A few weeks ago I ran across an article in the (London) TimesOnline that was at once profound, jarring, encouraging and puzzling. The headline itself is enough to send the head spinning: “As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.” The author, Matthew Paris, a former Member of Parliament, speaks volumes in this short commentary about the state of Africa today. The world looks at Africa with pity and dismay. In the last few years we have had a spate of movies such as Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda, and Sahara all set against the backdrop of the grinding poverty, rampant corruption, civil war and more general violence. We have seen headlines of the political instability, murder of innocents and the virtual destruction of countries by their own megalomaniacal leaders. Attempts to institute government reform and to plant a democratic mindset with free elections have failed miserably—witness the tragic political farce being played out in Zimbabwe. The African nations struggle under a mountain of foreign debt with no real hope of escape since the original loans have been diverted by their political leaders to line their own pockets.

Foreign NGO’s (Non-Governmental Agencies) labor to bring relief, but their work has no lasting effect. They may relieve a bit of the suffering of the moment but it does not bring substantive change. They work against the tide trying to bring aid to relieve the overwhelming human suffering in this alien terrain. Poverty, ignorance, famine, lack of pure water, disease (particularly AIDS) abounds.

Paris recounts his own historic attitude toward Christian missions in Africa:

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.(italics added.)

A recent a trip to Malawi has radically changed his understanding of the real problems in Africa and any hope for the future there. Having lived in Africa as a child he recounts some of his experiences (positive) with Christian missionaries and of African Christians. He also tells of some of his experience on his recent trip.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

Paris goes on to embrace an abject intellectual heresy in today’s pluralistic world:

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Paris’ observations in this article are profound. Changes in Africa cannot take place within its present cultural mindset. A belief system, a system of animism, tribalism, and superstition must be supplanted. The one proven belief system that transforms (that is the term he uses) is Christianity. It is Christianity that makes a lasting impact in liberating individuals and transforming culture. Trying to drag Africa into the modern world without profound change will not work.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

The observations and conclusions of this article are not what shocked me. As a Christian I agree completely with his conclusions. But his conclusions belie an underlying basic cognitive dissonance. As an atheist, Paris recognizes the pragmatic and empirical value of the effects of Christianity. He also has come to see that the transformative effects of Christianity arise out of the heart/mind. He cannot deny this. He also implicitly recognizes that his own worldview is the result of a culture transformed by Protestant Christianity, and his judgments are based upon that worldview.

Yet, as the title of the article proclaims—he remains an atheist. This is the cognitive dissonance. Paul tells the Corinthians, “Jews ask for signs, and Greeks look for wisdom but we preach the Messiah crucified. He is a stumbling block to Jews and nonsense to gentiles.” (1 Cor 1:22) I would suggest that our western scientific worldview is epistemologically reductionistic at its heart. Even in its moderate form it insists that truth must be ultimately grounded in rationalistic/scientific/materialistic explanations. Anything that cannot pass this rationalistic/scientific/materialistic test of truth is rejected as meaningless in the “real” world and is placed in the realm of subjective value-judgments.(This was developed out of Kantian phenomonalism in the 19^th century and gave birth to Logical Positivism in the twentieth century). The poverty of this epistemology has been shown over roughly the past seventy-five years. It is now generally discredited. Yet on the popular level it continues to inform the Western culture and worldview.

Paris and those like him live in a culture that ultimately arose out of a Christian worldview, but since the central assumption of that worldview which brought forth modernity (the reality of a personal deity) cannot be proven by the contemporary fashionable epistemology (rationalistic, scientific and materialistic) they freely to draw upon its benefits without embracing the reality that brought forth the benefits.