Building an Ecology of Resilience through Religious Practice and Community in Northern Uganda

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork from 2015 to 2019, this paper explores resilience among evangelical Christians in rural northern Uganda after years of violent conflict. The paper argues that three aspects of evangelical life train and build resilience for congregation members: (1) individual and collective prayer; (2) social inclusion and resource sharing; (3) narrative practices of reframing the past and present. When these are continuously practiced within the evangelical group, these features form a kind of resilience which acts to manage the effects of violence. Thus, resilience is conceptualized as an adaptive process within an ecology of social and narrative practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The quote was said in English not in the local Acholi language. The word “compound” can seem ambiguous in this sentence, however it is in this context used in a local idiomatic sense, meaning ‘to combine’ or ‘join together’.

2. By ‘financial stability’, I mean that people become more financially stable than before joining these groups. This happens by pooling resources from farming and selling produce at the markets, but also through a redistribution of common funds and sometimes produce from the fields to “the ones in need”, the congregants with the least income. I do not claim that that joining the church make them completely financially stable. Lack of resources is an on-going major concern for many people in rural northern Uganda.

3. The perhaps more general veneration in the Global North of “spiritual practices” as opposition to “religion” is excellently debated by Heelas and Woodhead (2008).

4. All names are pseudonyms.

5. Having a “prayer team” connected to the church that goes to people homes is not a Ugandan or Acholi idea, but is widely known within evangelical groups elsewhere e.g., USA (Luhrmann 2012).

6. For more on forgiveness in Acholi after the conflict, see Meinert et al. (2014).

7. Literally meaning “sharing thoughts”.

8. I tried to find out how many, but gave up eventually because anyone can start such a church if they wish and there are no records. When asking people in Paibona, they will simply say that there are “hundreds of these churches”.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the IGA-Rockefeller Funding Call under Grant IDVTA.

Notes on contributors

Lars Williams

Lars Williams holds a PhD in Anthropology from Aarhus University in Denmark. His most recent work is on mental illness and prayers in Pentecostal churches (Transcultural Psychiatry, 2021) and psychotherapeutic intervention for PTSD in northern Uganda (Medical Anthropology, 2020), as well as on trauma and temporality (Williams & Meinert, 2020) and paths of recovery for trauma (Williams & Meinert, 2021). He is currently a researcher and external lecturer at University of Copenhagen.