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Jonathan Zimmerman: The long road Africa took to the split with the Episcopal church of America

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."]

HEY, the Africans are trying to impose their culture on us!

That's what Episcopalians in the United States are saying about last week's summit in Tanzania, where global Anglican leaders urged Americans to bar homosexuals from becoming bishops and to stop blessing same-sex unions. As The New York Times reported, Episcopalians condemned"meddling" foreigners for"imposing their culture and theological interpretations on the American church."

In a sense, the Americans are right. Episcopalians in this country shade to the left, in theology as well as politics, while their African brethren tend to be more conservative. So it's not surprising that the African leaders would oppose gay marriage or that they'd demand that the entire Anglican communion do the same.

What is surprising, in light of history, is that the Africans are imposing on the West, not the other way around.

For nearly 500 years, Christians from Europe and the Americas tried to foist their own language, culture and religion upon Africa. Now the tables have turned.

To understand why, we need to return to the era immediately following World War Two. As anti-colonial movements swept Africa, sympathetic Western missionaries began to question the arrogant and ethnocentric assumptions that had marked so much Christian effort on the continent.

Decrying prior campaigns to" civilize" the Africans, liberals from the West substituted the language of culture. Every people had a culture, the argument went; no culture was inherently better or worse than another; hence Westerners should take special care to respect and even defend the cultures they encountered in Africa.

But how could you preserve African culture, even as you converted Africans to your own religion? For some missionaries, the answer lay in new syncretic forms of worship that fused indigenous traditions to Christian doctrine. For many Western liberals, however, the rise of the culture concept cast the entire missionary endeavor into doubt.

"We questioned what right we have to intervene in the education of people of another culture and what our motives are in desiring to intervene," wrote two American missionaries, in a typical statement."Do we want to 'domesticate' the people in one way or another, make them like us, convince them to adopt our culture?" The question contained its own answer.

To shed their ethnocentric baggage, indeed, liberal Americans increasingly abandoned the term"missionary" itself. One mission renamed its project"overseas service"; other missionaries simply called themselves volunteers, echoing the Peace Corps and other secular agencies."The very word 'missionary' calls up notions of superiority," explained one American.

And in an era of culture, that was the one thing nobody wanted to be.

Into this breach stepped a confident new generation of conservative missionaries, seeking to convert new souls to Christ. Conversant with African history and traditions, they did their best to couch their message in culturally appropriate terms. But they never wavered from the message itself: Jesus was Lord, Scripture was literal Truth, and anyone who believed otherwise was destined for hell.

Today, nine of 10 Westerners who call themselves"missionaries" hail from a conservative or evangelical church. And they have done their job well. That's why African Christians stand so far to the right of their brethren in the West on a host of religious and cultural questions: abortion, gay rights, female priest ordination and more.

And that's why they're starting to evangelize us, to the chagrin of many Americans.

The battle inside the Anglican Communion is only the first of many struggles that we can expect in the next few years, pitting Third World conservatives the against liberals in the West.

For almost half a millennium, Christians from the West told the rest of the globe how to think, behave and believe. Now, for the first time, we're getting a taste of our own medicine. For liberals, especially, it might be a very bitter pill to swallow.