congregation. Funds from the school and Internet café were used to pay evangelists and teachers who worked at the church’s preschool. In addition to Ugandan shillings collected from the school, the Internet café brought in foreign currency because e-mail seeking Europeans, North Americans, and increasingly East Asians traveling in the region frequented the store. Originally the brainchild of an American missionary, the school’s mode of advertising was to offer services, not religion. Indeed, the bulletin board hanging outside the site announced seminars and media services but said

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nothing of the church. Except for two references to Bible study among the small print of other courses, the computer school carried the public face of a nonreligious business. Yet like the Sunday service I described earlier, which carried over onto Main Street, the computer school called out to passersby as though calling them off the street. One poster advertising a concert by a popular music group from Rwanda asked, “Townspeople, are you ready?” Below the announcement someone had posted a “for sale” sign for a used car, and next to that hung a list of courses taught that semester at Makerere University, the national university. A prominently placed poster reported “Tapes Available” to advertise the sale of volume one of a set of audiocassettes of speeches by former President John F. Kennedy. In the center of the flyer was a photocopied picture of the American president. “You have heard about him . . . now listen to the man himself, a charismatic voice that changed the world,” read the advertisement, at the bottom of which Kennedy was quoted: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” In view of the church’s interest in helping to build tomorrow’s nation, the reference to Kennedy in the context of “doing for your nation” carried overtones of an American connection. Indeed, more than any other business on Main Street, the café resonated with a U.S. voice. Dates on bulletin board posters were sometimes written in U.S. fashion: monthday-year rather than day-month-year; and some spellings were North American (program, not programme). Implicitly, if one looked carefully, the technological world of the Internet was connected most directly to the United States. However, the reference to Kennedy also linked this nondenominational church to a Catholic world, for in the views of Ugandan and American church members alike, Kennedy was not secular but Catholic; his presidency marked a turning point for relations between evangelical Christians and Catholics. (Prior to Kennedy, nondenominational American churches had been wary of the U.S. government’s establishment of formal relations with Catholic-establishment states and had protested President Truman’s 1951 proposal to exchange ambassadors with the Vatican.17 However, after the opening of the Iron Curtain, and mainly during the years of Pope John Paul II, these churches came to work more closely with Catholic organizations. Indeed, one of the American missionaries on the team held a master’s degree from a U.S. Catholic seminary, and another noted in conversation that “Kennedy is evidence you can combine religion with the state government.”18) Many Ugandans working and living in the vicinity were only vaguely aware that American church groups funded the school. Most knew the enterprise more in association with what they believed had been the awarding to the computer school of a contract with a nearby power plant. ­American and

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Ugandan technicians associated with the school were to provide technical support to a hydroelectric utility—a semiprivatized industry that sold energy in Uganda and western Kenya. A U.S. congressman had recently visited the dam, hosted by American missionaries who had contributed to the school and café, and the American delegate was presumed by workers in the area to have been present in association with funding for the project. Another poster hung on the bulletin board outside the Internet café. This one advertised the church’s medical clinic, though indirectly. It asked passersby, “Is a Computer Virus Similar to a Human Virus?” The full-paged, single-spaced response compared and contrasted computer viruses with the virus that causes HIV/AIDS. “A virus is an independent program that reproduces itself,” the text began. All forms of invaders “modify information” and “attack” specific programs. “An infected program may not exhibit symptoms for a while,” the poster reported, though computer viruses, like HIV, could be exchanged among friends. “What if my friend borrows an infected disk?” The answer: “Your friend’s computer will most likely become infected the instant he or she uses your disk.” At the bottom of the poster someone had written, “If you have more questions about human viruses and HIV, please come inside.” Should a passerby have ventured in, he or she would have been told that the health care clinic was located elsewhere and that the clinic specialized in family counseling and occupational therapy for persons infected with HIV. Unlike Ugandan government-sponsored AIDS clinics, the church’s clinic did not provide full-scale medical support, although it offered free testing, entry-level antibiotics, and nonprescription medicines. It also differentiated itself from Pentecostal faith healers, who spoke in tongues and whom Alysia described as “scam artists.” Indeed, at about this time the national media exposed that Pentecostal pastors were using concealed mechanical devices to electric-shock people at the moment of being “healed.”19 The “value added” of the nondenominationals’ clinic, Alysia said, using the language of marketing and business in which she was trained, was in helping infected persons find economically productive work and “guidance in finding Christ.” Contributions from U.S. churches financed projects for the sick, including a piggery that sold pork to local shops (a project that, it bears noting, restricted observant Muslims’ participation), a basket-making enterprise that sold traditional African wares to U.S. congregations, and a small brickmaking factory that contracted with local builders. This pragmatic yet highly elliptical approach to recruiting people to the church called out to the public in inclusive yet particular terms. Instead of advertising that health care services were available at the church or noting that evangelists and missionaries ran computer-training courses, the church spoke out about popular concerns. Computers and HIV/AIDS were

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on many peoples’ minds. This recruitment strategy ensured that people entered the church with interests of their own. Individuals came to the projects with needs, not the other way around, and then through the projects people could experience for themselves the “gifts of Christ.” What may at first have been seen as secular programming could lead people to enter the community; and what to a visitor may seem like American-dominated preaching and lecturing could be seen as Ugandans’ use of American interests to augment local communities’ wealth. Once involved, persons could reasonably decide whether or not they wanted to become a part of this Christian group. As one senior missionary put it, “If you become a part of our social world, you can choose to become a part of the church.” Skeptics of this community, however, could see the relationship as being the other way around. “If you become a part of their projects, you have to become a part of the church—you’re drawn into their networks,” remarked a Muslim man. Another man, speaking to a delegation of American academics visiting a mosque one Friday for ibada prayers, said, “Tell your American evangelists to stop taking our Muslim youth!”—a comment that came up many times in connection with the church’s school (which I discuss in a moment).20 The ambiguity of this church’s work—or indeed the divine mystery of conversion, as churchgoers saw it—turned on the uncertain combination of church leadership, self-direction, and the “pure grace of divinity.” Churchgoers placed stock in all three elements, but primarily credited divinity with the expansion of the church. For their critics, the ambiguity turned on the degree to which engaging with the religious group also implied participation. Joining in was to become a part of the church; and to become a part of the church was to shape a Christian world.

The School What about that most obvious of all educational institutions, the school? How did the school structure and valorize ideas about “tomorrow’s nation”? Located some twenty kilometers west of the church, in a village outside of town, Christian Academy Secondary School was founded in 2003 by the church on Main Street and was registered with the Ugandan Ministry of Education in 2005, which is to say that in that year the Ugandan government recognized the school as having met standards for teacher quality, building safety, and procedures for enrollment and matriculation. The Academy began with fewer than seventy students and grew to 190 in 2006. Students paid fees—about 60,000 Ugandan shillings for day-schoolers in 2006, and about 155,000 Ugandan shillings for those who

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boarded that year.21 The motto painted on the Academy’s signpost read, “Educating God-fearing Citizens for Tomorrow.” Most Ugandan teachers and administrators considered the school a huge success. The teachers were pleased that the school provided opportunities for disadvantaged children, that it offered literacy and continuing education programs for adults after school hours and on weekends, and that the school ensured equal access to both girls and boys. Indeed, more girls than boys were enrolled in this school, for reasons that, one teacher explained, had to do with the boys’ preference to “run to town, looking for work” upon completing primary school. Although the school was private and fee-charging, it offered scholarships to nearly any student wishing to enroll. Most of the funds came from a wealthy American philanthropist—a former chancellor and chief administrative officer of a nondenominational Christian college in the United States. In addition to contributing annually, the retired chancellor raised money through U.S. churches. This money was used by Ugandan school board members to buy land, construct classrooms, and purchase equipment beyond what any other school in the area could hope for: a tractorgrater to smooth the school’s dirt road after heavy rains, solar panels for generating electricity when local sources were cut, computers for the teaching staff, and scholarships for selected students to offset school fees and uniforms. Some church leaders estimated that this philanthropist had donated “something like a quarter of his pension annually” and that his pension was itself a reflection of his success in the economic management of his own American university. “He was a good fundraiser in his day,” remarked a Ugandan member of the school board, who was involved in securing private funding for the Christian Academy. According to teachers, WalMart Stores, Inc. had contributed to the university the chancellor had led. Although there was no Wal-Mart in East Africa, a number of “big box” chains owned by South African companies had recently opened in the region, and Ugandan teachers were familiar with the concept of corporate giving. Most spoke of this philanthropist’s “generosity” in terms of his “having a heart for Uganda now.” More than they valued the amount of his gift, which church elders confirmed was substantial and ongoing, the teachers valued the manner of his giving—with no strings attached, no conditions on how to spend it, and little oversight. “A blessing,” a head teacher said. “His funds are a gift from God.” Owing to his age, the donor himself rarely visited Uganda. Instead, his son managed the work and was seen as kind and competent—different from the way Ugandan leaders generally portrayed the sons of missionaries.

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In addition to securing external funding, Ugandan church leaders sought to distance the school from the national government. One board member noted: Ultimately we have God to thank, this is all the work of God. But after that it is a matter of careful planning and keeping government outside these projects. When the school first started, many politicians were trying to get involved—the village chairman, the MP [Member of Parliament], the LC [Local Commissioner], all these politicians. But I told members of our church that I didn’t want to work with politicians. Eventually I convinced the church that it was better to keep politicians out. I told them that control of the school should come from the community, that if the politicians controlled the funds, the community would be left out. This is what we did in the end, and our progress has been good.

