May
2006
Faith and Freedom: Who the World Thinks We Are
Mama Chezi is a huge woman in many respects. She takes up a large amount of space in the small round, dirt-floored hut where we are clustering around a single candle and a smouldering pile of white sage. Although she can speak English, she refuses to do so, and speaks to our guides, Ayenda and Joe, in Xhosa. As guests in the village of Umngazana, my friend and I have just finished an extravagant dinner of chicken, mussels, mealie pap, and bistiyo, and Ayenda has brought us at Mama Chezi’s instructions to meet her and to see if the ancestral spirits will move her to bless us. The hut is dark and solemn, and when people hear that Mama Chezi will intercede for us, they begin to file in to help her pray — to clap, to sing, and to drum. The hut is full of strangers. And then Ayenda introduces us, in Xhosa, as Americans. One older man, sitting against the side of the hut, looks at us scornfully and says, “Ah, Bush.”
When you are in one of the most remote parts of South Africa, where there are no paved roads, where huge glass bottles of Coke constitute gifts for the ancestors, with little or no electricity or running water, and people still look at you and complain about your president, you know you’re in trouble.
I did my best to apologize for Bush with a five word Xhosa vocabulary (I’d only been there a day), and that seemed to smooth things over (possibly my very amusing accent did the trick). But it gave me something to think about.
In two weeks in South Africa, I spoke to many people, black and white, from cities and villages and townships, about their lives, their political situation and ours. South Africans are very well-informed people politically, but not one person I spoke to realized (until I told them) that there is any opposition to President Bush’s policies from people of faith in our country. Often people would only warm up to me after I had made an explicit statement about my political stance, and about the fact that I worked with an organization that endeavored to strengthen the voice of people of faith opposed to militarism and economic exploitation. In fact, the more well-informed people were, the more they seemed to dislike Americans as a whole and believe that we support our administration whole-heartedly.
We are a democracy with complete and open access to the political process. If the administration does what it does, and we are doing nothing about it, what else is the world to think? How else can people who have fought a decades-long fight at great cost for a functioning democracy think about people who have all the resources of the earth at their disposal and do so little with them? We on the liberal or progressive or radical side of the religious spectrum think of ourselves as powerless, we give up, we stop fighting, we conform to the system – or so anyone would guess, looking at what we actually do with the immense economic and political power that’s been given to us as citizens of the United States.
A trip to South Africa gives one so much to think about — about what constitutes struggle, about where faith fits in struggle, about why the struggle needs to be undertaken at all and how we can go about it in our own situation. Our nation is a site of struggle that affects the entire world; our actions, our policies, our culture, and our economy are all of concern not just to us, but to the global community. Creatively resisting the constant pull of the system of individualism, consumerism and militarism — be fulfilled! be rich! be safe! — is a call we can all answer in our own lives, and will have to answer throughout our lives, because it is not a system that can be overthrown by electing a Democratic president. The struggle is more than voting; it is more than party politics; it is more than the public sphere. And that’s where faith comes in.
If there’s one thing I learned in South Africa (and I learned many things), it’s that the struggle is not a bleak and endless place of desolation and hopelessness (which, to be frank, is what I often think about our political parties). To engage in struggle and resistance, with commitment and with faith, creates joy, unpredictability, and freedom. That’s the gift of grace that is offered to us as we live through and pray through our own particular crisis of history. Engaging in struggle in our lives, politically and personally committing our lives to the gospel values of peace, shared resources, community, and inclusion, will lead us to unexpected places. And there’s no reason that ten or twenty years from now our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world might not think differently of us, and of what our faith and our culture has wrought.