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Church, State, and “Native Liberty” in the Belgian Congo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Gale Kenny  and
Tisa Wenger
Gale Kenny*
Affiliation:
Barnard College
Tisa Wenger
Affiliation:
Yale Divinity School
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This essay describes a religious freedom controversy that developed between the world wars in the Belgian colony of the Congo, where Protestant missionaries complained that Catholic priests were abusing Congolese Protestants and that the Belgian government favored the Catholics. The history of this campaign demonstrates how humanitarian discourses of religious freedom—and with them competing configurations of church and state—took shape in colonial contexts. From the beginnings of the European scramble for Africa, Protestant and Catholic missionaries had helped formulate the “civilizing” mission and the humanitarian policies—against slavery, for free trade, and for religious freedom—that served to justify the European and U.S. empires of the time. Protestant missionaries in the Congo challenged the privileges granted to Catholic institutions by appealing to religious freedom guarantees in colonial and international law. In response, Belgian authorities and Catholic missionaries elaborated a church-state arrangement that limited “foreign” missions in the name of Belgian national unity. Both groups, however, rejected Native Congolese religious movements—which refused the authority of the colonial church(es) along with the colonial state—as “political” and so beyond the bounds of legitimate “religion.” Our analysis shows how competing configurations of church and state emerged dialogically in this colonial context and how alternative Congolese movements ultimately challenged Belgian colonial rule.

Keywords

Congosecularismchurch and statecolonialismreligious freedomhumanitarianismBelgiummissionariesreligion
Type
Archival Mediations and Meditations
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 156 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2020

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References

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50 We are grateful to an anonymous CSSH reviewer for the interpretive suggestions informing this paragraph. As our reviewer noted, it seems germane that Evans-Pritchard's classic study of witchcraft among the Azande, whose Central African homelands overlapped with the Belgian Congo, appeared in 1937, just a decade after this controversy (Nelson, Jack E., Christian Missionizing and Social Transformation: A History of Conflict and Change in Eastern Zaire (New York: Praeger, 1992Google Scholar). On magic, sorcery, and witchcraft as colonial discourses, see Chireau, Yvonne Patricia, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Styers, Randall, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Román, Governing Spirits; Ramsey, Kate, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Palmié, Stephan, The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of contemporary humanitarian discourse on witchcraft in Ghana, see Roxburgh, Shelagh, “Empowering Witches and the West: The ‘Anti-Witch Camp Campaign’ and Discourses of Power in Ghana,” Critical African Studies 10, 2 (2018): 130–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2017.1415155. On the colonial imbrications of the study of religion, see Chidester, David, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996)Google Scholar; Murray, David, “Object Lessons: Fetishism and the Hierarchies of Race and Religion,” in Mills, Kenneth and Grafton, Anthony, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 199–217Google Scholar; Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West; and Chidester, David, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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63 Emory Ross to Governor General, 18 July 1932, box 289, IMC-CBMS, SOAS.

64 CPC Circular, “Memorandum to Colonial Minister,” 24 Feb. 1933, CPC Papers, RG432, box 81, folder 2, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia. This is the French version of the memorandum, which is slightly different and dated two months earlier than the English translation cited below.

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74 Conseil Protestant du Congo, “Minutes- Meeting 15, Léopoldville” (22 Jan. 1937), CPC Records, Yale.

75 Conseil Protestant du Congo, “Minutes-Meeting 18, Léopoldville” (11 Feb. 1940), CPC Records, Yale.

76 While most Protestant missionaries eagerly accepted the school subsidies, others declined them on the grounds that they violated the separation of church and state. This issue caused significant conflict in some missions. Subsidies brought improved resources and opportunities to Congolese Protestants, but also brought the missions more closely into the orbit of the colonial government. In the longer term, as the independent Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaïre) continued the policy, educational subsidies helped keep Congolese Protestants close to the government and made it difficult for them to criticize the abuses of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. See Nelson, Christian Missionizing; Fast, Anicka, “Sacred Children and Colonial Subsidies: The Missionary Performance of Racial Separation in Belgian Congo, 1946–1959,” Missiology 46, 2 (2018): 124–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1177/0091829618761375; Kabongo-Mbaya, L’Église Du Christ Au Zaïre; Boyle, Patrick M., “School Wars: Church, State, and the Death of the Congo,” Journal of Modern African Studies 33, 3 (1995): 451–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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79 Kabongo-Mbaya, L'Eglise du Christ Au Zaïre, 100–2; Bita Lihun Nzundu, Missions Catholiques.

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