Christianity and Public Culture in Africa, edited by Harri Englund, may be most helpfully characterized as a kind of prolegomena toward the construction of a new, post-Habermasian idea of the public sphere. The notion of the public sphere, as initially presented by Habermas, presumed the disappearance of faith as a heuristic agent in any discourse above and beyond private exchanges. Habermas took for granted that Western culture had evolved beyond something as recognizably irrational as religion. The ten essays in this volume do not so much challenge this argument as presume the argument's repudiation. In some way they all seek to show that the public sphere does not occur in contemporary Africa in any sense that would accommodate Habermas's ideas. What can be observed, they suggest, are public cultures, meaning shared arenas of space and media, where there is at least some agreement among the contestants about the rules of engagement. As understood by the scholars in this volume, what is worth noting about these public cultures is that they have and continue to provide venues for contests over collective symbols and values. The permanence of these public cultures is not considered. Each essay offers what might be called a snapshot of a situation as it appeared at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The absence of teleology in the essays is impressive, thought the absence does leave the reader a bit out to sea in terms of determining the import of what has been observed.

Beyond Englund's introduction, which provides a useful orientation to the scholarly literature on religion and politics in contemporary Africa, the essays have been divided into three sections according to the identified contestants in the cultural battle particular essays assess. The first three essays, by respectively James A. Pritchard, Maria Hinfelaar, and Nicholas Kamau Goro, address the question of how religious identities have contended with concepts of the secular in the societies surrounding them. Pritchard talks about how one Protestant and one Catholic mission have facilitated the evolution of contrasting “modern” (non-traditional/non-tribal) personas in one rural region of Zambia. Hinfelaar's study, also situated in Zambia, looks at the contest between Christian groups to use conflicting constructs of Christian statehood as a tool for political mobilization. Kamau-Goro's essay argues that the novels of Ngugi wa Thiongo should be appreciated for how they appropriated biblical imagery and re-purposed this imagery as a lexicon for nationalist discourse in Kenya.

The second set of essays, by Barbara Cooper, Ruth Prince, and Damaris Parsitau all consider contests between older and newer ideas of public morality, the older in all cases being inspired by notions of patriarchal Christianity traceable back to the era of the missions. Cooper offers an intriguing look at the innovative efforts of Protestant Christians in Niger to claim for Christianity the collective attention granted by local peoples to celebrations of new births. Prince characterizes the battle in Kenya over the Luo practice of the levirate that pits on one side women, missions and Pentecostals against on the other Luo Christians concerned with the maintenance of ethnic identity. Parsitau surveys the career of three successful female evangelists and church founders to talk about how women are forcing a reconceptualization of the public patriarchal face of Christianity.

The final set of essays is more theoretical than empirical. These essays all speculate about where the investigation of the connections between religion and politics should go now that Habermas has been left behind. Brigit Myers, using the Pentecostal movement in Ghana as a springboard, suggests that the investigation should consider the question of how religious movements shape public discourse. Her essay highlights the important differences between a religious movement “going public,” that is, claiming a persona and place in a public culture and a religious movement, “making public,” that is, opening up to outside scrutiny aspects of its cult that had previously been known only by participants. Both shape public culture, but in different ways. Harri Englund in his contribution on the Christian use of radio broadcasts to attack Islam in Malawi, raises the questions of first how does modern media facilitate the construction of public culture, and second how is modern media exploited to conduct “spiritual warfare,” that is mental confrontation between systems of beliefs. Ilana van Wyk looks at the perplexing example of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa which consciously renounces most of rites of communion practiced by most Christian churches, yet seems to thrive. Van Wyk's study is in part concerned with identifying the boundaries of ecclesiastical minimalism. The more pertinent question it raises in the context of the volume, however, is in a Christian public culture, what attributes of Christian cult can a church presume its congregants can find elsewhere? Michael Perry Kweku Okyerefo, like Myers, points out some of the questions prompted by the success of Pentecostalism in Ghana. Okyerefo ponders the question of what parts of the sociology that Habermas presumed as operating behind the evolution of the public sphere still remain. In the Pentecostal megachurches Okyerefo studies, the seams that Western social science assume to exist between cultural, social, and economic activities do not show, triggering questions about the application of existing social theory to new Christian realities in Africa.