Evangelical Christians and Indirect Resistance to Religious Persecution in Ethiopia
Tibebe Eshete Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Evangelical Christianity in Ethiopia changed significantly during and immediately following the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution. The revolution encouraged an indigenous, charismatic faith movement which was heavily influenced by Pentecostalism and which made inroads in several mainline churches. The church neither withdrew nor rebelled; it reloaded itself as committed leaders prompted believers to engage in nonviolent resistance by locating themselves in the hidden arena of the underground home cells and expanding aggressively to reach out to others.
Scholars have paid too little attention to how the evangelical churches in Ethiopia interrogated a hegemonic power field using spiritual idioms and the power of religious ideas. The evangelical church battled with a state openly hostile to religions through nonviolent approaches such as refusing to collaborate with its atheistic national projects, creating a counter-culture community, and by discursively challenging its ideological legitimacy through protest-oriented gospel songs. Re-tracing the Ethiopian church's experiences can serve as a helpful case study of indirect resistance to religious persecution.
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