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"We the people," begins the Zambian constitution's preamble. It sounds familiar to Americans, but a few words later is a phrase that American Christians haven't ever heard: "declare the Republic a Christian nation while upholding the right of every person to enjoy that person's freedom of conscience or religion."

It's not just lip service. Zambia's laws draw on Christian tradition to ban, for example, both homosexual behavior and pornography. Earlier this year, a Zambian judge sentenced a German tourist to six years in jail with hard labor—for oral sex. "Customs of other countries, which are an abomination here, must not be allowed to be practiced by tourists or anybody," the judge said.

It's not just a political thing, either. More than 80 percent of the country's 9 million residents are professing Christians—and the numbers are growing. By 2025, predicts The World Christian Encyclopedia, 87.8 percent of the country will be Christian. By 2050, it should top 92 percent.

This is a country where Christianity infuses every aspect of the culture. Christian music—from local bands to Dolly Parton's gospel hits—is everywhere. It greets visitors in the airport. It plays in the taxis. There are radio stations that play exclusively Christian music, of course, but the mainstream stations have dance mixes that intersperse "Sunny, yesterday my life was full of rain" and "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A man after midnight" with "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord."

On a crowded cross-country bus, two complete strangers talk about their unhealthy-looking fried chicken. One jokes that no food can be called unclean since Christ's death, so it must be okay. Everyone in the minibus gets the joke.

Zambia is a Christian nation.

Zambia is also the living legacy of David Livingstone, a missionary who became one of the most famous men of the 19th century. When Livingstone died in 1873, his African companions made a year-long journey to return his body to London. With thousands attending his funeral, his body was buried in Westminster Abbey—but not his heart. That was buried beneath a mupundu tree in the middle of Zambia. In 1899, locals believed the tree was diseased, cut it down, and shipped back to London a section of the trunk that had been engraved with Livingstone's name.

Livingstone, too, has been called diseased, and has been cut down by historians who brand him a megalomaniacal failure. In his "home country," he is largely forgotten. If Western Christians have heard his name at all, it is only through Henry Stanley's famous question, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

But Zambians know him well, and thrive on his legacy. In this "officially Christian" African nation, for better and worse, Livingstone's heart has taken root. When Zambians speak of being a Christian nation, it is in many ways his kind of Christianity they're talking about.

Zambia didn't exist as a nation when David Livingstone first arrived in 1851, a decade after landing in Cape Town. The local tribes identified themselves ethnically, not geographically, and European maps had only the vaguest outline of the continent. As Jonathan Swift wrote, "So Geographers, in Afric-maps / With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps, / And o'er uninhabitable Downs, / Place Elephants for want of Towns."

Livingstone filled in many of the gaps with his considerable cartographic skill, but his emphasis was less on cataloging villages than on identifying rivers. No river more captured his attention and imagination than Zambia's namesake, the Zambezi. He called it "God's Highway," believing it could allow missionaries and merchants to travel easily between the coast of Africa and its interior.

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February 4 2002, Vol. 46, No. 2