South Africa has a role to play in advancing a theology of transformation, which recognises the spirituality of all people and unites humanity in a struggle against conflict, inequality and oppression.
We have messed up. The end of the Cold War, colonialism and apartheid should have enabled the world to enter an era of peace and prosperity. But right wing fundamentalists claiming to be Christians, Muslims, Jews and others are locked in conflict over earth's resources and seeking to drag Africa into the fray. Instead of transformation, oppressive religious, political and economic forces have brought humanity to the worst crisis in its history.
Can South Africa, with its motto of unity through diversity, help find an answer? Spiritual power in the secular world can lead us to transformation.
In his address at the 4th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture, President Thabo Mbeki said: "The question must therefore arise - for those of us who believe that we represent the good - what must we do to succeed in our purposes...
We must strive to understand the social conditions that would help to determine whether we succeed or fail. What I have said relates directly to what needs to be done to achieve the objective that Nelson Mandela set the nation, to accomplish the RDP of the Soul."
Humanity faces decimation, extinction, or transformation. Decimation occurs when our planet is attacked by asteroids, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, or diseases that cannot be forecast or prevented. They just happen any time.
The problem is how can survivors handle them? Extinction is self-afflicted through greed, economic dictatorship, warfare, and environmental destruction supported by heretical beliefs. The problem is how can survivors handle it?
Africa knows we need vision and power beyond the bloodshed, poverty, heresy and obliteration of the northern world.
The third scenario is transformation. We liberated ourselves from apartheid and the world can liberate itself from the destructive course of the developed countries today.
We are not all religious, but we are all spiritual human beings alert to compassion, cooperation and vision. A spiritual renaissance is emerging in the secular world of politics, economics and culture - a spiritual unity in our religious diversity.
As Mbeki said: "Because of the infancy of our brand new society, we have the possibility to act in ways that would, for the foreseeable future, infuse the values of Ubuntu into our very being as a people."
LIBERATION FROM COLONIAL RELIGIONS
Africa liberated herself from the political and economic oppression of apartheid but not from the limitations of colonial religions. Imported religious structures often divide us, impose colonial conflicts on us, and denigrate our own spiritual integrity.
Millions of 21st century citizens still cling to the ideas of the Roman Empire, the Crusades, reformed Germany and the Netherlands, Huguenot France, Charles Wesley's hymns, Victorian Britain, 19th century America, medieval Islam or oppressed Judaism.
We need to explore the spiritual unity in our own human experience. We need to reposition ourselves in the spiritual arena, following the vision of our political, academic, economic and religious prophets.
Former ANC President and Nobel Laureate Chief Albert Luthuli said: "Somewhere ahead there beckons a civilisation which will take its place in God's history with other great human syntheses: Chinese, Egyptian, Jewish, European. It will not necessarily be all black: but it will be African."
It is not our concern as the ANC to become a religious body, or interfere with people's personal spiritual interests in this life, or after death. It is our concern when our cadres are enticed to support religious movements promoting the agenda of foreign forces manipulating Africa for their own purposes. It is our concern when people use religion to undermine the national democratic revolution. It is our concern when people use religion to destroy South Africa's soul.
Human fulfilment consists of more than "access to modern and effective services like electricity, water, telecommunications, transport, health, education and training for our people."
"As distinct from other species of the animal world, human beings also have spiritual needs. Thus all of us, and not merely the religious leaders, speak of the intangible element that is immanent in all human beings - the soul! Acceptance of this proposition as a fact must necessarily mean that we have to accept the related assertion that consequently, all human societies also have a soul," Mbeki said.
'Spiritual' is the drive of a vital force inside us. It does not mean weird, spooky, superstitious, fear-laden, religious or heavenly. Some lives exhibit a proud, greedy, lustful, jealous, angry, self-centred or lazy spirit. Others have a spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, loyalty, humility or self-control. Human communities can move from a negative to a positive spirit.
That is the focus of the revolution we need in today's secular world of politics, economics, culture, and human relations.
When our homo sapiens ancestors emerged in Africa about 140,000 years ago, the challenge was to make human communities work. Darwin saw that species evolved by the survival of the fittest, but communities required the survival of the weakest. Human communities had to care for one another; they had to work together to conquer the perils and challenges of earth, and they had to think beyond their next meal.
