Chapter 14
The Problems of Forgiveness, 2013–2020
During these years of war, churches continued to assert their divine authority through their ability to demand peace. In the cosmic polity, for churches, peace was a key way to assert legitimate power. This chapter first discusses this demand for peace at the national level. Churches used their histories and divine authority to contest the unrestrained power of the hakuma, to push back against arbitrary displays of violence and to demand peace. This involved church leaders’ engagement in the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) peace meetings, and their willingness to make statements against the hakuma in churches and in public statements.
The chapter then discusses how church leaders also tried to assert their authority through peace-making among South Sudanese communities, including in communities surrounding the Bilnyang and connected rivers. These assertions of authority came during a period of the proliferation of churches and new intra-church competition. However, the church’s peace alienated, and even offended, many.
1 There is no, single, united ‘church’ in South Sudan. At the same time, South Sudanese, often when being critical, speak of ‘the peace of the church’. For all churches in South Sudan there is a shared conviction in the importance of forgiveness. Their insistence on forgiveness was seen by some as immoral; it not only ignored the judicial model of peace, but rejected moral obligations to the dead. While the Christian understanding of forgiveness is bound up in sacrifice and punishment, this entails a reformulation of understandings of life post-death which is not commonplace. For many in the communities around the Bilnyang, the church’s peace was for the educated alone, excluding many of those who implemented violence. The temporality of the church was also different, offering no immediate curse and sanction for the violation of peace agreements.
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Figure 5. A soldier waves a cross as people gather in the county headquarters to celebrate the day of South Sudan’s independence from Sudan, Warrap State, 9 July 2011 (Naomi Ruth Pendle).
At the same time, church leaders have managed to make peace when they can confront the war-makers in the hakuma itself. They have also shown that there is potential to support rituals that have promoted more inclusive communities and that have encouraged peace by dampening divisions. How to understand the wartime dead is an ongoing contestation and church leaders have not been absent from these debates. A dispute near Ler about how to treat the bodies of captured spies provides an example that ends this chapter. Christian ideals did allow a more inclusive treatment of those who had died. Yet, these practices needed enforcing through military power and were really made possible through the proximity of the church to the hakuma and its guns, showing displays of the power of God himself.