Have we failed Christianity? Or how violence in the Great Lakes region challenges Christianity and the nation state

The paper reflects upon the extreme violence raging in the Great Lakes region while facing the seemingly paradox of Christianity inability to secure a sociability of conviviality. Thus, it engages in a wide sociological and theological discussion around a central interrogation: why did African Christianity not promote the dis-enclosure of communities, giving rise, from the beginning, to a community located beyond ideological manipulations and atavistic reactions that produce genocides and massacres in the Great Lakes region since1959? To answer to this question, it is important to distinguish Christianity as a doctrine and a system of dogma elaborated over centuries in the West from the Christian message. Once this distinction is made, one can understand that it is not necessarily the Christian utopia itself that has failed, but the way in which it arrived parceled and sometimes identified with capitalist culture or with a Western civilization driven by forces hostile to difference and alterity. This process allowed Christianity to comply with the colonial and postcolonial ethnicization policies in Rwanda for example. Its subordination by the nation state eventually ended up by colonizing or neutralizing the Christian political imagination.