Responsibility without Choice: Harare’s Baptist Christians and Normative Freedom Amidst Uncertainty

Author:

Williams Green Leanne

Abstract

Abstract Baptists living in Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare, engage with a long-standing debate in Christian theology and beyond: that of the relation between moral responsibility and human freedom. The presumption has often been that to be held morally responsible, a person must be free to choose and to act. The views of Harare’s Baptists directly challenge this understanding, with important outcomes for their political lives. I show ethnographically how they do so through the urgency of their daily moral deliberations as religious practitioners. Influenced by Augustinian theology, they treat moral responsibility as a condition of existence, irrespective of choice. I argue that they adhere to a “normative freedom” as an alternative to classically liberal perspectives or to freedom as outlined recently in anthropological discussions of ethics. I propose that attending to moral responsibility provides a key avenue for further theorizing diverse conceptions of human freedoms and the attendant political consequences.

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)

Subject

Religious studies

Reference65 articles.

1. “Two Concepts of Liberty.”;Berlin,[1969] 2002

2. “Teachers’ and Bank Workers’ Responses to Zimbabwe’s Crisis: Uneven Effects, Different Strategies.”;Chagonda;Journal of Contemporary African Studies,2012

3. “The Necessities of Perfect Freedom.”;Couenhoven;International Journal of Systematic Theology,2012

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