I’m behind my deadline for the next installment. It is only half written… I came upon some snags I was not expecting in the construction of the next phase of the story. So, I apologize. I’m hoping to have it complete by this time tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m going to hint at a future line I plan to develop… for discussion.
I would be remiss if I centered a story around Africa and Pentecostal religion without mentioning the epidemic of accusations of child (and other) witch-craft going on in parts of Africa, and the child-abuse that often results. This isn’t going to be a big story line, but readers will learn something about it, and get a chance to think about what might be behind it. The trend finally got some major media attention this week. Apparently a father whose son was accused of sorcery tried to force him to drink acid and burned his son’s face to the point of disfigurement in the process. The best discussion is always at Bartholomew’s Notes. (The Wild Hunt also has a round-up). I’m not sure if this is a big issue in the Saharan stretches of Chad. I suspect it isn’t. But I plan to address it anyway. You can call that “license”, I guess.
My take on this is that the majority of American Pentecostals are unaware of this problem and would largely disapprove of those developments if they did know about them. I don’t know how many would feel a responsibility to try and do something to stop it – or even how many are in a position to do so if they did feel that responsibility. I do think that Pentecostalism – as harmless as it may be in a western, educated, politically stable place – has some characteristics that make it vulnerable to harmful trends – especially in a third-world nation where animistic and magical religion still have a strong foothold.
Pentecostals, more so than other evangelicals, take seriously the notion that spirits are active in the real world. They are apt to see most any difficulty or problem as the result of spirits harassing or even possessing non-Christians or insufficiently protected Christians. It’s less true that they disbelieve in the Gods and spirits of other religions than that they see the Gods and spirits of other religions as being the same as demons of the Christian religion. And they see this as relatively literal. Spirit-magic works, because real demonic spirits are involved in it. It isn’t a far jump to there, for an African pentecostal, to see tribal animistic or ancestor-worshiping religions as sorcery or witchcraft, and to fear them. And, when prayer or other harmless approaches do not solve the problems attributed to witchcraft, then it isn’t a big jump to more extreme responses to fear. There may be more to it than that. Of course there is. Nothing in life is so simple. And this is largely guesswork – guesswork that I am adamantly not going to place in the mouth of a fictional expert to propound upon as though it were scientific fact. That’s what Dan Brown does.
It is worth being aware that the “excorcism” or “deliverance” practices of American Pentecostals are not always entirely harmless, and not always simple to distinguish from the rare case that becomes actual abuse. That’s one issue – it’s hard to know, whether for the outsider or the insider – what lines are there to cross and where in that gray area there is a line being crossed. I’ve never discussed it with a clinician, but I suspect that the therapeutic value of these “deliverances” is very poor, with only superficial, short-term “good” results to those who are “delivered”. I also suspect that, partly because it may sometimes displace the role of needed real therapy, and partly because it has the potential to reinforce a neuroses. But I won’t talk much about any of that.
I’m sure there is some anthro-, socio-, or psych-ology that explains why children are often the target of the kind of witch-hunts that are becoming such a problem in Africa. I suspect it has something to do a community’s response to poverty, but I guess there is probably more to it than that. I hope to learn more about it as I go, so I can treat it seriously.
Anyhoo, I’m not going to start a metaphorical witch-hunt of my own. This difficulty with the Pentecostal mindset in context of a foreign culture is worth mentioning – but I’m not going to lay all of those ills at the door of every pentecostal believer. I’m just going to give a couple of fictional believers a chance to struggle with the issue and maybe even make decisions that will have an impact for good or ill in their fictional world.
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