The Production of Christian Globalism and ‘The Church of Mandela’ in the Pursuit of Justice
by Megan Robertson
My work and Hillary Kaell’s focus on very different phenomena – hers on child sponsorship programs in the US and mine on queer clergy sexuality in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA). Yet, both these topics reflect an interest in understanding the complex politics and often contradictory theologies which frame how Christian institutions function. In this brief essay I reflect on how fostering trust through the auditing of children’s smiles in Kaell’s work is supported by the creation and maintenance of middle-class Christian norms which produce notions of Christian globalism. I compare this to my own research on the MCSA, and to the ways in which gender and sex norms are policed in order to maintain a very particular institutional (Methodist) identity which I encapsulate in the phrase, “the Church of Mandela.” Both the production of Christian globalism and the Church of Mandela seem to enable the pursuit of justice work. Indeed the continued survival of these institutions are dependant on their ability to ensure that members buy into their overall mission of justice. Yet, it also raises questions about how these overarching identities and ideals are created and who becomes excluded and policed in trying to achieve the norms which seemingly enable justice work.
PRODUCING ‘THE CHURCH OF MANDELA’
My doctoral research explores the experiences of queer clergy in the MCSA—specifically how their everyday lives reflect and co-constitute its institutional culture. As the largest mainline Protestant church in South Africa, the MCSA is a statistically significant site of study. It also governs Methodist churches in neighbouring countries of Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Botswana. Still, the Church’s policies largely speak to South African realities and the institutional narrative remains largely centered on South Africa. Apart from its geographic reach and large membership, a more significant motivation for my focus on the MCSA is its institutional identity and the role it continues to play as “the Church of Mandela.” While Nelson Mandela was a member of the MCSA, I use the phrase more in reference to the ways in which the denomination has taken on its associations with Mandela and other social justice advocates as an institutional identity. The production and maintenance of the MCSA’s identity as the “Church of Mandela,” I argue, continues to support the denomination’s image as a relevant player in South African politics and public morality – most notably through its involvement in forums such as the South African Council of Churches and through its links to members of the ANC, the ruling political party. However, institutional debates on same-sex marriage and sexuality and the institution’s failure to take decisive action on gender issues threatens to puncture the legitimacy of the social justice image on which the denomination thrives.
In relation to decisions and questions around sexualities which are constructed as non-normative, “the same-sex debate” in the MCSA has been ongoing since the late 1990s and has failed to result in any conclusive take on the matter. This is because making a firm decision either for or against same-sex marriage or the ordination of queer clergy threatens the dissolution of the institution as it stands through a division in membership. In the MCSA, the majority of the membership is black, and, as much as some inside and outside the Church may want to believe that white people are generally for and black people are against the issue, there is no firm data to support the claim. Instead, I found the debate to be characterized by nuance and complexity. For example, one of my white male participants found that he encountered mostly other white clergy who were against same-sex marriage. Other participants recalled that some clergy who identified as queer, or as men who have sex with men, but do not want to be “outed” to the Church publicly, take a stand against the issue. MCSA members of various races may hold conservative theological beliefs because they reject what they view as colonial liberal attitudes towards sex and gender. Those who advocate for the full acceptance of queer people may use liberation and feminist theologies as an ideological compass, which they view as integral to the Christian and Methodist commitments to love, acceptance, and social justice.
Ignoring this complexity, and attributing attitudes about sexuality to a particular culture, race, religion, age or class, runs the risk of perpetuating myths about Africa (and specifically African black people) as conservatively religious, culturally traditional and thus queer-phobic or of romanticising ‘traditional’ religions and cultures as more fluid and accepting of various sexualities. At an institutional level, due to the variously motivated individual attitudes towards same-sex marriage, the MCSA avoids navigating this complex terrain by instead making vague declarations of being “a community of love rather than rejection.”
My research indicates that despite internal and external criticism of incidences related to queer and women clergy in the MCSA [1], clergy and members (including queer people and women) continue to “buy-in” to the idea of the Church as a social justice entity. The historical institutional identity was reified and continued to be constructed in the ways in which celebrated stories were told and re-told in informal spaces in the Church. Through celebrating recent historical clerical figures such as Rev. Peter Storey and Rev. James Gribble, both retired Methodist ministers known for their apartheid activism credentials, an identity of social justice is attached to Methodism and specifically to Methodist ministers. The celebrated social justice heroes become characters which carry the institution’s idealized versions of being. They personify values and characteristics which become embodied in human (male) form. They therefore serve as examples of how to perform an ideal Methodism which even queer women in my study continue to celebrate.
