Matthew Parris, columnist for The Times of London, wrote in December 2008: “As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.” Parris was born in South Africa where his father went to work as an engineer and grew up in Swaziland and Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). A former British diplomat, he also worked for right-wing Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and served as a member of parliament for the UK’s Conservative Party.

“Missionaries, not aid money are the solution to Africa’s biggest problem—the crushing passivity of the people’s mindset,” Parris continued. Parris’s argument—that Africa needs more than the education and training development projects offered by secular NGOs, government and international development efforts—was that Africa needs Christian evangelism to bring about a spiritual transformation. Without this there can be no real change: people need to be offered something to replace the fear of evil spirits, of the ancestors, of nature, tribal hierarchy and so on which structures rural African thought: “direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being … offers something to hold on to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink.”

When my father gave me this article to read in 2008, I was incensed but said nothing; no need to upset him and my mother, former missionaries who do not understand my beliefs and disbeliefs.

So, I was angry—but not surprised—that my parents thought Africa’s problems could be solved overnight by Christian evangelism.

As missionaries from 1958 to 1975, my parents worked for the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) which sought to bring evangelical Christianity into the “unoccupied regions” since the 1930s, as Rowland Victor Bingham, the cofounder and long-time director of the SIM once put it. (He is cited in Donham, D, 1999, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution). The missionaries used aspects of modernity, particularly technology and medicine to propagate their Christianity: “Imbued with a progressive sense of time and increasingly impatient with ‘tradition,’ mission converts dreamed of a better day” (p. 83).

Parris’s article was like a re-invitation to colonialists and missionaries to go back to Africa to have another go at things.

Seven months after The Times published Parris’s column, former US President Jimmy Carter wrote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, “Losing my religion for equality.” Severing ties with the US-based Southern Baptist Convention, Carter argued that some of their leader’s beliefs conflicted with his belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God. Using a few carefully selected verses to justify the superiority of men, they claimed that “Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be ‘subservient’ to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.”

Carter argued that religion has long provided reasons to discriminate against women and that the male interpretations of many religious texts has reinforced traditional practices that justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant and damaging examples of human rights abuses and continues to deny many girls and women “fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.”

It means boys are favored over girls in education and health care and that many girls “face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.”