Ian Boyne, Contributor
THE CHURCH was the most important social institution for ex-slaves in the immediate post-Emancipation period. The church made emancipation meaningful by providing land through the Free Villages programme, without which the black masses would continue to be at the mercy of their white oppressors.
The church gave organisational force to the ex-slaves so that their savings could be mobilised in their own interest. The church founded the credit union movement in Jamaica, pioneered co-operatives and established the educational system to provide meaningful liberation to black people.
The church was integral to every single area of the life of the people in the post-Emancipation period. Indeed, the church played a pivotal part in the abolition of slavery and in its delegitimisation, not to take away from the slaves' own revolts in ending slavery, as Richard Hart and others have so conclusively demonstrated.
But, alas, 170 years after Emancipation, the church's influence over the lives of Jamaicans is both marginal and decreasing.
MORE CHURCHES
We claim to have more churches per square mile than any other country in the world, but also the most murder per capita than any other country in the world, barring one. Churches dot every corner and lane, but so do corruption, immorality and injustice. Our crusades are roaring with excitement but so are the vulgarity, venality and debauchery of the dancehall.
On weekends our churches are packed but on Monday morning there is no perceptible impact as our hedonism, materialism and Godlessness do not effectively trail that of post-Christian Europe where many churches have been closed down or are empty. It is not just the political project which has failed in Jamaica. The church, as an institution, has been a failure in so far as affecting the culture and life of the people.
Three well-known, godly, well-meaning women have interrupted their sleep to run around Heroes Park at 5:00 for 42 days (a day for a year of our Independence), desperately praying for a change in the nation.
BAWL OUT TWO
This afternoon, thousands of Christians are expected to gather downtown for Bawl Out Two, hoping that God will hear them this time and stop the runaway violence and criminal mayhem in Jamaica.
The Christians follow Lieute-nant Stitchie's advice to "Fast and Pray", but the nation continues to drift further from God. How has the church fallen so badly since the days of Emancipation when every Jamaican life was tangibly touched by the church's activities?
As we celebrate Emancipation, it is an appropriate time for us to reflect on the decline of the Jamaican church. First, let's understand what we are not saying.
We are not saying that the church is doing nothing except preaching about Heaven. That's a bit of nonsense spoken only by people who have no connection to the church. The church is extremely active in touching the lives of many Jamaicans through its social outreach and multiplicity of social programmes.
Indeed, it is now routine for Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches which formerly eschewed what they called "the Social Gospel" to be heavily involved in uplifting members' lives in the here and now.
The church continues to rescue many youth from gunmanship, prostitution and a life of purposelessness through its evangelistic witness. The crime and corruption in Jamaica would be worse had it not been for the church. Make no mistake about this.
Very importantly, the church, particularly its charismatic and newer elements, has made a major advance in providing an alternative cultural offering for Christian young people by using the dancehall, popular music rhythms as a channel to both educate and entertain.
SECULAR ENTERTAINMENT
On a weekend Christians don't have to be bored at home or settle just for secular entertainment: They can shout, scream, wave and do the latest dance moves and rival the dancehall and the night-clubs, all to the glory of the Lord, substituting immoral lyrics for sanitised ones.
This is a major advance in popular culture, and though it is being resisted by some elements from the traditional churches, the newer churches have facilitated it and the young adults are having a grand time in the Lord, while totally ignoring the old fogies who prefer their Jim Reeves and Sankey songs.
But there has been nothing comparable at the intellectual level. The church has been vanquished in terms of intellectual influence in the nation. While in the past, members of the clergy influenced the national discussion agenda and were forceful in influencing discourse and reflection, today the church in Jamaica is intellectually marginalised, though no other institution boasts the number of high-calibre intellectuals as the church.
PREPARE THEIR PEOPLE FOR HEAVEN
We can understand that some Fundamentalist churches and sects are withdrawalist and believe they should only prepare their people for Heaven or the eschatological Kingdom. The Jehovah's Witnesses and others must be respected for their pietistic, quietistic theological views.