Another board member echoed this sentiment in a more general picture of church-government relations in East Africa: Most new schools right now are being started as Christian schools, but then the government comes in. For example, a Kenyan friend of mine wanted to have a Christian school but because of financing he involved the government. It’s tempting to involve the government and the politicians because they promise to find a way to help finance education. They say they will provide the infrastructure and necessary items like lab equipment and library books, but when they do they also want to have a say in who the school hires and what it teaches, and that’s where you can run into trouble. For instance, at one school where the politicians hired the headmaster, he turned out to be a drunkard. So it’s not really advisable, once you set to make it a Christian school, to involve the politicians and government. The politicians change, they come and go, and this of course attracts the possibility of the school being attacked by the next generation of politicians. Politicians can help on an outside basis, but still you must be careful because slowly by slowly the government will try to come in because the government wants to be recognized as providing services to the community.22

These mostly negative views protest against the use of community schools for politicians’ personal ends, but they also reveal an interplay among the church and government, and among the missionaries and Ugandans. Ugandan board members, as the preceding quotes suggest, are interested in transforming, not in conserving, the field of schooling, and in ensuring that the church and not the government is “recognized as providing service to the community.” With respect to “tomorrow’s nation,” the government, Ugandan evangelists, and American missionaries each take different positions. The government acts as agent of schools by legalizing the status of the church (a government ministry certified the school and registered the church as its owner); evangelists portray themselves as indigenous authorities who have both the territorial and, importantly, the moral

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right to shape the nation; and missionaries position themselves as expert outsiders who in the spirit of witness share their skills through social services and teaching. Although the government, evangelists, and missionaries have different positions on witchcraft (the government generally criminalizes witchcraft, Ugandan evangelists regard it as sign of suffering, and American missionaries consider witchcraft evidence of a deep, underlying pagan context), each is committed in different ways to educating Ugandan children for a better future. (I return to this point in a moment.) Moreover, the government authorities, evangelists, and missionaries involved here all share a view regarding the use of school land. The area immediately surrounding the school was called by evangelists “Muslim land.” It had been bought from a Muslim man and was legally transferred via municipal deed. Eventually the school displaced a mosque and attracted Muslim students. There were “problems” with Muslims in the early months, recalled a Ugandan teacher: “They would not allow us to walk across their land to get to school, and they were complaining that their youth were being put in our church.” In recent months, however, a settlement had been made, and the local mosque at the border of the school grounds closed and its worshipers moved elsewhere. This was a sign, according to this Ugandan, that “God is winning.” The fact that the mosque had closed and moved elsewhere was seen as evidence that “God has conquered them, God himself has conquered them.”23 The missionaries too saw evidence of “God’s success,” in the number of Muslims converted to Christianity. In the course of three years, twenty Muslim students had been baptized. A junior teacher attributed these conversions first to a biblical plan and second to the school’s curriculum. Christian Academy offered two courses in religion: Christian Religious Education (CRE) and Bible study. CRE was a national curriculum taught in public and private schools; the Ugandan Ministry of Education developed its content and set criteria for national exams in the subject. (Muslim students at public schools had the option of taking a Muslim religious education course.) By contrast, Bible study was unique to this Christian school. Students had to pass the Bible study course in order to remain enrolled. “By the end of the first year, many Muslim students say they are ready to be baptized; that is how we pull them in, by making them study and read the Bible,” reported the junior teacher. Ugandan board members associated with the church found themselves working closely with local officials and district officers, particularly when it came to negotiating with villagers the church’s claims to own the land. “Sometimes Muslims from the area would bring medicines to the meetings,” reported one board member. (Medicines—dawa—was shorthand for the “powders blown” as part of witchcraft.) “We had to tell them we

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don’t work that way, that we’re Christian and don’t use witchcraft.” Conversations with villagers had been particularly tense, he said, in the early months, when land ownership had been in dispute. Some villagers had come to the meetings with concoctions they thought would deter the work. Other villagers spoke openly at meetings about their concern that their children would be pulled into the church. Ugandan elders later recalled that during that time they had had to work with and show compassion toward these villagers. Their approach was less to condemn than to persuade by example—to serve as “witnesses to God’s love,” as they framed it. It was not until American missionaries funded local villagers to assist with school construction and maintenance, and offered financial assistance to some local students, that bewitching incidents subsided. At least they subsided as church and school administrators saw it. Some villagers in the area referred to the “magic” with which the church had “purchased” and funded village children as a form of witchcraft in itself—the kind that comes with “too much money” and is used to control unwitting souls. Not unlike the bewitched schoolchildren reported regionally,24 and not unlike the correlate critics in Tanzania who questioned missionaries’ motives, these parents attributed the financial and educational successes of nondenominational missionaries and evangelists to unseen, suspicious forces, not to “God’s grace.” By the time the church school was well under way, however, most of these critics had lost a stronghold in the village. The man who had owned the land had moved his residence elsewhere, and the rest of the villagers had either sent their children to the school (most on scholarship) or quietly stayed away. Yet, for the truly critical, the quieted voice of dissenters did not change the fact that buried on the Muslim land were Muslim family members. In their views, the land was theirs, despite who owned it legally; and this fact in itself kept alive the sense that church work was questionable. Five years after opening, the school had graduated two cohorts of students. It had hired and fired at least one schoolteacher whom Americans and Ugandans alike considered to be “for the moment outside the reach of Christ.” It had selected a handful of teachers from nearby churches—teachers whom the missionaries and school board had preselected on the basis of their “being local citizens and devout Christians.” Like the computer school and health care clinic, the school had become a part of the ordinary landscape. In this regard, like the church itself, the school was highly successful in having invoked and sutured “the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures” (Pratt 1992: 7). The social differences it conjoined (if uneasily) were those of Americans and Ugandans, Christians and Muslims, rural and urban dwellers. As such, for these Christians the school was a utopianized place that bridged social,

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cultural, and spiritual differences. It served as a space—as did anthropology, for some—in which to structure and organize human experience in accordance with what, for these churchgoers, Scripture prophesied.

Summary We have seen in this chapter how churchgoers in Uganda used religion and education to shape the local community. They did so by creating spaces of routine engagement between the fields of education and religion, and by infusing both fields with shared moral value that called for social action. Indeed, it was through this coupling of sociomoral action with the routines and institutions of public life that Ugandans and missionaries bore witness and created common ground between Americans and East Africans and between believers and non-Christians. What all churchgoers shared in shaping this transnational church (notwithstanding the asymmetries that premised and reproduced relations) was a commitment to transcending, not eliminating, the nation-state. The future nation—a Christian one—was the state’s moral conscience and spiritual force. The Christian nation operated as a suprastate coordinator that linked people and groups from different countries. It served as an endlessly rational educator that infused logic with spirituality. In short, the future Christian nation was the moral anchor of the state. It supplanted “secular” with “Christian” in the (newly posited and Christian, not secular) nation-state. Internally, however, the Christian nation exhibited tensions and contradictions. Polygyny and witchcraft signified enduring differences. The irreducibility of the groups’ cultural histories to any single moral logic defined Americans and Africans in relation to one another, and specifically as separate groups. The working out of their differences occurred through social interactions, which in turn constituted Americans and Africans as different and sometimes as antagonists. Differences were reconciled, however, by channeling tensions to a higher ground. The utopian spaces of school and church promised to improve and transform collective life. That is, the church and school—as well as the Internet café and computer training site—institutionalized a service-oriented, testimonial form of religiosity. This religiosity—Christian witness—mirrored and modified the moral norms and routines of public life. Ironically, and insofar as both church and school were utopianized sites that bridged social and spiritual differences, they may have become—as they may become anywhere, over time—arguably two of the least transformative institutions on the social landscape. Homi Bhabha’s observation (1989: 67) is relevant here: “[T]he only place in the world to speak from

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[is] at a point whereby contradiction, antagonism, the hybridities of cultural influence, the boundaries of nations, [are] not sublated into some utopian sense of liberation or return. The place to speak from [that is, from which to make a difference, is] through those incommensurable contradictions within which people survive, are politically active, and change.” The nondenominational church seems to have worked oppositely: to have created a utopian space of future perfection in which differences and tensions are minimized. I comment on this mode of operation in the final chapter, where I discuss when and how church and school are transformative, and when and how Americans and East Africans view themselves as separate and distinct versus one community. For now I offer a coda to this chapter: a quote from American missionaries that references an enduring point of difference for both Americans and East Africans: again, witchcraft. The quote reveals ongoing and seemingly indissoluble differences, but it also shows how these differences shape these missionaries’ views of themselves in relation to their sense of others. I have put some text in italics to indicate how differences are created, and to highlight relationalities to which Ugandans generally objected. The passage is from a collection of essays in honor of a nondenominational American restorationist missionary. It is written by a man who, with his wife, lived and missionized in Uganda and Kenya. The effects of belief in the spiritual world and the practices associated with witchcraft are pervasive and powerful in the lives of many Africans, believer and unbeliever. As western Christians we must open our eyes to the difficulties African Christians face as they attempt to live out their faith in Jesus in a pagan context. If Christianity is to be wholly and appropriately lived out by African people, they must be allowed to ask and taught how to answer the questions of life which they face every day. [Tyler 2001: 359]

No more or less than many of the points made by Ugandans in this chapter, these sentiments reveal “a zone for working out social meanings and enacting social differences” (Pratt 1987: 62). It is precisely through this mutual misunderstanding and reconstruction of the other that new moral geographies and moral polities are shaped and emerging today, as indeed they have in the past, though never, it always bears noting, in precisely the same way.

7

 New Anthropological Ethnography A of Religion and Education

Theory I offer this multisited study of a transnational Christian Church not only to provide an ethnographic illustration of the group’s religious and educational activities but also to open up an inquiry at a higher analytic level. As I noted at the beginning of this work, education and evangelism sit in uneasy historical and conceptual relation to one another. Historian Terence Ranger, quoted in Chapter One, challenged anthropologists to see beyond the differences between the academy and the church, and to recognize (if not fully embrace) the shared precepts and practices of evangelism and ethnography. Such a recognition has yet to occur, although my hope is that this work has brought readers to a closer understanding of how religion and education in the particular formulations I have explored here go together. My argument has been that religion and education—specifically in this work, Christianity and schooling—structure and valorize divergent human experiences and sociocultural perspectives in different parts of the world. Religion and education are utopian spaces that define and transcend societal norms, and they are imaginative tropes and institutional forms that reinforce and challenge social and political differences. In this final chapter I wish to emphasize more how these coproduced relations help us recognize that, like Christian witness, anthropology itself is a matter of eyewitnessing. Anthropology is premised on the idea that to see is to know and that to be somewhere is to affirm that the “there” is real and knowable. This seeing eye of anthropology, this empirical-rational method of personal testament and knowing, is developed in the school. That is, the academy is a place where knowledge is pulled out from experience, seen and studied, and analyzed. As a transnational institution, the school these days is (and for a long time has been) everywhere. All nation-states “have” them, as world culture theorists correctly note (see, for example, Meyer 2004; Ramirez 2003). The seeing eye developed in schools, however, is also informed by different ways of looking, different ways of experiencing and inhabiting the world, and different orientations to a shared history, including, as we have seen in East Africa, the history of colonialism

