Religious thinking is changing in South Sudan, partly as people try to make sense of the brutality of war and excessive, unprecedented loss. Across Africa, Christianity and nationalism have become important as a way to make sense of the violence and social upheavals that confront people.
1 Allen. ‘The Violence of Healing’, page 108. In the 1930s, Evans-Pritchard’s account of Nuer prophets was already highlighting the history of religious authorities. Johnson’s work on the Nuer prophets has played a seminal role in historicising religion in South Sudan.
2 Douglas, Nuer Prophets; David Anderson and Douglas Johnson, Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in East African History (James Currey and Ohio University Press, 1995). Work has included sweeping histories, such as those by Werner, Anderson and Wheeler,
3 Roland Werner, Willian Anderson and Andrew Wheeler, Day of Devastation, Day of Contentment (Paulines Publications, 2000). as well as intricate histories such as those of the parts of the Catholic and Protestant church, by Nikkel and Zink.
4 Jesse Zink, Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism (Baylor University Press, 2018). There have also been publications on Nuer prophets by Hutchinson, and on specific
baany e biith (Dinka priests and masters of the fishing spear) by Mawson and Cormack. These have all highlighted the histories and politics of religious figures.
5 Johnson, Nuer Prophets; Andrew Mawson, ‘The Triumph of Life: Political Dispute and Religious Ceremonial among the Agar Dinka of the Southern Sudan’ (PhD diss., Darwin College, 1989); Zoe Cormack, ‘The Making and Remaking of Gogrial: Landscape, History and Memory in South Sudan’ (PhD diss., Durham University, 2014). As governments repeatedly saw non-Christian divine authorities as anti-government figures, there has been a scholarly preoccupation with contesting any necessary propensity to violence.
Recent work has responded to the growth of churches and Christian thought in South Sudan, especially over the last four decades. Tounsel’s work has described how South Sudanese used the Bible to create a lexicon of resistance, radical identities and ‘potent spiritual power’ through reshaping Christian thought and theology. Tounsel describes the way in which Christian worldviews, work and theology informed the ideological construction of the South Sudanese nation-state.
6 Tounsel, Chosen Peoples. Tounsel has also documented how the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), including through its weekly newspaper, the
SPLM/A Update, created a martial theology and contributed to a religious framing of the SPLA-Government of Sudan (GoS) wars.
7 Christopher Tounsel, ‘Khartoum Goliath: SPLM/SPLA Update and Martial Theology during the Second Sudanese Civil War’, Journal of Africana Religions 4:2 (2016): 129–153. While the SPLM/A had no formal religious affiliation, it manipulated Christian ideas to mobilise support.
8 Tounsel, ‘Khartoum Goliath’.Zink takes a different approach and provides an account of the religious implications of the civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and changing modes of production, for the Anglican Church in the communities of Jonglei State. Zink argues that armed conflict, migration and economic shifts forced people to question their social existence and cosmological beliefs. Christianity offered new religious expressions and symbols that helped people navigate the shifting social relations, especially when Christian thought incorporated existing symbols and idioms.
9 Zink, Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan. Hutchinson’s findings among the Nuer in the 1990s alternatively narrated how Christian norms and practice were undermining Nuer beliefs and creating confusion in how they could reconcile and come to terms with their first-hand experiences of terror and war.
10 Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas, pages 299–350; Rajech Venugopal, Nationalism, Development and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2018).This book intentionally focuses on the eclectic divine and religious influences among a specific community in South Sudan – the communities around the Bilnyang River system. The book builds on this previous scholarship but focuses on how these meanings are used to contest the moral logics of government especially in a dominantly rural area of South Sudan. The book does not focus on abstract theological ideas, but instead focuses on how religion actually shapes both everyday lives and politics.
11 For others in the Sudans who have encouraged a focus on the impact of religion on ‘ordinary conduct’, see: Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Religion’, in Harry L. Shapiro (ed), Man, Culture, and Society (Oxford University Press, 1956), pages 310–311; Wendy James and Douglas Johnson, Vernacular Christianity: Essays in the Social Anthropology of Religion (Lilian Barber Press, 1988).