The Godless Delusion: Europe and Africa

By Jim Harries

Wipf and Stock, 2017

ISBN: 978-1532614989

188 pages

USD $24.00

Reviewed by Prof. Rajkumar Boaz Johnson, PhD Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies North Park University, Visiting Professor SHIATS University Allahabad, India.

By 1913, the British Empire ruled over 412 million people, a quarter of the then world’s population. I come from one of the countries they ruled-India. The British came up with a system of education for Africans and Indians, which suited their rule. The people groups they deemed higher classes were allowed to remain as high classes. However, they were trained to be middlemen, so the British could control the large majority of the population through them. In India, these were the high caste priests or Brahmins. Hinduism already had a practice of enslaving the low castes and the outcastes. The British system of education gave them further tools to enslave the masses, and thus benefit themselves. In African countries like Kenya, Zambia, and Nigeria, the British system of education was inimical to economic growth and caused much tribal animosity. Years after the British left these countries the colonial stamp remains, with British education and English ideas as the gold standard.

Jim Harries, in his crucial book The Godless Delusion, does a great job in delineating the dire consequences of thoughts produced in the West that impact the thinking elite in Africa. Richard Dawkins is one of Oxford University’s most important thinkers and scientists. When he states in his magnum opus, The God Delusion, that God does not exist, and that all religion is a delusion, thinkers in India and Africa listen. After all, he is from the Mecca of learning-Oxford. Africa, pays careful attention, because Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya. His father, John Dawkins, was an agricultural scientist there.

In the first chapter, Harries suggests that Dawkins and other western thinkers have continued to impose on Africa the artificial divide between the head and the heart; the mind and the emotion; and the secular and the spiritual. The African person does not know this kind of division. In the second chapter, Harries shows that religion is a vibrant, active and live experience; the realm of the supernatural is very real in Africa. In chapter 3, Harries writes, “God has an essential role to play in many, if not all, African ways of life … What Dawkins is really saying is that God is not in a ‘real’ category, … he belongs in the ‘delusion’ or ‘non-real’ category” (44). Harries urges that this mindset is foreign to Africa, and must not become the basis of African theology, or church life. In fact, he suggests that the very use of a western language like English, takes away from deep African Christianity, which is a lot deeper than an intellectual exercise. It is prayer for healing of cancer. It a spiritual battle against supernatural evil, which takes on all kinds of social, economic, and complex forms in society. African languages can understand this complexity. This is vibrant Christianity and is so different from the western godless delusion.

I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to know how to think outside the narrow box of the western dualistic world.