ESTABLISHED CHURCHES
But the established churches have never accepted that exclusively otherworldly orientation, and that was what led them to have such a decisive influence on the social, economic and political life of post-Emancipa-tion, post Indepen-dence Jamaica. That is what led the Jamaica Council of Churches to be so active in the 1970s and to play such a crucial role in raising political consciousness and in affirming cultural identity. But the church has been in strategic retreat. And the nation is suffering as a result of it.
If you listen to many of the preachers in Jamaica today, especially the educated ones, they are dull, boring, excruciatingly irrelevant, out of touch with everyday realities and seriously lacking in effective communication skills.
GREAT ORATORS
Sure, there are still some great orators, men highly skilled in homiletics. But they are not connecting with the issues people are grappling with; they are answering questions no one is asking; rebutting points no one is raising and providing answers to questions people don't even understand. They are on Mars and Venus while we are on planet Earth.
The Pentecostals and the Charismatics are more relevant but culturally debilitating with their unbalanced health and wealth teaching, which is really rebranded consumerism. The church's state in Jamaica is truly sad: Those with the sophistication and learning are speaking above the people's heads and are typically dismal communicators, and the effective, moving communicators are usually intellectually deficient minstrels, performing to the American Gospel of Prosperity. It is not an Emancipating Gospel.
It is a Gospel which identifies Godliness with the American Dream and it serves to further enslave our people in a web of consumerist, materialistic values which rob them of their sense of significance and worth if they don't have the trappings of "faith": The fine home, car, clothing, fat bank account.
SHAME
It is a shame that the biggest issue the church is known for out side its walls is its opposition to casino gambling. At a time when the country is reeling from the worst effects of American cultural penetration, the church has not provided a counter-ideology for the masses.
Indeed, the fastest-growing sections of the church are themselves victims of this Americanisation. But the church has serious intellectuals who could provide the critique of the atomistic, nihilistic and hedonistic culture which we have imported from the United States principally.
This has nothing to do with rejecting the market economy and reaching back for socialism. Nonsense. Accepting a market economy which we should is not the same as accepting a market society which we should not. There are values which are above the aggrandisement of the self and the maximisation of personal pleasure. The church must reassert that hedonistic values hurt societies.
TAINTED MONEY
The Prime Minister is warning his possible successors about disqualification for accepting 'tainted money' and fears are being expressed that cash-rich campaigners in the JLP succession race might be able to bribe delegates to choose their man for the job. So here we are faced with the possibility and more than the mere possibility of having corrupt people foisted on us because we are in a culture which puts money and material advancement through whatever means at the apex of the value chain. You can't sit easy with a culture of hedonism and self-centeredness and then suddenly expect people to act morally when electing party successors. Why not take a bribe and accept drugs money if it suits your personal interests? Away with old-fashioned values!
The church has not built a counter-culture against the admittedly very powerful influence which has been distorting the emancipation of our people and enslaving them in the values of American consumerist culture.
SHIFTS IN SOCIAL VALUES
Writing in the year-end issue of the Journal of Popular Culture last year, Laura Oswald notes the shifts in social values over the last forty years from "commitment to a higher good that transcended the individual such as the good of the community or the family to commitment to self-satisfaction."
There has never been a time when the church has had more powerful ammunition to attack secularism as it has today when secular societies are languishing in anomie, social crisis and what Newsweek calls "eroding moral certainties" in a cover story titled 'Sad Planet: Depression Has Become a Global Disease' (June 21 issue). The June 13 issue of The New York Times has a fascinating article on 'The Fidelity Fix' showing the astounding successes of the fidelity model in fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa.
The fall 2003 issue of the New Perspectives Quarterly contains a fascinating interview with University of Chicago Professor of Social Thought Leon Kass on the failures of secularism: "The present attitude of consumer society is against the grain of all past human experience which called for sacrifice in the present." The church needs to resurrect this message in post-Emancipation, post-Independence Jamaica.
CONSUMERISM
"There is an enormous amount of evidence that consumerism that characterises the lifestyles of middle and upper class Americans and is being exported the world over is harmful to our shared environment," says Laura Canon in the essay 'The Butterfly Effect and the Virtues of the American Dream' in the Winter 2003 issue of The Journal of Social Philosophy. The Church must be a part of the resistance to these alien values to our African peoples.
The church needs to lead a new emancipation struggle against cultural imperialism in order to make itself relevant to 21st century Jamaica.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist.
