Religion verses Relations

I recently was reading a friends blog about her experience in Africa.  This post was dealing with the nature of the church in Africa that brought up some ideas on which I wanted to comment.  She was frustrated with a range of things, many of which are frustrations I share.  The biggest was the popularity of “Prosperity Gospels,” which was recently spoken of as the worst religious idea of this decade in The Washington Post.

However, amidst the frustrations of locals becoming pastors, orphanage caretakers, or teachers so that they have a steady job that can pay, the real frustration was that Africans struggle with understanding Christianity as a relationship and not a religion.  I think this is the wrong way view Christianity.  The religion/relationship dichotomy fails to see the function of religion/s.  Marx’s definition of religion serves as an example of this unintelligent reasoning.  Marx’s states that religion is the opium of the masses, so the relational Christian states, “Marx’s maybe be right but it does not matter because Christianity is not a religion, it is a relationship.”  In short, it turns into a way of sidestepping the harder question of the function and meaning in religion, in spite of definitions like Marx, Freud, Fuerbach, and others.

Christianity is a religion.  It constructs a world-view that orders and makes sense of the world around the individual.  It provides rituals, sacraments, and a liturgy to reinforce this understanding of the world.  But what is bad about this?  All world-views do this. 

When applied to many African communities, this dichotomy is often to initially misunderstood.  To the Westerners, it seem as though the Africans do get it.  That’s right, they don’t.  They did not get the Enlightenment hammered into their heads from grade school.  They did not group up with spirituality and physicality completely separated.  That is our inheritance.  We make the distinction between religion/relations and spirituality/physicality.  Spirituality is a part of physicality for them.  They are in relationship with their religion.  So of course, they “don’t get it.”  The spiritual realm is in relationship with the everyday.  That is why the “Prosperity Gospel” is appealing.  That is why the everyday notions of religion are just that, everyday notions.  This is an area where we should be learning from each other.  Not simply imposing the Western understanding and getting upset because they are not “doing it” the way we do.  In many ways, we could use some physicality in our spirituality.