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Your book describes the values of these freed American slaves as bourgeois liberal values: individual responsibility, personal initiative, enterprise. What did these have to do with antislavery, and what did they have to do with evangelicalism?

You might say these bourgeois liberal values have their roots in evangelical Christianity, because all of them are premised on the divine right of human personhood. All men and women are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. When Americans tried to create a fresh political community during the American Revolution, they fell back on a theocentric idea of human community; not a theocratic one, and certainly not a natural-law notion of community, but one that assumed that God has given us the gift of life, and created us in freedom. So liberty is our divine right. It's not something that the king or state gives us.

Typically Christianity in Africa has been linked closely with colonialism. You're suggesting a different story.

I'm actually driving two nails through the colonial argument, from opposite ends. I am saying that this radical view of Christianity and of society that came to West Africa in 1792 preceded colonialism, and that the political view of Christianity--first secure the chief as an ally of Christianity--was tried for 300 years and didn't work. I drive the nail in the other end when I point out that the greatest expansion of Christianity in Africa occurred not during colonialism but after colonialism. In 1960, which is the end of the colonial era, there were between 48 and 50 million Christians in Africa. In the year 2000, merely 40 years later, the numbers have increased to 340 million.

What was the colonial policy regarding Christians?

Most of the early Christian leaders in Africa were arrested by the colonial authorities. Many of them were tried and sentenced because preaching Christianity, especially from the Bible, was deemed a criminal offense.

Why?

One senior colonial administrator in Nigeria said that Christianity was giving Africans the wrong ideas of equality and justice, and that these ideas did not belong to Africa. Christianity taught that God had accepted them, and so all believers could stand before God without prejudice. But this religious idea also gave Africans the political notion that they were equals of Europeans, and that was not acceptable. But political repression only strengthened the conviction of Africans that they had actually found the truth.

Still, the colonialists managed to disenfranchise these Christians. And they have remained disenfranchised to this day.

Yes. Today Africa's new political leaders behave like the old chiefs. They connive in looting the continent, traumatizing their citizens, and flouting the rule of law.Consequently slavery has re turned to some parts of Africa. And there is no institution or structure to challenge it.

What do you think western churches can do to help Africa today?

They can be partners in this business of saving souls and ministering to the immense physical needs. What is crucial is not just structures, institutions, general trends, and forces but what I call moral agency: human beings as moral agents. It doesn't help to throw money at problems out of a sense of Western guilt. That only deepens the problem. The most important thing we need today is moral character and leadership, men and women who are not in it for their own gain. Identifying such people and equipping, training, and supporting them is one of the most important investments the church can make.You find such people not among the privileged but among what you might call the flotsam and jetsam of society. These are people who have been to the depths of human experience and have come to their faith in Christ in a way that places them at the very center of God's moral redemption of the world.That is what happened with the antislavery movement in Africa. It was not a movement of the privileged but of those whom the world despised. Nevertheless, their faith was strong, because their work was plainly "the work of God," as they put it. In spite of human obstacles, they were able to undertake this tremendous revolution of love, peace, and justice.

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July 10 2000, Vol. 44, No. 8