Abstract
The encounter between Christianity and African culture produced one of the most enduring debates in contemporary African theology: whether the faith should be more fully Africanized in its cultural expression, or whether such Africanization risked compromising biblical fidelity. For much of its history on the continent, missionary Christianity communicated the gospel through European cultural forms, so that becoming Christian sometimes meant becoming culturally Western, and this confusion left many African converts alienated from their own heritage. Yet the opposite temptation, an uncritical retrieval of African Traditional Religion in the name of relevance, carried its own danger of syncretism. This tension framed the problem this study addressed: how Christianity might become genuinely African in cultural expression without ceasing to be authentically Christian in theological substance. Guided theoretically by the theology of translatability and inculturation associated with Lamin Sanneh, Aylward Shorter, and Kwame Bediako, and informed by Nigerian scholarship from Felix Enegho, Abiodun Ige, and Augustine Obaje and his collaborators, the study employed a qualitative, library-based method of textual and thematic analysis of theological literature. It found that neither wholesale Westernization nor uncritical Africanization offered an adequate model for African Christian identity; rather, a framework of critical inculturation, one that affirmed cultural values compatible with the gospel, transformed those that were ambiguous, and rejected those that contradicted Christian teaching, provided the more defensible path. The study recommended that African theologians, church leaders, and educators pursue this critical inculturation deliberately, engaging African cultural resources with genuine respect, submitting them to rigorous theological evaluation, and cultivating expressions of Christianity that remain recognizably African without ceasing to be recognizably Christian.
Keywords: Christianization, African African Christianity, Traditional Africanization, Religion, contextualization, inculturation, Pentecostalism.
Author name(s):
Prof. Abiodun S. Ige
Department of Religious Studies
Prince Abubakar Audu University
Anyigba, Nigeria
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0509
Olusegun Bukola Comfort
Department of Religious Studies
Prince Abubakar Audu University
Anyigba, Nigeria
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1823-0202
DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.230842
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.