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and, more recently, of private philanthropy. Thus, although seeing and “being there” are central to some concepts of eyewitnessing, witness can also be expressed through other idioms, including through social service, fieldwork, and no less, idioms of secrecy and witchcraft. Indeed, the whole trope of witnessing is central to both Americans’ and East Africans’ ­models of power and knowledge. To see and be seen, to render forces visible and manifest, reflects an East African cosmopolitics;1 and to attest to an underlying truth that is biblically encoded is central for nondenominational Americans. In other words, knowing and seeing occur not only through what is written, say, in the Bible or in schoolbooks. Knowing and seeing are also attained through many different experiences and forms of signification, the limits of which are constrained only by human imagination and structured agency. A key point to note in studying the recombinatory operations of religion and education is that Christian witnessing, like anthropological knowing, is typically expressed in and through moments of encounter—through social processes that bring together, and differently make, historically and culturally produced societal forms. Two points about encounter bear noting. First, encounter is not dualistic but dialectical. That is, social identities are formed in relation to one another and are formed on common ground, a consequence of which is that sometimes social groups differentiate themselves, other times they pull together and see themselves as one. (I discuss when and how below, in a summary on ethnography.) Second, the operative mode of encounter is pedagogical, not instructive. The meeting point of encounter is revelatory and productive, transformational and transcendent. It is pivotal, not co-categorical. By this I mean that encounter is a matter of producing the modes and methods that in turn produce and define people and places. The differences between instruction and pedagogy can be thought of metaphorically: instruction is about the bringing together of facts; pedagogy is about understanding meta-analytically the qualities by which facts are contrasted and compared and by which they are made sometimes one and the same, other times different, but always relational. To a point, the difference between instruction and pedagogy is like the difference between social studies and anthropology. The first often teaches facts using timelines and maps. The second typically teaches operational modes through three-dimensional fieldwork. The difference between instruction and pedagogy, however, also parallels differences between mission and secularized anthropologies. Mission anthropology overlays a conceptual typology (of biblical, target, and mission cultures) onto different places and people, and then assesses these people and places by a certain (biblical) standard. Secularized anthropology seeks to discern the typolo-

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gies that emerge and are produced in various field sites, including typologies that come together from different groups and shift in meaning and social import under certain conditions as these conditions are seen and known from different vantage points of constituent subgroups. Through the ethnography presented in the foregoing chapters, we can see that religion and education are structuring categories. They produce and transcend different places and time, and they create different places as a unity. That is, religion and education—specifically, here, Christianity and schooling—standardize differences through their own universalizing principles of, for instance, one Christian world (for these nondenominational churchgoers) and of, for educators, standards of literacy and numeracy. Religion and education inhabit and transform, not mark and maintain, social life. Their simultaneity—specifically their shared generative quality that (re)produces the world as potentially one—has implications for understanding old and new conceptions of the nation. In particular, the literalist-rationalist schema of this transnational church fits nicely into the modernist schemes of the secular-rational state, but in a way that operates qualitatively to transform it. The Christian nation desired by the transnational churchgoers associated with this nondenominational group inhabits and exceeds the boundaries of the twentieth-century nation-state not by replacing secular ideals with Christian terms but by transcending public life, virtually all the time, by infusing through religion and education a common moral value into the routine of daily life. Put simply, the futureimagined Christian nation seeks to be present in, not separate from, government. It seeks to be a part of the whole, a part of the entirety of schools and public life. This Christian-modern faith in schools (in both senses) looks to tomorrow and is full of hope. It sees human action as having future consequences, and it displaces its work onto various domains. The church is literally everywhere. Where, however, does anthropology lie in this world? Again, what is the relation of Christian witness to anthropological ethnography? Whereas the nondenominational version of witness I have dwelled on here itself speaks openly of a future utopia (heaven, the end of time), anthropological witness is less reflective than evangelism about its own projecting of categories onto various domains. In contrast to evangelism, contemporary anthropology focuses almost to a fault on how moral value is humanly refracted and created socially, and less on social patterns that appear to arise systematically and universally. This difference reflects secular anthropology’s greater emphasis on the significance of human agency, and its greater interest in understanding how people regard cultural patterns as evidence of

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underlying patterns—patterns that nondenominationals consider to be evidence of divine intent. Yet, like mission anthropology, though more in the vein of human explication than divine revelation, anthropology is forward looking in hoping that human insight adds up and makes sense over time, and even that anthropologists’ work should somehow improve (even if only through “mere” intellectual understanding) the quality of human life. Whereas religion is outward looking, seeing “the spiritual” in any and all outward forms, the academic monograph is (almost ridiculously) reductive, turning the mirror of life toward the printed page and focusing, as though using a lens to conflate and pinpoint, all of life into written words. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that ethnographic maps hanging in university department halls should be dotted with pins marking fields.2 Location, despite all talk about transnationality, remains an important dimension of anthropology. In the bigger picture, however, we can see that religion and education are generative modes that are also conflated. Both (at least in the forms of schooling and nondenominational Christianity) exhibit a faith that knowledge is gained through “a practical mimesis (or mimeticism) which implies an overall relation of identification and has nothing in common with an imitation that would presuppose a conscious effort to reproduce a gesture, an utterance or an object explicitly constituted as a model” (Bourdieu 1990: 73, emphasis in original). Imitation is an instructive mode; mimesis is pedagogical. Through embodiment and ordinary daily action, subjects can know, and at least partly change, the world and themselves. Anthropologically, we might represent the conflation of education and religion through a kind of synesthesia of category: the pedagogical church and the revelatory school, the Bible teacher and the teacher-priest. This new pedagogical church (to vary a term) combines liberal-secular faith in school—the kind of faith on which “third world development” has been premised—with a theologically conservative dimension.3 The Christian believers discussed in this work interpret the Bible literally and stress divine intention, not human experience, as the source of knowledge and indicator of right meaning (compare Crapanzano 2000: 3); but such “pedagogical church” and “teacher-priest” conflations also reproduce a Christian historical element in anthropology, and as well recreate at least in part an enduring categorical duality (a limit, perhaps, of having to work within the analytic frame that also defines the history and practice of anthropology). Nonetheless, the pedagogical church and the revelatory school translate into—or better, inhere in—many locations, many contexts within which churchgoers, and anthropologists, work. The pedagogical church and the revelatory school take located expression, have certain forms and modes, and are highly translatable and transcultural.

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History Another agenda of this work has been to rethink the anthropological subfields of religion and education in a manner equal to the demands of an early twenty-first century—an era in which religious groups such as this transnational church are invited by government and bring themselves to engage in social work they once considered the job of the secular nationstate. The particular social and political conditions of recent shifts require that we rethink social theories of the state and of state education. Historically, theorists as ideologically diverse yet intellectually related as Althusser, Bourdieu, Durkheim, Gramsci, and Marx maintained that nation-states used schools and other educational arenas as the primary site of intervention for building and propagating their cultural projects. The school, if you will, was the nation-state’s witness; it monitored national devotion and gave evidence for it. State-mandated operations of curriculum and testing were seen as organizing the routines and lives of children, parents, teachers, and whole communities. Schools variously “sorted and selected,” as twentieth-century progressivist John Dewey framed it, and perhaps on good days the educational system run by governments rerouted and transformed the life course of hardworking individuals (if not always of underprivileged groups). However, this conventional, seemingly unchangeable notion of the state school underwent radical change in the late twentieth century. Without giving up on the ideal (and some would say myth) that schools promote social justice and equality, policymakers in the United States and in international organizations (especially those influenced by the United States, such as, notably, the World Bank and some UN agencies) looked away from the nation-state as primary educator and toward private groups—businesses, faith groups, and those voluntary associations widely binned under the rubric of “civil society”—to partner with the state in the provisioning of public and mass schooling. Partnering was promoted in the interest of (a) saving money, (b) diversifying educational systems and offerings, and (c) injecting an element of competition and choice into what was presented as a state monopoly on education. It was also promoted, arguably, to serve as a check on the state’s uncontested witness, which for some had become overly secularized and atheistic. Within this increasingly privatized and marketized social-public field—a field characterized by the amplification of the tenets of modernity rather than any wholesale shift to a new world order, as Weiss (2004) and colleagues effectively persuade—the school was repositioned. Although the modernist myth continued that education led to better jobs and that better jobs ensured (American) national success and

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(third world) development, it increasingly became seen as displaced from what really occurred. American jobs went overseas, educated persons in Africa remained unemployed, and the market for schooled expertise had little or nothing to do with skill, nor even with certification. But if not to learn skills, then why go to school? What was education supposed to bring? This was the logical next question in the historical moment, and also the next in an analysis. Although I insist that it is too simple to say that morality replaced economy as the rationale for schooling, this displacement is a part of the shift. An economically evacuated educational system had other functional and socially important strengths: socializing people into a community (citizenship), ensuring that they are all well-behaved (morality), and keeping people effectively, if not always productively, engaged and occupied (activity). Within the policy world of defining curriculum and standards, the language of economics and markets “ramped up” even as the practical relation of jobs to schooling declined; and over time, moral communities, including faith-based groups, were “brought in,” not to inject morality into the mass system of schooling—at least not at first, ostensibly—but to provide cheaper ways of delivering instructional programming heretofore administered by departments and ministries of education. In the United States and internationally, government agencies called on faith groups to step up to public service, as much as to allow faith-based groups to check on and attest to state social programs as to deliver services more cheaply. The first director of the U.S. White House Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), John J. DiIulio, for instance, coedited a book on policy published in 2000: What’s God Got to Do with the American Experiment? Chapters on faith-based social action, including “Faith, Outreach, and the Inner-City Poor” and “Charitable Choice and the First Amendment,” take on the then-novel idea that religion was inherently a part of public life, which sociologist José Casanova and others had already demonstrated intellectually but which was now being directly taken up in public policy. Six years later the director of the Sagamore Institute Center on Faith in Communities produced a manual titled “Being There: Faith on the Frontlines” (Sherman 2006). This manual provided “successful models of faith-based, cross-sector collaboration” from a public-private think-tank alliance. Also, notably, in 2007 the then-new director of the OFBCI, Jay Hein, was recruited from the Sagamore Institute. Hein championed faith-based initiatives in Africa, including projects on global health and education.4 Although the Sagamore Institute focused mainly on U.S. domestic work, other organizations operating in a similar vein framed “being there” as a matter of being everywhere internationally. The publication in 2005 of a

