Senior Research Seminar with Dr Leanne Williams Green (University of Cambridge)
Baptist Christians and Alternative Views of Freedom in a Zimbabwean City
Attributions of moral responsibility and human freedom are often linked together in discussions of ethics, the presumption being that a person must be free in order to be held morally responsible. A related tension persists in theology, particularly among those Christians heavily influenced by the thought of Saint Augustine. Among them, Baptists living in Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare, take all humans to be morally responsible as a condition of existence relative to God and prior to any capacity to act. As a result, Harare’s Baptists daily debate how to live moral lives in their postcolonial city despite believing themselves to be highly limited in their capacity to act morally at all. Perhaps most apparent in their emphasis on “original sin,” they do so because they hold a view in which moral responsibility conditions a non-liberal freedom, rather than the reverse. Original sin’s universality, however, ultimately prevents them from holding various sinful actors— whether neighbours or governments— to account. Even as their case invites us to recognize a historically influential and distinctive Augustinian perspective on freedom, it also calls attention to the ways that moral responsibility may more fundamentally organize human life than does being free.