Those essential requirements of compassion, cooperation and vision are crucial in the secular world of politics, culture and religion today.
THE SPIRITUAL APPROACH TO SECULAR SOCIETY
Secular and spiritual are two side of the same coin, the currency of human communities. Compassion, cooperation, and vision are as vital as oxygen and hydrogen; delivering peace and joy is as relevant as chemistry and physics; generosity and humility are as crucial as the balance of payments.
Spirituality is a crucial, techno-scientific truth about how secular humanity operates. Spirituality concerns politicians, economists, social scientists and families - not just those wearing religious labels.
Early homo sapiens set off from Africa and walked round the world. It took them quite a while, forming a sub-race here, a nation there, a bleaching over the horizon, until earth was populated. All these communities sought compassion, cooperation and vision that, like eating and drinking, copulating and dying, were simply part of being human.
About 5,000 years ago people began to develop religions. Four thousand years ago the focus moved from rituals to ethics. Writing documented the evolution as scriptures. World religions grew institutions, temples, priests and traditions, except in Africa, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.
Primal spirituality saw no need for religious institutions. It still survives from Inuits to Aborigines, American 'Indians' to Siberian shamans, the myths of early Europe to African traditional spirituality.
Our ancestors hunted together, ate from trees and roots without thought of ownership: land belonged to all. Then humanity went astray. Cultivating animals and plants in settled places enabled them to invent villages and towns. Powerful people took possession of land, forcing others to work on it. Humanity became possessors and workers, landowners and land workers, aristocrats and peasants, masters and slaves.
Compassion was replaced by greed, cooperation by competition, vision focused on 'me', not 'us', and oppression became real. It was a spiritual challenge between those who saw human progress as the pursuit of wealth, and those who saw progress in the pursuit of compassion, cooperation and vision.
Religious institutions divided clergy from laity, and favoured wealth, power and men. Prophets in every religion preached the values of compassion, cooperation and vision; differentiated between ritual and ethics, and criticised the separation of the market from morals. Divisive denominations developed.
Bosses and priests usually united against working people and prophets.
Religio-political dictators took power by violence and claimed to be civilised. It is still so.
Religions invented theologies to satisfy their political and economic allies. Many leaders, from the Roman Emperor Constantine to US President Bush, claimed that a special relationship with God justified their oppressive actions.
These religious institutions flooded Africa as colonial imports:
Portuguese (1488), Dutch (1652), French (1688), German (1737), British (1795,1806,1820), Americans (1908,1914,1920), Reformed (1665), Lutheran (1779), Anglican (1806), Methodist (1806), Congregational (1806), Presbyterian (1813), Catholic (1688,1804), Pentecostal (1908,1914), Muslim (1658,1694,1780), Jewish (1834), and Hindu (1860).
The missionary package brought many benefits, plus the barbarism of colonialism. Sincerely mistaken figures hijacked God as a racist sexist oppressive religious figure. They produced the inherited diversity that our spiritual unity has to transform. Religion became a site of struggle because colonialism worshipped Greed.
Mbeki set out the relevance of this continuing conflict: "The capitalist class, to whom everything has a cash value, has never considered moral incentives as very dependable... Within the context of the development of capitalism in our country, individual acquisition of material wealth, produced through the oppression and exploitation of the black majority, became the defining social value in the organisation of white society.
Because the white minority was the dominant social force in our country, it entrenched in our society as a whole, including among the oppressed, the deep-seated understanding that personal wealth constituted the only true measure of individual and social success...
"The new order, born of victory in 1994, inherited a well-entrenched value system that placed individual acquisition of wealth at the very centre of the value system of our society as a whole... Get rich! Get rich! Get rich!" Opposition to apartheid rediscovered the soul of South Africa. Ignoring their scriptures on race and wealth, most religions succumbed to apartheid.
Despite marginal opposition, liberation was demonised as a tool of Communism.