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conference report, Finding Global Balance: Common Ground between the Worlds of Development and Faith, edited by Katherine Marshall and Lucy Keough, framed the value of faith-based organizations in development work mainly in terms of moral advantage. Faith-based groups combined “development and human dignity” and addressed crises of health, environment, conflict, and war in terms of “morality, ethics, and practical paths.” Schooling—that is, education—was significant for moving people forward toward realizing the “many dimensions of equity” and of “peace.” Little was said in this report about the value of schooling for developing people and places economically; and little was said about the nation-state or its historical role in shaping national and global citizens. Instead, faith-based groups were presented as at the pivot point of development, as they were again in a 2007 publication titled “Faith-Inspired Organizations and Global Development Policy: U.S. and International Perspectives.” This 2007 report authored by Nicole Cordeau, Rebecca Davis, and Amy Vander Vliet was part of a two-year project aimed at examining “the roles of faith-inspired organizations in global development” and serving as “the basis for further analytic work and policy discussions” (1). Looking back at this historical path, one might argue that the nationstate ceded aspects of its governing modes, including schooling, to faithbased groups, although again this is only part of the picture. To a point, Althusserian notions of governmentality, which implicitly informed governing bodies and policy plans across the mid to late twentieth century, underwent a degree of change. Althusser (1971) had argued that state schools were modern-day substitutes for the church as the dominant ideological state apparatus. “Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser wrote, are “realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions” (143). He continued: “the ideological State apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations . . . is the educational ideological apparatus” (152, italics in original). What Althusser aimed to communicate in such a statement is that the school is the ideological tool of the nation-state. The school “teaches ‘know how’ but in forms that ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its ‘practice’” (133, italics in original). Althusser regarded state education as historically displacing the state-controlled church: “[The] dominant ideological State apparatus is the educational apparatus which has in fact replaced in its functions the previously dominant ideological State apparatus, the Church. One might even add: The School-Family couple has replaced the Church-Family couple” (153–154). Although Althusser may have captured a certain historical moment, his framework falls short of describing a bigger picture. His views about the displacement of the church in relation to the state do not hold up in the present

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day (nor, to follow Asad 2003, did they hold up fully in Althusser’s day). For example, it remains an open question whether the state has appropriated faith-based groups or the situation is reversed. It is likely that the relationship goes both ways. Whereas skeptics saw the U.S. government catering to the “religious right” in the early 2000s, the continued incorporation of conservative theological views into federal-level faith-based initiatives suggests that the faith-government co-imbrication crosses political lines and defies easy labeling of “left” versus “right.” Moreover, Althusser’s theory of the school as ideological state apparatus is faceless, mechanical, and Eurocentric in projecting a Western view on all of history—although to be sure his framework reflects a dominant governmental mode of international policy, both past and current. Instead of critiquing his framework for what it is not, however, I wish to stress its value in recognizing how, under at least some circumstances, education and religion as ideological state apparatuses articulate diverse understandings of what is socially important and politically at stake. Althusser presents the nation-state schools as an arena filled with agents fighting to retain control over the ideological forms of governance. In his analysis, as in others’ (such as Bourdieu 2005; Gramsci 1971), various groups compete to control what is taught—and preached— in schools. What I stress in this chapter, however, is that para-state groups such as this transnational church reorganize and redeploy ideological apparatuses of state governance onto other-than-state domains. Nondenominational groups testify and bear witness to the rule of state law through a particular religious lens—that of a version of Christianity. In doing so, they transform conceptions of modern nation-state power by superseding nation-states’ territorial boundaries with claims to higher moral times and communities (of Kingdom, heaven, end of time). They enact a version of what Deleuze (2000: 76), elaborating on Foucault, calls “continual state control.” Members of this church do not assert governmental power directly but rather integrate into their daily work moralities and relationships found in otherthan-government domains. Families, communities, schools, and businesses are conjoined through biblical ideals of morality. Bureaucracy as the problem is removed from government and relocated and favorably reworded as partnership; and what is often assumed to be separate is in fact combined such that the pairing of faith-group and government interests encourages the integration of power relations across different domains. Far from being the source of power, the church (to paraphrase Deleuze 2000: 76) locates the source at a higher level and then identifies with, and defines itself as having, it. More concretely, we can say that the history and political climate that enable Christian witness in East Africa and the United States today dif-

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fer from those of the colonial era and of the recent past. Through much of the twentieth century, religious organizations involved in education and development saw their work as a charitable act in the sense that they considered it to complement the goals of colonial and independent state governments. Erica Bornstein (2005: 171) captures the quality of this historical shift remarkably well in noting that “in the late 1990s and under the rubric of neoliberal programs of economic development [that is, programs that favored market solutions to social problems], social welfare once again became a charitable act, this time of internationally funded NGOs.” Bornstein features in her study the work of two Protestant NGOs: World Vision International and Christian Care. Since the time of Bornstein’s research in the late 1990s, further integration and displacement have taken place. Policy changes that recognize, support, and sometimes fund faith groups as nongovernmental agencies have brought religious work into the offices of government, and conversely have fostered a sense among members of some churches, such as the borderless group featured here, that their work supercedes and encompasses, and then transcends, that of politics and government. The relationship today, in the view of these nondenominationals, is not one of church-state separation; nor is it one of public-private partnership. Seen from the perspectives of these East African and American churchgoers, the work of the church is infused into all aspects of life and into all locations.

Ethnography Theoretical and historical considerations may give us new insights, but what do we see ethnographically? What is the substantive, illustrative contribution—the ethnographic purpose—of this work? I see it as twofold. The first purpose is to provide a picture of a spatially large-scale transformative historical moment. Other scholars have called for the kind of ethnographic illustration I have provided here. Writing about the privatizing aspects of sub-Saharan African states, for instance, Béatrice Hibou (2004) has called for case studies to analyze interventions that pass through private intermediaries; and Yves Chevrier (2004: 256), writing about the need to widen the framework of political and economic analyses “beyond the Western route,” has specified that comparative study is best conducted by situating different and reciprocally related communities (such as, I suggest, those of the East Africans and Americans in the churches studied in my work) in terms of how groups’ different trajectories overlap and constitute one another at various levels of spatial scale. The scales we have seen in this book are, in the baldest sense, local, regional, and global; but more synthetically, they are conceptual

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in scope. They are scales of relative encompassment and integration, and of tension and separation that bring subgroups into quick, sometimes fleeting, but always partly integrative connection. The question, however, is when and how? When and how do American and East African churchgoers come together? Americans and East Africans are oriented differently to religion and education, and to religion as education, and vice versa. Not all agree about how “the spiritual” unfolds and is formed in the course of worship or through the work of the everyday, yet all worship and work in the same church, together, and all consider themselves authentic Christians; all contrast themselves to ecumenical, liberal Protestants, fiery Pentecostals, and for that matter, to animists and witches (although the quality and extent of differentiation, as we have seen, vary among and between East Africans and Americans). Churchgoers see the church as a single entity, yet there are times when Western and East African identities and values pull apart and persist, and it is important to know when historical-cultural identities fall away and when they are bundled up, when they are seen as useful relationally, and when they are dissociated, including when churchgoers display a “horror of mixing” (Apple 2006: 175). The second ethnographic contribution of this work, then, is to illuminate how, at the level of this group’s transcendental or utopian plane, transnational members regard their work as conjoined, and when they consider it not to be; and then, through these points of commonality, to understand when and how the church is productive and transformational. Four issues sharply structure the subgroups’ commonalities: language study; conceptions of time; notions of non-Christians, especially of Muslims, as others; and access to and participation in global markets. Regarding language, it is noteworthy that English study is a point of reference for all engaged in this church’s work, because nation-state schools of the past century used to associate language of instruction with national citizenship and identity. Now the scope of the nation—at least as seen from within this borderless church—spans the geographic limits of nation-states. Of course not all who value English identify as Christian, yet many still see English as useful. For instance, some Muslim parents of Tanzanian school children see English as necessary for getting jobs in the market economy (as opposed to the local economy of trade and barter, for which one can use Kiswahili). However, insofar as the market economy links to Western Europe and North America, it also links English to Enlightenment-derived religions and secularist nation-state histories. English is thus a point of contact that connects disparate places through an implicitly Christianized religiosity. When English is contrasted, for instance, with Arabic lessons in Muslim religious schools, differences become polarized and the site of the school is religiously politicized. To counter this, churchgoers use English not only as tool but also as

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a mode for synthesizing points of contact through transcultural communication. English is thus a means of minimizing differences, even as it shapes unity in a particular historical and cultural—and geo-spiritual—form. Less well articulated as sites for integration are missionaries’ own concepts of time and history. The categories of time that missionaries bring to their work—including the longue durée—fall flat in the face of East Africans’ idea that time and history should account for patrilineality, and that common notions of time should recognize global political realities of empire and colonialism. Cyclical time versus the linear forms that missionaries use are typologies, not analytic or culturally generative frames. Such typologies describe but do not, like English instruction, synthesize or integrate the groups involved. Instead, integration occurs around the matter of time in a higher order, namely, at the level of the Church as it is represented in the Bible and as it works and witnesses in the world. When churchgoers think about their work as incarnational and as embodying the Jesus method of instruction or the life of Christ, subgroup differences fall away and a religious unity emerges almost seamlessly. This unified entity then defines itself against a comparable other. Oftentimes for all churchgoers involved it is Muslims who are contrasted. East African teachers and elders no less than American missionaries position themselves as the saved, and it is in the order of geo-spiritual communities that churchgoers pull together as one. When this geo-spiritual community combines with the power of markets—that is, when Christian students see themselves as sharing social networks and opportunities that link them economically—subdivisions within the church again fall away, and projects become economically and spiritually fused and integrated. Once integration occurs, however, synthesis and creativity wane and the points of contact are no longer transformative. In other words, subgroup relations are most productive when groups grapple with and integrate differences in collaboration. When adherents inject new moral meanings into older forms, the church’s work is potentially powerful and generative. It modifies ordinary values by infusing a familiar yet particular morality into the routines of public life. Once achieved, synthesis is over, and new differences and points of contact arise. Schools, for instance, may be new sites of integration, but tensions quickly emerge over matters of management and ownership. As I noted in the previous chapter, there is potentially nothing less creative and transformative than a stable social institution, including churches and schools. What makes this transnational group more productive than others is that it constantly uses the school to recruit. It appeals to the commonsense desires of East African communities to become educated and integrated into the world economy, and it uses these desires to gain new converts by indirectly calling—but never coercing—new members to the church.

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Thus Christian witness is also Christian outreach. It is an interpellative mode along the lines of the nation-state apparatus of the school that Althusser described. However, instead of calling persons to join in the reproduction of social class relations that maintain the nation-state, church practices invite new members to the church: children, adults, the healthy, the sick, the sinners, the saved. The church does so using ordinary language that states a need more than offers to fill it. The interpellative mode of this nondenominational church thus takes advantage of the church’s expansiveness. It is the very projections of the church onto the world, heterotopically, everywhere that makes it possible for the church to work everywhere at once while claiming that it exists institutionally nowhere, that it takes on no centralized administrative form. In the foregoing chapters and pages, then, I have shown that the combined utopian missions of religion and education overlap and are coproduced, and I have illustrated this coproduction with references to the operations of this mission group. I have also argued that evangelism and ethnography are closely related, at times inverted, and historically also coproduced. Whereas evangelism refracts outward into the world, ethnography reduces the world to a written form. It is around this matter of heterotopia, I suggest, that we can also see an inverted relationship between religion and education, and specifically between Christianity and anthropology. Whereas the nondenominational version of religion on which I have dwelled here speaks openly of a future utopia (heaven, the end of time), anthropology is less utopian but perhaps all the more hopeful that human inquiry can shape the world. At any rate, anthropological faith in schools is such a hope, one that accounts for, but also considers that it exceeds the limits of, religious form. Realistically, however, we need to concede that both versions of faith—indeed many such versions—exist simultaneously.

