Religion in Rwanda

Parish church in Rwamagana, Rwanda

The Rwandan government reported on November 1, 2006, that 56.9% of the Rwanda's population is Roman Catholic, 26% is Protestant, 11.1% is Seventh-day Adventist, 4.6% is Muslim, 1.7% claims no religious affiliation, and 0.1% practices traditional indigenous beliefs.^[1] This study indicates a 6.9 percent increase in the number of Catholics and a 15.8 percent decline in the number of Protestants (which can in large part be explained by breaking out the growing Seventh-day Adventist church separately) from the 2001 survey figures.^[1] The figures for Protestants include the growing number of members of Jehovah's Witnesses (20,509 in 2011) and evangelical Protestant groups.^[1] There is also a small population of Baha'is. There has been a proliferation of small, usually Christian-linked schismatic religious groups since the 1994 genocide,^[1] as well as substantial conversion to Islam.^[2]

Current context

Foreign missionaries and church-linked nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of various religious groups operated in the country.^[1] Foreign missionaries openly promoted their religious beliefs, and the Government welcomed their development assistance.^[1]

The Constitution of Rwanda provides for freedom of religion, and the Government generally respected this right in practice.^[1] Local government officials sometimes detain Jehovah's Witnesses for refusing to participate in security patrols.^[1] In 2007, the US government received no reports of societal abuses or discrimination based on religious belief or practice.^[1]

History

Colonial period

Although the ethnic divisions and tensions between Hutu and Tutsi predate the colonial era, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) report on the genocide states,

In the colonial era, under German and then Belgian rule, Roman Catholic missionaries, inspired by the overtly racist theories of 19th century Europe, concocted a destructive ideology of ethnic cleavage and racial ranking that attributed superior qualities to the country's Tutsi minority, since the missionaries ran the colonial-era schools, these pernicious values were systematically transmitted to several generations of Rwandans…^[3]

When the Roman Catholic missionaries came to Rwanda in the late 1880s, they contributed to the "Hamitic" theory of race origins, which taught that the Tutsi were a superior race. The Church has been considered to have played a significant role in fomenting racial divisions between Hutu and Tutsi, in part because they found more willing converts among the majority Hutu.^[4]

1994 Genocide

An estimated 800,000 Rwandans died during ethnic violence over a brief span of 100 days between April and June 1994.^[5] Most of the dead were Tutsis, and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.

The genocide started after the death of the Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, in the shooting down of his plane above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994. The full details of that specific incident remain unclear; however, the death of the president was by no means the only cause of the mayhem. (Ethnic tension in Rwanda is not new. Disagreements between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis are common, but the animosity between them grew substantially after the end of the Belgian colonial regime.)

Timothy Longman has provided the most detailed discussion of the role of religion in the Rwandan genocide in Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, published in 2010.^[6] Longman argues that both Catholic and Protestant churches helped to make the genocide possible by giving moral sanction to the killing. Churches had longed played ethnic politics themselves, favoring the Tutsi during the colonial period then switching allegiance to the Hutu after 1959, sending a message that ethnic discrimination was consistent with church teaching. The church leaders had also long had close ties with the political leaders, and after the genocide began, the church leaders called on the population to support the new interim government, the very government supporting the genocide.

At the same time, churches did not uniformly support the genocide. In the period leading up to the genocide, 1990–1994, major splits emerged within most churches between moderates who promoted democratic change and conservatives allied with the Habyarimana regime. Many of the clergy were Tutsi, and they generally supported democratic reform, but many moderate Hutu within the churches supported reform as well. Churches provided major support to the formation of the new human-rights groups that emerged in the early 1990s. When the genocide began in 1994, some clergy and other church leaders opposed the violence,^[7] even at the risk of their own lives.^[8]

Some individual members of the religious community attempted to protect civilians, sometimes at great risk to themselves. For example, Mgr. Thaddée Ntihinyurwa of Cyangugu preached against the genocide from the pulpit and tried unsuccessfully to rescue three Tutsi religious brothers from an attack, while Sr. Felicitas Niyitegeka of the Auxiliaires de l’Apostolat in Gisenyi smuggled Tutsi across the border into Zaire before a militant militia executed her in retaliation.^[9] In her book Left to Tell: Discovering God in the Rwandan Holocaust (2006), Immaculée Ilibagiza, a Tutsi woman, describes hiding with seven other Tutsi women for 91 days in a bathroom in the house of Pastor Murinzi - for the majority of the genocide. At the St Paul Pastoral Centre in Kigali about 2,000 people found refuge and most of them survived, due to the efforts of Fr Célestin Hakizimana. This priest "intervened at every attempt by the militia to abduct or murder" the refugees in his centre. In the face of powerful opposition, he tried to hold off the killers with persuasion or bribes.^[10]

Post-genocide conversions

Reports indicate the percentage of Muslims in Rwanda has doubled^[11] or tripled^[12] since the genocide, due to Muslim protection of Tutsis and to Hutus' wanting distance from the people who murdered. Although the growth of Islam stabilized after a few years, it is still attracting some converts. Conversions to Evangelical Christianity also increased after the genocide, while attendance in Catholic churches has decreased. Observers believe this is due to the participation of some Catholic priests in the genocide.^[13]

See also

• Roman Catholicism in Rwanda

References

External links

• "Rwanda's resurrection of faith" by Mary Wiltenburg, The Christian Science Monitor, April 12, 2004
• "Rwanda: How the genocide happened", BBC News, December 18, 2008
• [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/29/pope-catholics-rwanda-genocide-church: "For Rwandans, the pope's apology must be unbearable"], The Guardian, March 28, 2010