Conscience was stirred by the Freedom Charter in 1955. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the banning of the liberation movements, anti-apartheid concern grew in all sectors. The Christian Institute, the South African Council of Churches (SACC), the Message to the people of South Africa of 1968, Black Consciousness, Call of Islam, Jews for Justice, the United Democratic Front (UDF), the Kairos Document, Liberation Theology, and the South African Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, demonstrated together, struggled together, prayed together, went to jail together, experiencing a unity which bridged race, sex, class, religions and politics. They discovered, in the words of Aziz Pahad in his address on 'Building a Global Progressive Movement', "the galvanising effect of articulating a vision of a non-racist non-sexist democratic society".
In the struggle people from different races, spiritualities, classes and skills came together and experienced a new humanity. South Africa discovered its spiritual power. This vision of united humanity was as full of portent for the world community as the emergence of Homo sapiens on the highveld centuries before. Apartheid was not defeated by violence: it was supplanted by the self-discovery of South Africa's soul.
Many warmed to Nelson Mandela's call: "The transformation of our country requires the greatest possible cooperation between religious and political bodies, critically and wisely serving our people together."
In the words of Constitutional Court judge Albie Sachs: "We had in this country an amalgam of cultural and spiritual ingredients that provided a profound philosophical setting for peaceful change. It was a case of ubuntu meeting Satyagraha meeting an international tradition of struggle for revolutionary change. The result was something that has evolved and become deeply rooted in the temper of our people. As Gandhi showed through his life, idealism is sustainable in the real world. It needs only to be backed up by real commitment by millions of ordinary people." South Africa had discovered its soul: the unity in its diversity. And then we lost the plot again. After liberation we dilly-dallied. No strong united religious commitment towards transformation emerged. Many sectors lost the vision of doing transformation together and reverted to colonial competition.
We love our inherited colonial separations too much to unite as spiritual South Africans. Inhuman priorities remain unchallenged in our economic systems and political attitudes. Many have been seduced and manipulated by the dictators of wealth. According to Pahad: "The world as a direct result of globalisation has been cast as a vast ocean of poverty in which a few islands of prosperity are to be found."
As Mbeki says, we are fixated on "the dominance of the capitalist motive of private profit maximisation, which has evolved into the central objective that informs the construction of modern human society in all its elements.
Nothing can come out of this except the destruction of human society... We share a fundamental objective to defeat the tendency in our society towards the deification of personal wealth as the distinguishing feature of the new citizen of the new South Africa".
THE VISIONLESS AGE
Major changes in world affairs have affected liberated South Africa, including:
In this soulless state - at the point of disillusion, discord and despair -a secular spiritual unity arises to bring compassion to our economics, cooperation to our politics, and a transforming vision to South Africa's soul.
All spirituality shares a common ground of being, a commitment to the common good, is threatened by right wing fundamentalism and believes that good overcomes evil.
Throughout history people have sensed a more-than-just-me spirit, a supra-human influence - from ancestors stones to cathedrals, from Buddha to Jesus, from Krishna to Umvelinqangi, from Yahweh to Allah.
Creation stories in every folklore related the motive forces of compassion, cooperation and the vision of peace and prosperity to the sense of a greater power operating in the human community whether in terms of Jesus, Muhammad or Marx. Albert Einstein wrote: "A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary form - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; and in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."
There is a spiritual unity in our religious diversity. All spirituality believes in the common good. Nearly all people describe religion as a Way of Life. Many passages in the scriptures of the world might have been written by the same hand, speaking the same language, singing the same songs, reflecting the same personal and communal spiritual inputs to the secular world.
The spiritual unity within this diversity is the great strength of humanity.
The post-colonial, post-globalisation quest for transformation needs to review the primal spirituality of humanity, which for us is through African Traditional Spirituality. It too is a way of life, more comprehensive than a religion, a secular spirituality in pursuit of the common good, a holistic communal concern that needed no structures, buildings or priests.
Canon Luke Pato explains: "The African has a sense of the wholeness of life.
In traditional African religion there is no separate community of religious people, because everyone who participates in the life of the community also participates in its religion."
Dr Nokuzola Mdende says: "Religion among Africans is not treated as an isolated entity: it is dealt with in a broader context since it permeates all sections of life of both the individual and the society."
Ubuntu is a way of life not a way of being religious. It reveals the common primal truths of all communities. It includes all people, not a privileged group. There is no capitalist concept of a small group dictating to the masses on economic grounds: the poor are part of the community. Primal spirituality is compassionate, cooperative, and envisions a Vital Force within us - a secular spirituality.
