Mercy Oduyuye and the expansiveness of African theology

I’ve been thinking about Mercy Amba Oduyuye this week, returning to her work and recalling the legacy she left in theology and in the lives of all women, but especially African women. Oduyuye was a Ghanian Methodist, born in 1934. I became familiar with her work through the Concerned Circle of African Women Theologians (“The Circle”), which affirmed women’s lives were an interpretive framework for religious experience and practice. This Pan-African collective attended to the ways that religion shaped women’s freedom and oppression.

Oduyuye has been especially helpful for me in interrogating essentialism, otherizing, and the power of representative politics in the Western Church. Oduyuye came to mind this week following the publication of a The Widening of God’s Mercy by father and son biblical scholars Richard and Christopher Hays. From the reviews, the book is a case for LGBTQ inclusion in the church that traces similar terrain as other evangelical books (like the one written by David Gushee).

The book was not written for me (we’ve had access to this kind of biblical reasoning for decades) but I am grateful it was written. Richard Hays is writing as penance for decades of anti-gay New Testament scholarship, having trained thousands of students who pastored thousands of churches to believe God was against LGBTQ folks. I once had a person leave my church after reading Hay’s anti-gay chapter in The Moral Vision of the New Testament. His teaching had consequences – real, serious, and deadly consequences.

This has been a challenging publication week for evangelicals and other conservatives for whom Hays was a prominent ally in excluding queer people from the life of the church. One of those people is Preston Sprinkle, who has devoted his life to a kind of “compassionate” anti-gay theology. He has the same problems with this book that he has with any inclusive theology, so no need to recite the reasons here. But I want to pull out one of those well-rehearsed objections today: that people in the Majority World reject LGBTQ-inclusive theology:

The global church is growing exponentially in the Global South, Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the majority world. Almost all of these churches believe that sex difference is an essential part of what marriage is and that all sexual relationships outside this covenant of marriage are sin. The Widening of God’s Mercy implies that all these non-western Christians are not listening to the Holy Spirit, who is allegedly opening up fresh ways to read Scripture. 

The ethical viewpoint advocated for in The Widening of God’s Mercy is held primarily by a relatively small number of (mostly white and affluent) modern Christians living in the West. Is the Holy Spirit really speaking much more clearly to western Christians than those in the majority world? 

Sprinkle implies that LGBTQ-inclusion is the product of lascivious, wealthy, white Christians who believe that the Holy Spirit is speaking to them and not to Christians in places like Africa and Asia. This is a common reaction from people in majority positions of power in the Western church, and a place where I would like to suggest we need to exercise a lot more care and intention. I’m limiting my scope to Africa in this article because of my own familiarity and experience.

I want to be clear that “progressive” Christians have not aided themselves in dismantling accusations of xenophobia and racism in relation to theology in the Global South. Let us not forget Katharine Jefferts Schori explaining how Episcopalians are better educated than other Christians and thus have lower birth rates which makes them better stewards of the planet (astounding in many ways). White, wealthy Western church ignorance, racism, and colonization is rampant in theology and practice. But unlike Sprinkle who thinks this is a “progressive issue,” both ends of the theological spectrum in the Western church are enveloped in marginalizing voices beyond our borders and using those who agree with us to further entrench the power of the church in the West.

I suspect Mercy Oduyuye would be deeply uncomfortable with Sprinkle pitting “most Africans” against LGBTQ+ people. She spent her life resisting this logic and instead returning us to the God of liberation. Oduyuye was committed to the decolonization of theology in Africa. Her theology protested the negative judgment of African religion and culture by colonizing missions. “This colonization has not ended,” she reminds us, “In fact new forms of Christianity are arriving in Africa with even more trenchant antipathy for Africa’s indigenous religio-culture.” In her theology, Oduyuye utilizes idioms, stories, and symbols from Akan tradition and incorporates them into her theological work, a process known as inculturation (or indigenization). (I’m leaning heavily on Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa in this post.)

At the same time, Oduyuye recognized the marginalization and oppression of women in both her African culture and Christianity. Both are diverse in their relation to gender, and both require analysis that leads to the work of liberation. She called this process “African feminist culture hermeneutics,” the transformation of both African and Christian cultures. Oduyuye talked about the way women formed a “church within the church,” utilizing the image of the “hearth-hold” of her culture to describe the home-place carved out by African women in patriarchal churches.

Oduyuye would utilize the same household imagery for LGBTQ Africans. She discussed this in a chapter by African theologian John Mbiti. Oduyuye is critical of Mbiti’s encouragement of social norms of heteronormative marriages and procreation. She critiques the link between bearing children and immortality in African culture by showing the ways that women have been on the receiving end of harm through this cultural expectation. She talks about women’s victimization because of their childlessness, and the ostracization of gay men. Oduyuye’s essay comes from a personal place – she was a childless, married woman who speaks about her embarrassment and shame around neighbors and in-laws, how her worth was tied to motherhood.

Oduyuye is not alone in this work. For the past two decades, The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), founded by Dr Yvette Flunders, has worked towards the inclusivity of LGBTQ+ people in the Black church. Dr Flunders’ ministry expanded to HIV advocacy across the continent of Africa but took on new urgency in 2009 when Uganda introduced its Anti-Homosexuality bill. It was from Flunders that I learned about how legislative efforts to criminalize LGBTQ people in Africa are tied to the political advocacy of US evangelical Christians who fund these efforts (see the World Congress of Families). These groups portray LGBTQIA inclusion as neocolonial while at the same time pushing these interests through Western money and influence. Flunder’s organization partnered with Bishop Joseph Tolton to form TFAM Global, which works to combat this form of Western influence by promoting “pan-African justice” through the power of Spirit’s anointing and movement.

There are many other people and organization that are expansive in their LGBTQ inclusion through theology, activism, and art across the continent of Africa and in diaspora: Musa Dube (also a member of The Circle), Marc Epprecht, Desmond Tutu, Achille Mbembe, Jean-Blaise Kenmogne, Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiative and Advocacy, Cosmopolitan Affirming Church, Chinelo Okparanta, Unoma Azuah, Ezra Chitando, Esther Mombo, Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, Jean-Blaise Kenmogne, Godfrey Owino Adera.

I am grateful for each of these voices. Oduyuye has been helpful for me because she both stand within the tradition of Pan-African culture while naming the multiplicity of local and layered cultures within her own experience and community. That makes it more difficult (and more egregious) when Westerners use “African culture” to establish a dominant paradigm (“this is what Africans believe”) or to deal a deathblow to an LGBTQIA affirming theological position. From her we are learn that we cannot disappear LGBTQ Africans from our theological concerns. We discover that African theology is a living, breathing tradition with debates, movements, and theological concerns in conversation and contention. African theologians deserve our respect and critical engagement, not essentialism and weaponization.

Mercy Oduyuye Reading List

Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa (1986)

Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (1995)

Introducing African Women’s Theology (2001)

Re-membering Me (2019)

The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice by Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein

Interview with Prof Oduyuye from The Shiloh Project