A journal article in the latest issue of the American Ethnologist entitled “The gospel of self-help” looks at how churches in Uganda have been promoting a message of economic self-sufficiency. The author, Lydia Boyd suggests that this kind of messaging diverges from earlier frameworks of moral-economic behavior in Uganda that emphasized reciprocity and the social value of dependency. She argues that because of this shift in church messaging, gospel musicians, who make most of their money from sponsorship are now struggling to make a living. She uses this example as a way to think about how we frame economic inequality and the role that religious leaders and rhetoric have in shaping/justifying particular types of dependent subjects.
Given the Blog’s work at the intersection of critical humanitarianism, development on the African continent, and religion, we were very interested in this paper. Some initial responses from the team and colleagues are highlighted below and we invite you to also review the paper and offer your own thoughts in the comments section.
Reflections on the piece by Dr Chammah Kaunda (Pentecostal Pastor at University of Kwa-ZuluNatal):
This article seeks to demonstrate that dependency is cultural value in Uganda and that the self-help gospel is in line with western neoliberal capitalism. Both of these arguments are problematic. Dependency emerged as a colonial power imbalance; it is a legacy of colonialism. Within African cultural discourse, self-help has been construed as communitarianism (see Kwame Gyekye for more). Communitarianism was grounded in self-help that promotes the well-being of the community of life (sindima). Therefore, Pentecostal self-help, while implicated in individualism, is not new … nor is it life-giving as it promotes an individualist economy as well as new forms of economic inequality. It would have been helpful if the author defined specific Pentecostal classifications. Without such classifications, the paper feels very essentialist, trying to prove a point that is not clearly substantiated. Moreover, this kind of thinking about the prosperity gospel as self-help forgets that it is a reconstruction of extended family model in which the pastor is the beneficiary of the economic struggle of the poor. Finally, most Pentecostal musicians function exactly like non-Pentecostals. This means that it might be necessary to understand self-help not as theology but as part of the secular imagination. Pentecostal represent a broad range of people, like other groups, and we must be careful not to generalize everything that even one Pentecostal does as representing “Pentecostal belief.”
Reflections on the piece by Edwin Adjei (University of Ghana – Legon):
Some parts of the paper got me scratching my head a bit. It is not very specific by what it means by Pentecostalism, instead mixing Pentecostal and charismatic traditions. Secondly, I have not noticed clear differences between the way Pentecostal musicians make and sell their music and how people of other denominations do theirs. It would have helped the article to clarify some of these differences.