This quest for the common good is deeply economic. Prof Ulrich Duchrow from the University of Heidelberg says: "The perspective of the common good fundamentally starts with the weakest, most threatened members of the community. If they can live, all can live." The focus of the common good is on earth not in heaven, and personal commitment is to an agenda for the transformation of the community.
All spirituality is threatened by right wing fundamentalism. The globalisation of undemocratic capitalist dictatorship records a history of commitment to violence not compassion, to domination not cooperation, and has no vision but its own material gain. This barbarian empire, led by the US, supervises the rise of right wing religious-political-economic fundamentalism that is destroying the world.
The current flash point is in the Christian-Jewish-Muslim conflict of the Middle East. The Middle East war is not between these religions. It is a conflict of right wing fundamentalisms that misuse their religions. They have no basis in the teaching of Judaism, Jesus of Nazareth, or the prophet Muhammad. They are distortions of scripture dedicated to death, giving fraudulent theological backing to political and economic oppression.
Fanatics are fanatics. Christians, Jews and Muslims embrace 'mistaken enthusiasm'. They turn anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism; they corrupt Christian theology with an anti-God, anti-Jesus, anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-war image; they see all Muslims as suicide bombers.
Religions often encouraged it by their failure to embrace modern scientific and ecumenical realities, and their cold cerebral presentation of God. This precipitated agnosticism on the one hand and right wing fundamentalism on the other, both aligned to the worship of money.
The violent warring history of Christianity, totally opposed to its founder, began with its catastrophic adoption as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century. Its subservience to political and economic objectives, the Crusades, the wars of the rise of Protestantism and national states in Europe, the pursuit of slavery and colonialism, all contributed to the false concept of Church.
Into this superior imperialist background Christian Fundamentalism emerged in 1910 with the publication in California of 'The Fundamentals'.
Fundamentalists emphasised their interpretation of the Bible, engaged in major controversies over theories of evolution and politics. They pursued ecstatic forms of evangelicalism, witness, prophecy, and later gained major impetus by funding through television programmes.
Right wing fundamentalists in America, Europe and Africa, with strong capitalist backing, promoting the 'gospel of Prosperity', have moved into the 'Christo-Fascism' of the Bush Empire. It says the conflict between Christians and Muslims indicates Armageddon is approaching. The US is God's instrument for Christ to come again and destroy its terrorist enemies, thus Christians worldwide should support Bush. Opinion polls reveal that millions of Americans accept this heresy as truth.
Zionism is in a similar position, claiming Israel as God's promise to the Jews of antiquity. Zionism was actually established in August 1897 by Theodor Herzl at the founding of the World Zionist Organisation, supported by Britain's Balfour Declaration in 1917, and formally established as the state of Israel in May 1948.
It is a political and economic state, having marginal spiritual identity with the Tenakh and the Talmud. The United States' adoption of Israel as its ally in the pursuit of Middle East oil deeply distresses Jews who are not Israeli Zionist fundamentalists.
Muslim right wing 'fundamentalism' also arose only recently, and has nothing to do with the ways of Muhammad in the 7th century. The Prophet saw his task as spreading the way of peace, mercy and spirituality. He recognised the common roots with Jews and Christians, and had no basic conflicts with either (except with the claim that Jesus was God, on which the Church also was divided). Because the Prophet left no clear successor, different religious and political factions have sought precedence ever since, invariably claiming support from the Qu'ran.
The US has manipulated this disunity in its quest for control of the Middle East, switching from side to side with its political analysis. Many accuse US aggression for instigating the right wing fundamentalism developed in Islam.
There is also a major deliberate activity to spread right wing fundamentalisms in our country and continent. After the Middle East oil is consumed, the search for oil and platinum in Africa is next on the agenda.
Many see the current infusion of right wing fundamentalism as preparation for the armies that will come next.
THE MEDIA Because humans now feed their thinking with reading and watching, the media is a crucial area. Today, it often loses its commitment to truth and democracy and becomes a tool of commercial enterprise and fundamentalist assertions.