The queer clergy in my research maintain and reproduce the MCSA’s identity as the Church of Mandela despite all of them having experienced marginalization or violence in the Church due to their sexuality. Their continued buy-in to the Church’s identity is maintained, ironically, because of the ways in which participants associate the MCSA with pursuing social justice. This was most notable through participants’ reverence for the concept of “mission.” In informal conversations, participants would emphasise to me that they had a passion for “doing mission” or would lament their congregation’s reluctance to be involved in mission. In one conversation between Lebo (a queer black woman) and her partner they criticized another local white congregation for not being proper Methodists because they “didn’t even do mission.” On various occasions I asked participants for clarification regarding what they meant by “mission,” to which they would respond by providing examples and often showing me the most recent mission activity their congregation was involved in. Lebo for example, took great pride in showing me the vegetable garden her congregation had begun on their church grounds with the aim of feeding local members of the community. Sam (a queer person of colour who identified at times as a woman) took me to visit a local preschool which was founded and continues to be governed by the congregation in which she worked. The value of mission, then, is not something abstract for participants but rather something which they actively participate in constructing, often in embodied and material ways which are deeply tied to their identities as Methodist.
In Kaell’s work, sponsors produced ideas of Christian globalism through invoking aspirations toward universal justice, prosperity, and peace. Any minor failures which sponsors may have encountered in children leaving or being unsuccessful in the program do not disrupt the larger idea of “God’s bridging power…that move[s] human beings toward successful outcomes” (Kaell, 2020: 160). In this sense, Christian globalism and the institutional identity of the MCSA function as umbrella ideals that simultaneously create a feeling of belonging while also reassuring sponsors and queer clergy, respectively, that the institution can indeed achieve some sense of Christian mission and justice. Yet, while the maintenance of the “Mandela” identity of the MCSA and Christian globalism in some respects ensures the survival of the institutions which some may argue ensures the continuation of its good works – it also brings up for scrutiny the hegemonic ways in which these ideals are fostered and what and who is sacrificed in the process. In exploring this I want to discuss another overlap between my work and Kaell’s in relation to the auditing and policing of bodies and embodied performances.
THE POLITICS OF A CHILD’S SMILE AND A WOMAN’S BODY IN AUDITING AND POLICING PRACTICES
Kaell (2020: 159) argues that in order for child sponsorship programs to work, sponsors must, first, believe and trust that their efforts make a noticeable difference in the lives of sponsored children and, second, that their sponsorship contributes to possibilities of Christian globalism through the creation of a better world. Kaell shows how trust is fostered through public displays of auditing in relation to financial systems as well as through tracking and measuring the success of children beneficiaries (Kaell, 2020: 175). What really intrigued me in Kaell’s work was how sponsored children were required to embody particular norms in order to establish that trust. As part of “measuring” indicators of success, sponsors receive updates on the children to whom their money goes in the form of letters and photos. The letters and photos are often staged and manufactured to communicate to sponsors the desired indicators of progress. As Kaell (2020: 162) posits, these measures of success are reflective of particular, seemingly universal, middle-class norms in relation to childhood. Yet, I argue, these measures of success do not merely reflect middle-class norms but also function to produce particular Christian middle-class norms in the ordinary administrative and bureaucratic functioning of the child sponsorship institutions. The production of this norm is particularly evident in the politics surrounding the smiles of the photographs of sponsored children.
The sponsors in Kaell’s research prize photos of sponsored children as a means of tracking how well the child was doing in the programme. The progression from poor, destitute, unsmiling child to a smiling and hopeful one seems to be a visceral and gratifying measure of success. Sponsors’ ideas of success in relation to schooling and employment aspirations seem to be symbolised and embodied in the smile. On the other hand, in Kaell’s work it seems that unsmiling, pregnant (teenage girls who became pregnant and sometimes married), and absent bodies (children who had left the program) caused the most distress to sponsors. This is perhaps because these bodies tend to disrupt US Christian norms around happiness, sexuality, and commitment, which the success of the sponsorship programmes seem to rely on. The understanding that, “sponsors give money to make the project run” (Kaell, 2020: 158), likely acts as a subtle reminder to all concerned that children should smile for the camera.
In my own work, I have used the concept of “policing” to talk about how ordinary bureaucratic and administrative functions of the MCSA produce particular norms which govern which bodies meet the norms of the institution and are thus acceptable, and which bodies disrupt these norms and are thus policed and “corrected” or expelled. I argue that while the MCSA is seen as progressive in that it has promoted women to clerical and leadership positions in the Church, it continues to police how women behave in these positions and more especially, how they embody these positions. The queer women clergy in my study experienced policing that was sometimes violent, in the form of rape and verbal and sexual harassment, with the aim seemingly of “correcting” their sexuality. However, it also took place through ordinary processes, for example, Sam, one of the participants in my research, spoke about the ways in which the MCSA constantly tried to compel her to embody a more traditionally feminine way of dressing. This was especially evident in how she was assessed when doing her “trial” sermons (referring to sermons which candidates hoping to enter the ministry are assessed on).