Epilogue

The story does not end here, however. Two events stand at the horizon, and more appear to be promised over the hill. Many East Africans I know favored the policies and politics of President George W. Bush. Many are equally hopeful about the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, whom some, particularly those living in western Kenya, consider to be one of their own—a Luo. East Africans are pleased because America’s foreign policy in Africa has shifted in recent years. Between 2001 and 2008, U.S. strategies increasingly used terms and ideas near and dear to many East Africans’ hearts: belief and knowledge that deep spiritual forces inhere in all dimensions of social life; belief and knowledge that good and evil are a part of history and of the human condition, everywhere; and belief and knowledge that people are able to, indeed must, work together to forge alliances to offset disease and poverty, war and destruction. East Africans I know—mainly Christian—are delighted that Americans are discovering religion—and not only ordinary Americans, but American politicians. They are encouraged that the U.S. government openly acknowledges the power of faith to help and heal people. Of course the extent to which such views directly inform U.S. policy or will continue to animate government goes beyond my analysis here; but at the rhetorical level, and institutionally in the legacy of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, the presence of faith is everywhere. One specific past event in which many East Africans delight is President George W. Bush’s February to March 2008 trip to the African subcontinent. President Bush used the occasion to make clear his administration’s reasons for using compassion and faith to deliver foreign aid: to keep Africa stable and, by association, to keep African government leaders favorable toward the West. Discussing his trip at the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation, the president put it this way: America is on a mission of mercy. We’re treating African leaders as equal partners. We expect them to produce measurable results. We expect them to fight corruption, and invest in the health and education of their people, and pursue market-based

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economic policies. This mission serves our security interests—people who live in chaos and despair are more likely to fall under the sway of violent ideologies. This mission serves our moral interests—we’re all children of God, and having the power to save lives comes with the obligation to use it.1

Having dinner with Tanzanian professionals, I discussed President Bush’s foreign policy. To my surprise, most of the dinner guests considered his approach not only Christian by also highly secular. The categories secular and religious were not mutually exclusive for these Tanzanians. Indeed, it was a particular form of Christian secularity that these Tanzanians (devout Christians) embraced—a form that linked Tanzania and much of East Africa through the legacy of colonialism, specifically mission schools, to the United Kingdom and the United States. They recognized that aspects of this history were foreign and domineering, and that a colonial legacy continued to inform religious politics in the present. However, instead of critiquing the past in the present, these Tanzanians, like the U.S. president himself, sought to foster international connections through religious ties. One person at the table credited U.S. policy between 2001 and 2008 with pushing radical Muslim groups out of Africa by forcing their attention back to the Middle East: In recent years we have seen fewer strong Muslim groups proselytizing and funding projects here in East Africa. They are no longer building new schools and hospitals, and no longer drilling wells and helping poor communities. Instead, they’re redirecting all of their efforts, and their money, back to re-securing their strongholds at home, in the Middle East.

This person continued by noting that such redirection gave some Tanzanians time to shore up further what he described as a liberal-secular nation-state. Indeed, he portrayed his country as part of the modern, secular world, committed to upholding principles of participatory democracy. To him secularity was not areligious but rather a particular positioning of religion within public life. It included integrating Christians and Muslims, who were all part of his own extended family. Understood in the context of my argument here, this Tanzanian’s remarks underscore how secular-modernity embeds religious forms in the activities of everyday life and is used to sustain particular kinds of religiosity. This embedding occurs no less in East Africa than in the United States, though to be sure not identically. The second recent event to which some East Africans looked was a White House faith-based conference held August 2008 in Dallas, Texas. Designed to introduce faith groups to and update them on how to apply for and use U.S. federal funds, the conference was geared mainly for U.S. domestic religious groups, but this did not stop Luo evangelists and other East Africans

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from seeing the event as possibly important for conducting and expanding their own work. In the past, nondenominational churchgoers—including Stinton College student missionaries from Texas who worked in Tanzania—have met annually or biannually in Dallas. The Kenyan evangelists introduced in Chapter Five used such occasions to evangelize Americans. The recent August event provided another opportunity for independent American congregations to bring international leaders to the United States. For our purposes, such occasions are opportunities through which to see how this ostensibly noncentralized church is structured and organized, and how visiting evangelists may—as Luo, for example, have—use the opportunity to bless and spiritually shape churchgoers in the United States. As for the present and immediate future, the fact that a Luo’s son (as western Kenyans see it) became president of the United States brings new promises of its own. Some East Africans see Barack Obama’s rise in government as indicative of a broader change that is needed—a change that they hope will result in the development of closer moral and spiritual connections between the United States and East Africa. Less certain for these East African Christians, however, is whether or how such a new “Luo” president will continue to support American faith work and missionaries. Already the rhetoric of faith-based work has elided into more ecumenical versions of human progress and hope. Hope, after all, not faith, was a call word of Obama’s presidential candidacy, and his early presidential agenda articulated the need “for religious people to translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values.”2 Although most policy analysts on both sides of the Atlantic consider that U.S. government support for faith-based initiatives will continue in some form, less certain is the tone of religiosity that the Obama administration will set. From the perspectives of local Luo evangelists, the hope would be that a “Luo American” president would recognize Luo elders in the state and in the church; or to put this more specifically, that such an American president would create a climate that could convince nondenominational American missionaries of East Africans’ educational capabilities and strong leadership skills. Perhaps the greater import of such an imagined future is that, should it come to pass, Kenyan-Luo evangelists might themselves claim success in having evangelized the United States. The birth of a son to a Luo father, no matter where he was born and no matter what his religion, is itself socially and patrilineally reproductive. A Columbia- and Harvard-educated son (Obama) of a Harvard-educated father (Obama’s) is, from Luo vantage points, extremely socially significant. If liberal-secular faith in schools took a Luo son away, perhaps the same might reshape the quality of connections between East Africa and the United States.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1.  Carter 1997; Kassimir 2001; Mundy 1998; author’s conversations with American missionaries in Tanzania, June 2002. See also Hearn 2002 and Wade 2002. 2.  Adas 2006: 397; Diouf 1997: 292–293; Escobar 1995: 163–167; J. Ferguson 2006: 71. 3.  Marshall 2001; Wolfensohn and Carey 2001; USAID 2004. 4.  Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims. Born in Geneva, Switzerland; raised in Nairobi, Kenya; and educated at Harvard in the 1950s, the Aga Khan— or His Highness Prince Karim al-Hussayni—inherited the office of Imamate from his grandfather in 1957. He currently leads the Ismaili community worldwide. 5.  World Faiths Development Dialogue, Development Dialogue, at http:// wbln0018.worldbank.org/developmentdialogue/developmentdialogueweb.nsf/ weblinks/YEON-5G4MTK?OpenDocument. See also “Serving the Poor in AfricaWorkshop with Christian Leaders: Talking Points for Mr. Callisto Madavo, Vice President, Africa Region, World Bank,” held in Nairobi, March 6, 2000, www .worldbank.org/afr/speeches/cm000306.htm. 6.  http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/01/ 20010129-2.html 7.  For examples of changing forms and points of western domination, see works by Adas (1989, 2006); Hardt and Negri (2001); Mastnak (2002); Scott (1998). 8.  Among these organizations were the Freedom from Religion Society and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. 9.  Field research, Uganda 2006. The comment “people without history” was an ironic twist on anthropologist Eric Wolf’s 1983 book Europe and the People Without History, which argued that expansionist Europeans saw “other cultures” as existing in unchanging time and thus as “primitive” and “without history.” Ugandans returned the phrase, portraying Americans as primitive and unaware of the past. 10.  I use public in three senses, to mean “popular,” “governmental,” and “open,” after Starrett (1998: 192). Throughout I draw on Birgit Meyer’s astute analyses of religion, media, and the public sphere (Meyer 2004; Meyer and Moors 2006: 1–25); and on Ellis and Haar’s (2005) discussion of religion and politics in Africa. In scope, this book represents an example of what Anna Tsing calls an “ethnography of global connections” (2005: xi). It describes the ideas, images, and interactions of a transnational community whose members share, in this particular case, a religious view that reflects historical and cultural heterogeneity.

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11.  See, for example, “President’s Letter on ‘Armies of Compassion’ Bill,” from the President to the Senate Majority Leader and the Senate Republican Leader, November 7, 2001, available at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives. gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011108-2.html; White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President and Senator Lieberman in Photo Opportunity After Meeting on Armies of Compassion,” February 7, 2002, 2:10 PM EST. 12.  My conceptualization here is in part a response to J. Ferguson’s (2006: 112) call that to understand “state power in the contemporary world . . . what is needed is an ethnography of processes and practices of encompassment, an ethnographic approach that would center the processes through which the government or the conduct of others (by state and nonstate actors) is both legitimated and undermined by reference to claims of superior spatial reach and vertical height.” 13.  For phenomenological insights on the body, see Thomas J. Csordas’s edited book, Embodiment and Experience (1994), especially the essays by Terence Turner and by M. L. Lyon and J. M. Barbalet. 14.  By showing how Muslim women seeking to restore orthodox Islamic virtues in Egypt came up against state-secularist ideals of agency, Mahmood (2005: 14) demonstrates that the liberatory model of the political subject in Western social theory is itself a particular cultural product. Specifically, such a model conceptualizes agency “in terms of subversion or resignification of social norms” and defines it as resistance to “dominating and subjectivating modes of power”—especially of the state. 15.  See also the work of Bruce Lincoln (2003), who points out that religious expression in public life tends to assume “maximal,” not “minimal,” forms. That is, public expressions of religiosity permeate all aspects of social life and do not restrict religious activity to a specialized, chiefly metaphysical or private sphere. 16.  Many Bourdieuian approaches to education downplay this second dimension: that pedagogic reasoning may positively value contradiction as a generative principle and, in so doing, may recursively inscribe a logic for its own redoing. 17.  As works by Schulz (2006: 139–140) and Moors (2006: 122–123) suggest. 18.  They were considered liberal because they recognized the validity of diverse theological views and because they favored a privatized view of religion that also accepted the possibility of biological evolution and human-driven eras of history. 19.  For a fuller picture of this story, see Adas 1989. 20.  The international Group of Eight (G8) forum consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 21.  Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy, 2003–2005: World Bank, An Agenda for Growth and Prosperity, Volume 1: Analysis and Policy Statement, February 19, 2003; available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/GHANAEXTN/Resources/ Ghana_PRSP.pdf. 22.  World Bank 2005. The World Bank’s 1999 Education Sector Strategy Report stated that “many factors contribute to the persistence of [educational inequality]: traditional values and beliefs among them” (12), and that “education status has an impact on the individual’s future income, fertility and health and . . . in the long run, on values, traditions and culture” (21).