It is difficult to obtain the truth from a media influenced to indoctrinate people through advertisements, scandal, greed and fear, instead of mediating information enabling people to stand on their own spiritual feet. Right wing fundamentalists try to scare the hell into people to put their minds to sleep. The media love it - it sells.
Oppressive empires are not destroyed by other empires: they collapse from within, starting at the edges. That was the story from ancient empires to the British empire, and it is happening to the globalised US empire now. The poor, the slaves, women, and apartheid survivors know that good does overcome evil, evolution does move forward, and we can expect a transformation embracing the rebirth of society and spirituality.
Africa has a major role to play in going for the good. Our Constitution has an inclusive approach to religious diversity that only disbars hatred, coercion, and violence. Liberating themselves from colonial and economic subservience, both agnostics and believers in diverse religions can discover the spiritual unity of the modern world.
The common spirituality of our human community in the secular world brings richness both to those from different religious backgrounds, and to those who find an institutional religious component unnecessary. The transformation of Africa means rediscovering compassion, cooperation and vision in the secular world, together.
"We should all agree that to achieve the social cohesion and human solidarity we seek, we must vigorously confront the legacy of poverty, racism and sexism,... and... persist in our efforts to achieve national reconciliation," according to Mbeki.
Compassion is a concern for others that is more than personal kindness.
Vesting South Africa's interest in a compassionate society requires programmes to provide all citizens with experience of the living conditions of the poor, oppressed women, orphaned children, and the sick. Wealth is dehumanising, insulating the rich from humanity.
Compassion involves reconstructing economic society to take back leadership from the globalised empire. "Can we seriously expect that Africa and other countries of the developing world can deal with their underdevelopment by depending on a private sector that is driven by the profit motive? The reality demands that there must be a political will to transfer resources from the rich to the poor globally. In a globalised world, the war against global poverty calls for global action," says Pahad.
Some businesses, unions and theologians are now seeking systems deeper than the sterile capitalist versus socialist experiences of the 19th and 20th century. Compassion demands a major rethink and restructure of how the economy actually works for the 21st century.
Cooperation is born out of commitment to the betterment of all sectors of the secular world. Morality and ethics are the calories of cooperation.
"Space is open... for the development and consolidation of a global progressive movement encompassing all sectors of society including both progressive governments and progressive social movements, and progressives in the religious and cultural movements. It must be broad in scope, but organised and galvanised along principled lines," says Pahad.
Cooperation demands strong lay leadership, male and female. Great prophets invariably emerge from the secular world of politics and the market place, not from seminaries.
Religious groups seeking to discover spiritual unity to transform our country will need to consider what Mbeki means when he laments, "the absence of an integrative thrust - some reconciler - that would produce the institutionalised processes that would end the sense of alienation and marginalisation that leads to social conflict."
In the struggle against apartheid we united round the vision of liberation.
The vision today is of a transformed Africa in a transformed world. It means seeking a theology of transformation to which everyone contributes - not just religious professionals. It means a transformation of spirituality to unpack the unity that runs through Agnostic, Traditionalist, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Pentecostal - all of us. It means a transformation of nationhood from national competition to global responsibility, and a transformation of the economy to a post-capitalist order that solves the problem of systematic poverty and greed.
This vision requires a transformation of the way we do politics to a locally generated democracy; a transformation of the way we do education and culture from getting money to finding fulfilment in human community; a transformation of the way we do health, including disease and reproduction; and a transformation of the media to serve the people.
How we become involved in the struggle for transformation is something each sector must consider for itself: religions, government, neighbourhoods, economic systems, unions, educators, entertainment, the media, families and individuals.
The possible decimation of humanity by natural disaster or human folly are scenarios that the right wing capitalist-fundamentalist empire denies or ignores.
The ability to cope requires a major transformation in human society - a holistic answer from the united spiritual instincts of humanity.
Transformation requires deep action for change like the Freedom Charter, which does not try to push the world into shape but to turn it upside down.
Empires change by internal collapse, from the edges. South Africa is on the edge of the globalised empire, it knows about holistic ubuntu answers. It can explore the spiritual unity in our diversity. South Africa has a role to play.
*This is an edited version of a discussion paper prepared by the ANC Commission for Religious Affairs.
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