Are there negative elements in American culture and in the Church in the U.S. that African priests and religious will find challenging?
Making comparisons between the Church in the United States and the various countries in Africa is difficult and there is always the risk of oversimplification. It would be incorrect to speak of a single American culture. It is more accurate to speak of American cultures, which range from the deeply religious to the militantly atheistic. In this country we no longer live under what Peter Berger called the “sacred canopy,” which suggested that most people accepted a Judeo-Christian world-view. The absence of the “sacred canopy” can lead to a loss of a sense of the sacred. This may result in the embrace of relativism (absence of objective truth), materialism (wealth and material success is the highest good), secularism (the exclusion of religious faith from the public square), egalitarianism (questioning of authority and institutional structures), and anti-intellectualism (abandonment of critical thinking). This can lead to a loss of respect for tradition and history. The icons of popular
