preview

Evangelical Christianity Definition

Decent Essays

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Tswana, Maale, and Nigériens counterbalanced evangelical Christian mission colonization by incorporating local customs and practices into Christianity. We will define and dissect the terms “civilization” and “modernity” to describe how medicine and religion reinforced and changed African and white Christian cultures. I define “civilization” as a white, Christian ideology that formulated how missions historically oppressed black Africans; evangelical missions rationalized white supremacy by claiming that inept and inferior black Africans needed cleanliness and morality training. However, I define the term “modernity” as a culturally hybrid African response to mission evangelism; after hearing …show more content…

Firstly, evangelical Christian missions sought to “civilize” and dominate black Africans through racial subjugation. Narrowing our focus, we see that white Christian missions discriminated against and oppressed the Tswana people and Nigérien lepers to colonize the two groups. When Comaroff says that early missionaries “expected to find a ‘diseased continent’ and heal it” he asserts that missions assumed Africans spread disease because their black bodies, clothing, and homes conveyed promiscuity, sweat, and dirt (1997: 354). Essentially, early missions thought that Tswana families and neighbors spread germs between open-door, dirt-floor huts; to stop germs from spreading, missions reprimanded locals to clean up their homes. Furthermore, British missions reviled black Tswana female bodies as “greasy” because Tswana women spread contagion, and possibly death, among missionaries through physical contact (Comaroff 1997: 336). Afraid of contracting venereal disease …show more content…

In the nineteenth century, legislation passed that empowered doctors with advanced education to cleanse disadvantaged patients with biomedicine. Comaroff argues that biomedicine “became...a discipline, taking on the ethos of professionalism” after the Medical Act of 1858, which limited medical practice to well-educated doctors (1997: 328, 326). After the Medical Act of 1858, only wealthy doctors who learned advanced anatomical and physiological operations in prestigious universities could practice medicine. With legal leverage, these doctors developed biomedicine as a science in which medical tools, chemical liquids, and plant substances cured ailments and cleaned urban decay. As British doctors gained socioeconomic status, media outlets claimed that doctors engaged in “heroic” biomedical cures to save the urban poor from their foul behaviors and miasmic living environments (Comaroff 1997: 326). Because city slum dwellers often had many children, lived in close quarters, and could not afford to bathe, doctors sought to improve their health by teaching them proper hygiene. Indeed, Comaroff notes that the London Mission Society (LMS) advertised “the power of doctors to heal social ills in unsanitary British cities” to associate cleanliness with prestige and dirt with deficiency (1997: 332). When LMS missionary David Livingstone arrived in

Get Access