ABSTRACT
The history of faith-based aid and development is by no means simple or uncontested. Christianity’s role, or the actions of those in its name, has included the ravages of Iberian conquistadors, for example, or the construction of mission stations, schools and hospitals by European Christian missionaries in the colonies and protectorates of their home nations, and their portrayal as ‘arrogant and rapacious imperialists’ (Andrews 2009: 2). Nonetheless, in important ways religious organizations have played ‘development’ roles since they emerged many centuries ago. In fact, Manji and O’Coill (2002) have argued that the evolution of the role of development non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa ‘represents a continuity of the work of their precursors, the missionaries and voluntary organizations that cooperated in Europe’s colonization and control of Africa’ (2002: 568). This echoes Woodberry’s challenge to traditional theories of modernization that ‘liberal democracy and other social transformations traditionally associated with “modernity” developed primarily as the result of secular rationality, economic development, urbanization, industrialization, the expansion of the state, and the development of
new class structures’ (2012: 244). Instead, he argues that, although these factors matter, ‘Western modernity, in its current form, is profoundly shaped by religious factors, and although many aspects of this “modernity” have been replicated in countries around the world, religion shaped what spread, where it spread, how it spread, and how it adapted to new contexts’ (2012: 244). Nevertheless, this religious underpinning of modernity and its associated development project has been to a large extent ignored or underestimated (see also Fountain, Chapter 6).