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23.  A project that reinforced the idea of education as the sine qua non for ­effecting positive changes in society. 24.  The history of schooling in East Africa was closely tied to the movements and activities of Catholic and Protestant missionaries, mainly from denominational churches, not evangelical Christians of the more recent wave (Furley and Watson 1978; Jones 1925; Lugumba and Ssekamwa 1973). Klaus Fiedler (1994) usefully discusses the plurality of missions and their changing typologies from the late nineteenth century to the early 1990s. 25.  For discussion and evidence of missionaries’ ethnographic contributions, see LeRoy 1906 and 1909; discussed in Hodgson 2005. See also Higham 2003. 26.  Recorded and transcribed interview, conducted June 2002. 27.  Recorded and transcribed interview, conducted June 2002. 28.  This framework of understanding is very much like Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of contact zone (1999). 29.  See Doyle 2007; Nayenga 1981; Luboga 1962; Prince and Geissler 2001; Welbourn and Ogot 1966 for discussions of cwezi-kubandwa. 30.  Cohen 1988; Ndisi 1973. 31.  “Uganda to Continue Constructing Bujagali Power Station,” 2002. 32.  For examples of media reports on U.S. missionaries’ work overseas, see Eric Schmitt, “Helms Urges Foreign Aid Be Handled by Charities,” New York Times, January 11, 2001, Sec. A, Col. 6, p. 4; Daniel Bergner, “The Call” (on post-colonial missionaries), New York Times Magazine, January 29, 2006, Sec. 6, Col. 3, p. 40; Deborah Caldwell, “Should Christian Missionaries Heed the Call in Iraq?” New York Times, April 5, 2003, Sec. 4, Col. 1, Week in Review p. 14; “Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love,” New York Times, February 3, 2008, 16. 33.  For an interesting cross-national account of this, see Woodberry 2004. 34.  An argument made by Brouwer, Gifford, and Rose in Exporting the American Gospel (1996). 35.  The distinction I make between U.S. missionaries and East African evangelists throughout this book mirrors a general distinction made in East African settings between Americans as missionaries and Africans as evangelists. An evangelist is anyone who proclaims the Gospel. Missionaries are those who proclaim it away from their home. Chapter 2 1.  Stinton Christian College is a pseudonym. 2.  For more information on the term restorationist, see Hughes 1996, 2002; Marsden 1980: 178. 3.  The Christian Chronicle, http://www.christianchronicle.org/modules.php?na me=News&file=article&sid=621, accessed July 7, 2007; Lynn 2003: 16–18. 4.  For historical and ethnographic research on American evangelicalism, see Bramadat 2000; Carpenter 1990; Coleman 2005; Crapanzano 2000; Elisha 2008; Harding 2000; Luhrmann 2004; Marsden 1980; Reese 1985; Stevens 2001; Wood 2002; and Wyatt 2002. This is necessarily a partial list of a very large and rich literature.

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5.  Other examples include Helping Hands Foreign Missions and the International Health Care Foundation, the latter formerly called African Christian Hospitals. 6.  Drawn from Casey and Foster 2002; Hughes 1996; Jorgenson 1989; Marsden 1980. 7.  Personal communication with faculty at nondenominational Christian universities, 2003. 8.  Not unlike the more recent Gospel Broadcasting Network (http://www .gbntv.org). 9.  http://www.fuller.edu/news/html/revival_hour.asp 10.  In 1953 there were roughly equal numbers of denominational (that is, mainly ecumenical) and nondenominational (that is, mainly evangelical) missionaries, even though the number of nondenominational agencies in the 1950s was greater than the number of denominational agencies. 11.  The EFMA was later renamed and is known today as the Mission Exchange. See http://themissionexchange.org/get_connectedME_history.php 12.  The consortium included mission leaders from East Africa; see the Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, Collection 352, Box 44, File 2, p. 1 of letter dated November 6, 1968; and page 1 of memo dated April 16, 1969. 13.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 44, File 2, p. 1 of letter dated December 2, 1968. 14.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 26, File 2, p. 8, 1971. 15.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 26, File 2, p. 1, 1971. 16.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 26, File 2, p. 9, 1971. 17.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 26, File 2, p. 9, 1971. 18.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 26, File 2, p. 10, 1971. 19.  “Tanzanian Muslim Bodies Urge Faithful to Reject New Curriculum,” BBC Monitoring Report, September 3, 2008; “Konrad in the Ring with Muslims Tomorrow,” unattributed report from Tanzanian Weekly An-Nuur, August 29, 2008. 20.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 61, File 3, letter from Robert F. Rice to general audience, dated March 27, 1975. 21.  Recorded and transcribed interview conducted March 2003. 22.  Such courses did not disappear, as evidenced by the work of Frances, ­Allison, and James, who in Chapter One handed out Bible correspondence course information. 23.  See Chande 2000; Levtzion and Pouwels 2000. Moreover, for a long time Western missionaries, especially the French (Cooper 2006), focused their efforts on converting “animists,” not Muslims. By the 1980s, however, observers began to consider that Saudi-financed Islam was moving into the continent, starting with Egypt, Sudan, and Morocco and extending westward to areas of Mali, Niger, and northern Nigeria, and southward along the Swahili coast, from Kenya to southern Tanzania (Chande 2000; Levtzion and Pouwles 2000; Mbogoni 2004; Soares 2003). 24.  Arguably this shift reflects a dovetailing of Reagan-era political and religious interests that interpreted the expansion of Islam as evidence of amoral l­eadership

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and poor diplomacy (Lincoln 2003: 40–41). By the logic of 2 Chronicles 7:14, which Ronald Reagan read at both of his inaugurations, prayer and repentance would save Israel from destruction—much as, for the FFM at the time, the conversion of Muslims secured and protected Christendom. 2 Chronicles 7:14 reads, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 25.  Joyce 1981: 6. A copy of this document can be found in the Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 60, File 1. In the same collection, box, and file (dated July 20, 1970) can be found a copy of A Call to Prayer for the Evangelization of Muslims (FFM n.d.). 26.  Personal communications and fieldwork conducted as part of a previous project, 1991–1993. (See Stambach 2000.) 27.  Interviews, March 2003. 28.  Historical information on the college comes from the Texas Tech Southwest Collection and Archives. 29.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 352, Box 60, File 1. 30.  For examples of work on missions and empire, see Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Etherington 2005; Fischer-Tiné and Mann 2004; Hardt and Negri 2000. This is necessarily a partial list of a very large and rich literature. Chapter 3 1.  This excerpt is drawn from a recorded and transcribed interview. The vignette is compiled from students’ recollections of Block’s courses, from observations of Block’s classroom, and from syllabi and interview materials. To ensure confidentiality, and as is conventionally required of social science research, I have altered people’s identifying features. 2.  For some examples of missiological work that reflect anthropological training, see Flanders 2005; Hiebert 1994, 2004; Kraft 2003; and Lingenfelter and ­Lingenfelter 2003. 3.  This quote comes from Monthly Missiological Reflection #32, an essay that Amory had his students read. 4.  http://www.ram-wan.net/html/home.htm 5.  Matthew 28:19—from a set of verses known as the Great Commission (see Chapter Two). 6.  Matthew 24:14 reads, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (New International Version). 7.  These ten reasons are the subsection titles of Kraft’s first chapter, “Why Anthropology for Cross-Cultural Witnesses?” (1–13). 8.  Doxa, in Bourdieu’s analysis (1977: 166), is “that which is taken for granted.” Ordinary people perceive doxa to be natural and immutable; but doxa is, according to Bourdieu, in fact culturally constituted. 9.  See Bowie 2000 for an excellent discussion of the integrated histories of interpretivist-secular anthropology and Christianity.

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10.  This is of course not a coincidence. Professors Block and Amory, also students in the 1980s, studied anthropology when such formulations predominated. 11.  I am grateful to Noah Theriault, doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; his thoughts about secularmodernity inform my reflections on nondenominational Christianity here. 12.  Analytically, Christian witness is a signifying practice, a creative mode that produces what it knows and enacts. It draws in creative and expansive ways on the liberalist traditions of anthropology, including the notion that to see is to believe, to experience is to know, and to translate is to bear witness, whether as testament or as ethnography. Unlike mainstream anthropology, however, Christian witness carries an expressive mode that seeks morally to transcend what it creates. It is interested in discerning the divine core of a Christian world. Christian witness is a form of engagement that expresses a will, not a habit or wont—a will of being, not a disciplinary practice, or at least not only this. Understood as a will, Christian witness embodies what it objectifies (as practice theory describes) but also conflates thinking and acting, body sense and body learning into a self-regarded mode of being a-political, or to put it in performative terms, of being a shoo-in or a natural (compare, on performativity, Lambek 2000; Meyer 2004; Ferguson 1999; on Christianity, Asad 1993 and Cannell 2005). 13.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, Collection 165, Box 11, File 5. 14.  Kraft, for instance, held a doctorate from Hartford Seminary, where the theological bent of teaching was more liberal than at Stinton College. 15.  Compare Webb Keane’s description (2007) of Christian moderns in the very different setting of Indonesia. 16.  According to Asenath Bole Odaga’s English-Dholuo Dictionary (1997), Bible translates as both Muma and bug Nyasaye; and according to an older elementary grammar produced in 1910 by Mill Hill missionaries, ölo öko means “to pour out or throw away” and ölo opong means “to fill” (Members of St. Joseph’s Society: 1910). Perhaps in the form of “to throw away” ölo pertains in sound only to the Holocaust. I should note, however, that Luo Kenyans working with these Americans called the Bible “Bible” and were not aware of the use of ölo in relation to Holocaust. Chapter 4 1.  Personal correspondence, August 1, 2000. Frank Bolton is a pseudonym. 2.  Recorded and transcribed interview, June 19, 2002. 3.  Recorded and transcribed interview, June 13, 2002. 4.  From the same interview. 5.  Senior missionaries, in contrast, knew the language. 6.  Recorded and transcribed interview, June 13, 2002. 7.  I am grateful to Lisa Bintrim, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for pointing out these connections among the works of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Weber. 8.  Chama cha Mapinduzi is Kiswahili for the Party of the Revolution.

