We Forget

At the Sudanese church today, they were having a ceremony to honor the teachers who are instructing the children in the Dinka language. We recently watched the Sudanese get very enthused about the elections and formation of a new nation of South Sudan. This is church. Sunday services. In America, we forget how much Christian is a description of an identity, with encompassing cultural as well as intellectual drivers. It is as much a strength as a weakness in the long run, I suppose, because it does keep them in the mindset of their religion as seamlessly integrated with the rest of their existence - something we have lost in the West, with our marketplace-of-ideas religious culture. But it keeps those elements of belief I consider paramount on the back burner at times. And I am not there to support their language, customs, or politics, though I do understand that they are not easily separated, and have no objection to what they've got. I saw the same thing in Eastern Europe, and have read about it in the history of just about any place on earth: people's religions are often not particularly concerned with doctrinal understandings, but with what side they were born onto and will die on. From an American perspective, Northern Ireland doesn't look much like a religious war, but a tribal war where the tribes come from different Christian branches, neither of which is much understood by its adherents. For African groups, square that.