Sam: So early on that was the kind of thing, so that I toed the line but I could never toe the line well enough, like I always seemed to miss the mark and it became like a constant criticism. Like, her preaching’s fine, but [her] body language sucks (uhm), [she] doesn’t dress properly, has no decorum…and so a lot of the time I felt like people, they didn’t put my mind on trial or my sense of call on trial, they put my body on trial and me on trial. You know, they couldn’t see it as integrated whole.
In the extract above a discourse of “neatness” is continually invoked in relation to Sam’s body and presentation. She has, at different times, been described as sloppy, having no decorum, and as if she “rolled out the couch.” Rather than reflecting Sam’s neatness, these statements seem to tacitly allude to the “boyish” way in which she presents herself. In this way performances of gender which do not perpetuate normative bodies as normatively feminine or masculine are policed through subtle reprimands and more formal procedures of assessment. In fact, in Sam’s experience of being on trial, rather than assessing her preaching ability or her calling, the evaluator assessed her body. In this sense gender appropriate dress codes, I argue, become the unofficial uniform of clergy in the MCSA.
It is significant also to consider which bodies experienced the policing and, in particular, the more violent expressions thereof. The fact that queer women of colour in my research were the ones to experience the most violent forms of policing, through sexual violence and marginalisation, demonstrates how the intersectionality of identities functions to expel those bodies which are most threatening to the normative values that maintain the existent power hierarchy. In Kaell’s research, while the bodies of the foreign children are the targets of policing/auditing, the bodies of sponsors who typically meet the profile of a white middle-aged woman do not come under similar scrutiny. Underlying this is perhaps the assumption that these bodies are the Christian norm. While the children need to prove that they meet the Christian and middle-class norms celebrated in the sponsorship programs, the sponsors are already assumed to be smiling, happy, peaceable Christian people—exemplified by their very willingness to be sponsors. Sponsors and children in some ways represent the hierarchal binary between body and soul/mind/thought (or imagination). The division between body and soul/mind has a long history informed by Christian ideologies of being attached to a hierarchy of gender and race. The thought, logic, intellectual capacity, planning for, and imagining of a future lies with those considered more civilised—more human (white, cis, male…American). The body, on the other hand, is sexualised, fetishized, objectified (black, women, queer…African). The bodies in the sponsorship relationship are foreign children and their bodies are required viewing for the sponsors who are the holders of thought and imagination. The presence of the sponsors is in letters, instructions and prayers—all communicative modes of thought. The body of the foreigner must work, must be displayed, and must communicate adequately what the sponsors think and imagine.
In my work I argue that the way bodies are viewed, what we do with our bodies, and who has the power to decide both, are intensely political. In fact, in terms of the contemporary struggle to leave behind entrenched patterns of domination and violence, they are key political issues. By exploring the ways in which different bodies were policed, Kaell and I illuminate some of the taken-for-granted, everyday norms around gender, sex, class and Christianity. By looking at how bodies are policed and audited in Christian institutions we can explore how particular harmful hegemonic norms are produced and reproduced. Although I have not had the time to discuss it here, it would be equally important to explore how certain body practices subvert and transform those norms.
[1] In 2010 Rev Ecclesia de Lange was excommunicated from the MCSA for declaring to her congregation her intention to marry her same sex partner, which was followed by a much-publicised legal case between herself and the denomination. More recently, the Church has been involved in scandals which has begun to delegitimise its ability to claim to be ‘the Church of Mandela’ with a strong social justice agenda. Despite the 2019 election of the MCSA’s first ever woman, the election of Rev Purity Malinga as Presiding Bishop (the highest office in the denomination), this celebration was shrouded by an earlier case in the same year involving one if its male ministers. Rev. Vukile Mehana made derogatory remarks about Rev. Nompithizelo Sibhidla, a woman Methodist minister by referring to her “big breasts” and by equating her act of robing (a symbolic act of granting membership to men who were to join the Young Men’s Guild, a men’s organisation in the MCSA), to fondling men’s chests (see Nadar & Maluleke, 2019).
Megan Robertson is a postdoctoral fellow linked to the SARChI Chair in Religion and Social Justice, researching in the area of queer sexuality and institutional church culture. She is driven by a commitment to social justice and has a keen interest in developing method and pedagogical practice in that area. Dr. Robertson attained her PhD at the University of the Western Cape and completed her Honours and Master’s degrees in Sociology at Stellenbosch University and explored the ways in which race and gender are implicated in the institutional cultures of student residences and organisations at the university.