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9.  See Said, n.d., http://www.islamtz.org/nyaraka/Elimu2.html, Tables 1 through 4, data for which was obtained from Dar es Salaam City Council, UDSM Students Directories, and Ministry of National Education. 10.  See Phillips and Stambach (2008) for further discussion, and for reproduction of this image. 11.  ”Public-Private Partnerships in Education.” http://go.worldbank.org/ ANNUSMWCD0. 12.  Interview with a Tanzanian schoolteacher, June 17, 2002. 13.  Episodes of mass hysteria among students have been reported regionally for many years, for example, “Hysteria Affects Mwanza Students” 1972; “Mysterious Disease Hits Mpanda School” 1992; Ihucha 2005; Nkolimwa 2006; Smith 2004. 14.  “Tanzanian Muslim Bodies Urge Faithful to Reject New Curriculum,” BBC Monitoring Report, September 3, 2008; “Konrad in the Ring with Muslims Tomorrow,” unattributed report from Tanzanian Weekly An-Nuur, August 29, 2008. 15.  Interview, June 19, 2002. 16.  A note about East African regionalism: In describing African expressions of this church, I am dealing with three geocultural complexes, each of which is conventionally subsumed under the label “East African”: cultural practices in Kilimanjaro, including Chagga ideas about “ngoso secrets” and kupandwa na wazimu; cultural beliefs and practices involving jochiende (unhappy, haunting ghosts or spirits) in Luo-speaking parts of Kenya (see Chapter Five); and the cultural beliefs of Ugandan Basoga and Baganda involving mizumu (ancestors) and cwezi-kubandwa, a spirit possession complex associated with an ancient dynasty (see Chapter Six). Each of these complexes overlaps the others. In fact, their “geographic” component points more to the place of their historical associations than to any fixed geography. Luo, in particular, span all three countries (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), and it is not unusual for well-educated Chagga businesspeople to work in Nairobi and, to a lesser extent, in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and for many Ugandans to work in Tanzania and Nairobi. My point here is that notwithstanding the different histories and cultural beliefs of the Bantu (Chagga, Baganda, Basoga) and Nilotic (Luo) groups, these beliefs and practices are regional, and cultural practices and international boundaries do not fully equate. Chapter 5 1.  NBC (a pseudonym) is not the only unaffiliated Christian college in the region, nor is it the only educational institution with links to U.S. churches. 2.  Estimates drawn from interviews conducted May 2003 with Kenyan evangelists and American missionaries working at NBC. 3.  2007 estimate, The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, https:// www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html 4.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, Collection 447 and Collection 81. 5.  This is the case in all nondenominational restorationist congregations, including those in the United States, as noted in Chapter Two.

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6.  For details about land tenure and allocation, see Cohen and Odhiambo 1989; Fallers 1965; Luboga 1962; Ndisi 1973: 11–22; and Parkin 1978. 7.  From p. 46 of NBC instructor’s 2002 class notes. 8.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 91, Box 8, File 59. 9.  From p. 37 of NBC instructor’s 2002 class notes. 10.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 447. 11.  Recorded and transcribed interview, May 2003. 12.  I am grateful to Kristin Phillips for helping me to clarify this point. Chapter 6 1.  This letter is stored in the church’s archive and is not formally cited here to protect confidentiality. 2.  This vignette is drawn from a recorded interview, June 2006. 3.  Compare Bhabha 2006. 4.  Education for All (EFA) is an international policy initiative aimed at making schooling available for everyone worldwide by 2015. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are international policy targets aimed at reducing poverty and improving standards of living worldwide, also by 2015. EFA was launched in 1990, reaffirmed in 2000, and also that year, partly integrated into aspects of the MDGs, which were established in September 2000. Partners on both initiatives include national governments, UNESCO, and the World Bank. 5.  For instance, Alice Lakwena, leader of what developed into the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has wreaked years of havoc and terror in the northern areas of Uganda, had drawn followers from this part of Uganda. 6.  For illustrations of the way religion and education prefigure and produce a politics of difference in other settings, see especially Bowen 2007; Kaplan 2006; Lukose 2009; Maxwell 2007; Ngwane 2001; Simpson 2003; and Starrett 1998. 7.  Some of these congregations meet in people’s houses, others meet in converted shops and stores, and others meet in specifically designated church buildings. “Sixty-plus” congregations was the evangelists’ estimate in 2006. 8.  Materials and quoted information in this section come from observations conducted April 2004 and June 2006. 9.  Proverbs 23:1–5 reads, “When you sit to dine with a ruler, note well what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony. Do not crave his delicacies, for that food is deceptive. Do not wear yourself out to get rich; have the wisdom to show restraint. Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone, for they will surely sprout wings and fly off to the sky like an eagle.” 1 John 3:7 reads, “Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.” 10.  See Ashforth 2005; Green 2007; Sanders 2008 on witch-finding practices in the region. 11.  Acts 18:3 reads, “Paul went to see them, and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them.” 12.  From an interview with a senior Ugandan evangelist, recorded June 2006. The figure of $75,000 is estimated in 2006 U.S. dollars.

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13.  From an interview with a senior Ugandan evangelist, recorded June 2006. 14.  See Cheney (2007) for a fuller discussion of this campaign. 15.  See, for instance, articles on health and training in the June 2007 issue of the popular Ugandan journal Straight Talk. I’m grateful to Kristen Molyneaux for drawing these sources to my attention. 16.  “A field,” writes Bourdieu (2005: 30), is an array of forces within which “agents occupy positions that statistically determine the positions they take with respect to the field, these position-takings being aimed either at conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field.” 17.  Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Collection 165, Box 2, File 47; and Collection 165, Box 104, File 6. 18.  For discussions of the history of Catholic-Protestant relations in Uganda, see Kassimir 2001; Tuma n.d.; Tripp forthcoming; Twaddle 1978; Waliggo 1995 (in Hansen and Twaddle 1995). 19.  “Police Start Hunt for Wired Pastors,” Uganda Daily Monitor, July 11, 2007, 1; “How Pastors Excite Their Flock with the Electric Touch Machine,” New Vision (Uganda), July 13, 2007, 29. 20.  I was present on this occasion, sitting on the women’s side of the prayer hall, divided from the men’s side by a plywood panel. I was not able to see or later contact the speaker to follow up. 21.  In 2006, the estimated gross domestic product per capita in Uganda was $1,900 (CIA World Factbook, 2008, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the -world-factbook/index.html). In 2008, 1 U.S. dollar equaled 1,567 Ugandan shillings. 22.  The comments of this board member and his peer, quoted above, are paraphrased from interviews conducted June 2006. 23.  Conversation, June 2006. 24.  See footnote 13, Chapter Four. Students’ mass hysteria is often expressed regionally in terms of spirit possession and witchcraft. Chapter 7 1.  Brad Weiss’s insights in Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barberships (2009) ­illustrate this well. 2.  At my own alma mater, the University of Chicago, a field map hangs in Haskell Hall. Portions of that field map serve as the inlay of the words Faith in Schools on the cover of this book. 3.  Compare Kaplan 2006. 4.  See the web-archived White House Fact Sheet on U.S. Africa Policy, February 2008: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/ 02/20080214-11.html Epilogue 1.  See the web-archived document “President Bush Discusses Trip to Africa at the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation,” February 26, 2008, http://georgewbush -whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/02/20080226.html 2.  First posted January 20, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/additional

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Index

Africa Inland Mission (AIM), 46–49, 51, 137, 146 AIDS highway, 36 Althusser, Louis, 185, 187–188, 192 American foreign policy (see policy) American hegemony, 129, 133, 146, 165, 169 American imperialism, 16–17, 27–28, 62, 151 American missionaries: Africans’ views of, 51, 149, 151, 154–155, 167; anthropo­ logical training of, 86–87, 93; and self-reflection, 65–66; textbooks used by, 75–76, 78–86; and their views of East Africans, 42, 49, 132–133; use of anthropology by, 17–18, 30, 46, 64, 65–71, 75–87, 92, 96, 135–136, 146–150. See also Christian witness: as mode of evangelizing American philanthropy, 139, 172, 182 anthropology: and education, 11–16, 22–24, 30, 53, 58, 96, 156–158, 176, 181–192; history and foundations of, 5, 15, 72, 73–76; public interest, 72; and religion, 11–12, 22–24, 39, 73–75, 81–82; the teaching of, 65–73. See also American missionaries: use of anthropology by; Christian witness: and anthropology Apocalypse (see time: end of days) Appiah, Anthony, 61–62 artwork, students’, 105, 109 Asad, Talal, 11–12, 73–76, 152–153, 188 audit culture, 71, 73, 76 autochthony, 132–133, 143–144 Basoga, 25–26, 77, 89, 205n16 baptism, 26, 27, 112, 113, 114, 137, 160, 164, 174 Bible, use of to teach English (see language) Bible correspondence courses, 19, 53–55, 137 Bible study, 19–20, 160, 169, 174 biblical time (see time) Bornstein, Erica, 189

Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 60, 78, 115, 118–119, 159, 168, 185, 199n16, 203n8, 207n16 boys’ initiation (Chagga), 124–125 bridewealth, 94, 111–112, 128, 134–135, 144 Bush, George W., 2, 121, 193–194 Bush, George W. H., 95 Cannell, Fenella, 81–82 Casanova, José, 53, 152, 186 Chagga: boys’ initiation, 124–125; child­ hood lessons, 122–125; girls’ initiation, 124–125; location of, 26; marriage, 111– 112, 128; and religion, 99, 125, 205n16 children: and Chagga lessons, 122–125; civic enculturation of, 168–169; English lessons for, 3–4, 6–9, 101–108; and missionaries’ metaphors of church maturation, 84, 132–133; recruitment of, 10–11, 20–22, 120–122, 191 chira, 25, 146–147, 150 Christian colleges, 4–5, 7, 27, 30, 46, 57, 59–63, 135–136, 150 Christian family, 38–40, 53, 59, 68, 106, 109–110, 127, 134, 138, 157, 159, 170, 187 Christian media, 43, 45–46, 54–55, 57, 103, 168 Christian modernity, 69, 94, 176, 183 Christian witness: and anthropology, 5, 28, 75–76, 81–86, 95–96, 136, 181–184; and church-state relations, 130, 176; defined, 4, 204n12; East African concepts of, 164–165, 176; as mode of evangelizing, 10–11, 57–58, 81, 104, 146, 158–159, 192; and secrecy, 125, 182. See also churchstate relations; Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives church growth, 46, 84, 137, 136–138, 139–143 church organization, 133–134, 144–145, 157–158 church ownership, 132, 142–145, 149–152, 175 “church planting,” 37

