Imitating Christ in Magwi

With the shift of the center of Christianity from the global North to the global South, scholars such as Andrew Walls and Philip Jenkins have long noted that global South Christianity, especially African Christianity, may significantly impact how the religion is practiced in the West. Todd D. Whitmore’s Imitating Christ in Magwi is a theological example of how African Christianity may impact how the religion is practiced in the West. It is therefore fitting that the book appropriates the anthropological method of ethnography, a method implicated in the otherizing of Africa and Africans, to show how one way of practicing Christianity in an African context may interrogate how the religion is practiced in the West. The ethnographic research for the book was done in Magwi, a warzone in the Acholi region of northern Uganda and South Sudan. This warzone is characterized by camps for Internally Displaced People (IDP), many of whom are served by some Roman Catholic priests and the Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate of Gulu.

Whitmore argues that the Acholi worldview which animates how these priests and sisters practice their faith may throw significant light on how the faith should be practiced in the West, especially in the context of the academy.  The central theory around which the book is organized is mimesis, the non-identical repetition of the life and teaching of a model in different times and contexts. The mimesis engaged in the book is gospel mimesis or the imitation of Christ (114-119). The war and Acholi spiritual imagination that shape how these priests and sisters perform gospel mimesis in northern Uganda is said to be a more proximate context for the imitation of Christ than the West. The capacity for gospel mimesis which the priests and sisters display, the book argues, has especially been lost in a Western academic and Christian setting such as the University of Notre Dame (34) where the author works.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

A critical contribution of this text is its turning of the spotlight on the transformation of the theologian and the academy. The theologian should not only observe the world and comment about it from the comfort of the ivory tower (the academy), the author seems to suggest, but should get involved in the lives of the people about whom they write, with the aim of transforming themselves (the theologians) and the academy in the direction of risky gospel mimesis. The mimetic process which the author identifies – attention, discernment, commitment, and return – are all moments the author personally goes through in the process of fieldwork, and these moments mark the method of anthropological theology. Describing the ethnographic method in which the ethnographer is detached from the lives of those being studied as a form of “colonial extraction” (22), Whitmore calls for an anthropological theology in which the desire to practice gospel mimesis leads the ethnographer/theologian to become involved in the lives of those being studied, working with them to surmount the crisis they are experiencing rather than observing their struggles only as a spectator. It is for this reason that the ethnographer should not only be a participant-observer who studies a particular context (attention) and analyzes their findings (discernment), but one who also gets involved in the daily struggles of the people being studied, working with them to overcome what ails them (commitment), and then coming back home to interrogate relevant practices based on the ethnographer’s encounters in the field (the return).

Going through this process in the course of fieldwork, Whitmore  is transformed from what he sees as a Western disenchanted worldview that is risk-averse in its performance of the Christian faith to an Acholi-enchanted worldview that takes significant risks in the process of imitating Christ. Therefore, the author realized that he was participating in an imperial project under which the Acholi have suffered for a long time and to which Catholic missionaries, especially those of the Comboni mission who brought Catholicism to the Acholi, have played complex roles. Challenged by how priests and sisters were putting their lives on the line in service to others in a context of war, Whitmore writes that he noticed that the people among whom he worked wanted him to become an ally not by giving up his whiteness and power but rather by using that power to advocate for them (164-182). Advocating for the Acholi, however, led him to become at odds with his academic institution in the United States, the University of Notre Dame, which, even though a Christian institution, focuses on “university expansion and risk aversion” rather than the imitation of Christ (288-299).

This is a rich text that not only interrogates the question of method in theology and anthropology but also theologizes in an anthropological key. The author’s understanding of anthropology as needing to encompass commitment on the part of the ethnographer has long been controversial in the discipline but his vision of theology as involving the interrogation and transformation of the theologian and academy is sorely needed in our time. Even more, there have recently been calls for the theological and anthropological divide to be bridged in African studies (Karen Lauterbach and Mika Vähäkangas, eds., Faith in African Lived Christianity: Bridging Anthropological and Theological Perspectives, Brill, 2019). Whitmore’s book shows one significant way such bridge-building may take shape. However, the book’s use of mimesis as a theoretical trope may reify some versions of African Christianity (Christianity done in the context of war). Also, the author’s failure to cite a single African theologian, especially those doing similar work in the same region of the continent, such as Emmanuel Katongole, marginalizes the work of African theologians. These omissions should not detract from the book’s insightful challenge to both anthropology and theology.

David Tonghou Ngong is Associate Professor of Religion and Theology at Stillman College.

David Ngong

Date Of Review:

December 11, 2019