226

index

church service, 36–38, 159–164 church-state relations: changing, 5–6, 42, 52, 54, 185–189; a Christian college lecture on, 59–60; and Christian witness, 130, 176; in East Africa, 50, 52–53, 139, 157, 176. See also Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives cien, 25, 150 citizenship, 12, 14, 24, 60–61, 159, 167–168 civilizing mission, 14, 17, 41–42, 45, 52, 62, 131, 165 Cohen, David, 145 Cold War, 2, 57, 156, 169 Coleman, Simon, 39 colonialism, 3, 14–17, 50–51, 165–166, 189, 194 Comaroff, Jean, 81–82, 203n30 Committee to Assist Ministry Education Overseas (CAMEO), 47 confession, 161–162 contact zone, 66, 80, 130, 177, 182, 201n28 conversion 16–17, 26, 39, 50, 77, 86, 111– 114, 121, 129, 174, 202n23 correspondence courses (see Bible corres­ pondence courses) corruption, 36, 100–101, 149, 193–194 Crapanzano, Vincent, 95 cross-cultural communication, 66, 82–83, 86, 111, 128, 134–135, 146–148 cultural encounter (see contact zone) cultural equivalences, 90–92, 95, 129, 130, 134, 136, 152 cultural proximity to the Bible (missionary conceptions of), 62, 78, 99, 147 cwezi-kubandwa, 25, 99, 136, 201n29, 205n16 deprivatization of religion, 53, 152 Descartes, Réné, 13 development, political and economic, 1, 14, 135, 167, 187 Dewey, John, 121, 185 dispensationalism, 8, 41, 44–45, 57 drama, 8–9, 105, 107 Dundas, Charles, 124 Durkheim, Émile, 11, 77–78, 147–148, 159, 185 “E-scale evangelism,” 83–84, 86, 92, 147– 148, 150, 158 ecumenical Christianity, 14, 44–45, 47–51, 68–69, 75, 139, 152–153, 162, 195

education (see American missionaries: anthropological training of; anthropology: and education; religion; schooling) Education for All, 156, 206n4 Education for Self-Reliance, 129 encounter (see contact zone) English (see language: English) enlightenment, 13–14, 74, 100 ethnography, 4, 17–18, 24, 28, 180 evangelist, 201n35 Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies (EFMA), 46–48 Evangelical Missions Information Service (EMIS), 47 evangelization of Muslims, 54–57 evangelization of the U.S. by East Africans, 30, 142–144, 195 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 93, 147 faith-based policies (see Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives; policy: faith-based) faith-based public service, 42, 53–54, 58, 159, 194–195 faith missions, 41–42, 44 Falwell, Rev. Jerry, 43 fees (see school fees) Fellowship of Faith for the Muslims (FFM), 54–57 Ferguson, James, 200n12 fieldwork, 6, 17, 24–29, 66, 68, 81, 82, 90–95, 136, 182, 136 Foucault, Michel, 40, 109, 115, 188 The Fundamentals, 43 funding (see school funding) Geertz, Clifford, 11–12, 67, 73–76, 77 Geschiere, Peter, 143–144 girls’ initiation (Chagga), 124 global Christianity, 26, 27, 43, 46, 52, 54, 57, 78, 85–86, 132, 134–135, 157, 159, 176 global evangelism (see global Christianity) global Islam, 56–57 Graham, Rev. Franklin, 43 Gramsci, Antonio, 185 Great Awakening (First and Second), 44 Great Commission, 56, 101 Gutmann, Bruno, 122–124 Guyer, Jane, 88 Hannerz, Ulf, 26 health education, 168, 170–171

index heterotopia (and the spatial indeterminacy of the church), 29, 40–41, 43, 53, 109, 133–134, 144–145, 158 history: of church in Kenya, 136–140; of colonialism as studied in East Africa, 166; evangelical Christian notions of, 57; of faith-based policy, 185–187; of nondenominational churches, 30, 42–54, 137, 156. See also anthropology: history and foundations of humanitarian aid, 48, 58, 88 identity, 150, 155–156, 158–159, 182, 190 independence movements, East African, 48–51 initiation (see Chagga: boys’ initiation, girls’ initiation) intelligent design, 92 Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA), 44–50, 52, 54 “Jesus method of instruction,” 4, 58, 81, 104, 191 Kaplan, Sam, 12, 41, 207n3 Kennedy, John F., 169 Kenyatta, Jomo, 50 King, Rev. Martin Luther, Jr., 43, 63–64 Kiswahili (see language: Kiswahili) Kluckhohn, Clyde, 76 Ku Klux Klan, 61 Lambek, Michael, 74–76 land ownership, 145, 174–175 language: English, 7–9, 20–21, 101, 102– 103, 110, 115–119, 126–127; Kiswahili, 7, 102, 114, 115–117; missionaries’ study of, 46, 82, 90–93; and nationalism, 114; policy in Tanzania, 114, 115–119; and politics, 119, 122; and religious identity, 19, 190; use of Bible to teach, 6–8, 21–22, 53, 80, 126–127 Laubach, Frank C., 54 learning centers, 103–104 Lincoln, Bruce, 74–75, 200n12 Luo: and evangelization of the U.S., 142–144, 195; and land ownership, 145; marriage, 93–94; missionization of, 93; patrilineality of, 145, 150–151, 195; political organization, 144–145 Mahmood, Saba, 12, 200n12

227

maps: of field locations, 65, 95, 136, 140, 184, 207n2; of Islam, 56; of world, 109 marriage: Chagga, 111–112, 128; Luo, 93–94, 134–135 Mbiti, John, 148 Meyer, Birgit, 199fn10 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 156, 206n4 missionaries (see American missionaries) Mkapa, Benjamin, 51, 118 Moi, Daniel arap, 51 Moore, Sally Falk, 124–125 Munn, Nancy, 87 Museveni, Yoweri, 50, 51 Muslim: community, 29; conversion to Christianity, 42, 112–114; land ownership, 174–175; missionaries (da‘wah), 16; parents, 21, 110, 120; prayer, 171; schools, 17; students, 9, 106. See also evangelization of Muslims Mwinyi, Ali Hassan, 51, 117 National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), 46–47 nation-state schooling (see schooling) ngoso, 124–125, 126, 205n16 nondenominational Christianity: defined, 39–40, 44; and gender relations, 47; and restorationists’ prohibitions against instrumental music, 47 Nyamnjoh, Francis, 143–144 Nyerere, Julius, 50, 116, 129 Obama, Barack, 193, 195 Ocholla-Ayayo, A.B.C., 93 Odhiambo, A. S., 145 Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), 2, 58, 186, 193, 194, 195, 186, 193, 195 Ogot, B. A., 93 pamphleteering, 19–22 parachurch organizations, 41, 158 parents, 21, 94, 110, 121 participant-observation, 5, 6, 17, 96 patrilineality, 145, 150–151, 191 pedagogical church, 184 Pels, Peter, 130 Pentecostalism, 47, 51, 140–141, 157, 170 Phelps-Stokes Fund, 45 Piot, Charles, 69 points of contact, 66, 77, 78, 80, 82, 86, 87–88, 129

228

index

policy: American foreign, 1, 121, 151, 171, 193–194; anthropological study of, 72; colonial, 14; development, 15, 187; faith-based, 5, 27, 30, 185–187; global education, 157, 183, 206n4; language, 7, 20, 114, 115–119 politics (see church-state relations; policy: American foreign; religion: and politics) polygamy (see polygyny) polygyny, 82, 93, 109, 137–138, 144, 150, 165, 176 portfolios, 72, 108–110 postmodern Christianity, 43, 69 Pratt, Mary Louise, 80, 130 prayer, 22, 35–37, 171 preschool, 141, 168 private schooling (see schooling: private) Protestantism, 11, 39, 44, 146, 190 public interest anthropology (see anthro­ pology: public interest) public schools (see schooling: public) Ranger, Terence, 28, 181 Reagan, Ronald, 202–203n24 recruitment to church: of adults, 19–21, 110, 138, 170–171; of children, 6, 121 religion: American missionaries’ concep­ tions of, 75; East African conceptions of, 25–26, 99–101; and politics, 4, 29, 43, 52, 117–122; and public life, 3, 5–6, 16, 29, 53, 183; and secularity (see secularism). See also anthropology: and religion; church-state relations religious tensions, 4, 17, 45, 47–49, 52, 54, 56, 117–122, 170–171, 190 restorationism, 39–40, 42, 44, 52, 127, 133–134, 137 Robbins, Joel, 81–82 Roy, Olivier, 62 sacrifice, 91–92, 147, 154 salaries, 49, 165 salvation, 53, 100 school (see schooling) school fees, 134, 171–172 school funding, 139, 142, 169, 172 school motto, 172 schooling: and civic enculturation, 2, 167– 168; Muslims’, 17; nation-state, 2, 14, 24, 157, 159; private, 118, 119–120, 139–143, 141; public, 102–103, 141; and religious

inculcation, 53–54; in Uganda, 171–176; in western Kenya, 139–143 secrecy, 122, 124, 125, 182 secularism: and anthropology, 87–90, 95–96, 135; v. Christian modernity, 68–69; and education, 23–24; history of, 13–17; and the loss of African culture, 93; and religion, 152–153, 182–184, 194 service-learning, 4–5, 6, 7, 17, 62–63, 71–73, 75, 85, 96 Shipton, Parker, 144–145, 147 singing, 6–7, 47, 106, 108, 160, 168 social gospel, 43 students: and behavior issues, 107, 141–142; conversion of, 111–114; Muslim, 9, 106– 107; at Nairobi Bible College, 134 teachers: East African, 3, 120–121; at Nairobi Bible College, 134; and their credentialing in Kenya, 141; and their views on religion, 31; in Uganda, 175 teaching methods, 6–10, 11, 19, 103–108, 121 technology, 167–171 tentmaking, 56, 57, 162 textbooks (see American missionaries: textbooks used by) Theological Education by Extension (TEE), 47 time: anthropological analysis of, 81, 87–90; and cultural distance, 88; end of days, 39, 45, 71, 73, 77, 163, 165; missionaries’ concepts of, 69–71, 73, 77–82, 84, 88, 94, 163, 191. See also biblical time Tocqueville, Alexis de, 29 UNESCO, 206n4 “unevangelical” evangelism, 63 USAID, 2 Vatican, The, 169 Weber, Max, 67, 78, 115, 145–146, 148, 159 Weiss, Brad, 4, 185 witchcraft, 67, 123, 154–155, 156, 162, 165, 174–177, 182 World Anthropologies Network (WAN), 72 World Bank, 1–2, 3, 15, 118, 119, 138, 185, 200n22, 206n4 World Council of Churches (WCC), 47 World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), 2, 138–139 worldview, 66–69, 76, 79, 83, 121, 135, 14