Uganda has witnessed two historically important Christian movements. First, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, numerous Ugandans, most from Buganda, the largest kingdom in the eventual British colony, became Anglican and Catholic, making Uganda one of the great Christian modern missionary successes. Second, in the 1930s, the East African Revival swept through Uganda after beginning in Rwanda, later moving across the region and beyond. The Revival convulsed Uganda's Anglican Church, shaping collective religious sentiment so that revivalism became a default spiritual style across Christian denominations in eastern Africa. Having written extensively on the Revival already, Bruner here portrays its impact, spiritually, and especially practically, on those people who embraced it.
Living Salvation describes how the public confession of sins defined the ‘saved’ — or in Luganda, ‘Balokole’. Drawing on numerous first-person accounts gathered by past researchers, interviews with now-elderly converts from the Revival's early years, and colonial-era records — and in conversation with other Revival scholarship — Bruner shows how internal conviction of forgiveness led to public declarations of sinfulness, with past offenses shared in often shocking detail. Yet if confession defined a Mulokole, as one saved person was called, other changes usually followed: joining a fellowship and significant transformations in behavior.
The nature of the changes that Bruner discerns in those personal accounts is used to organize the book. After an Introduction and first chapter discussing the Revivalists’ post-conversion insistence on remaining within the (Anglican) Church of Uganda — instead of starting independent churches, so common in contemporaneous western and southern Africa — succeeding chapters each cover a dimension of Balokole transformation. These include the confession and renunciation of sin (Chapter Two), bodily changes in diet and attire (Chapter Three), experiences of migration and work (Chapter Four), changes in domesticity and the home (Chapter Five), and new realities in schools (Chapter Six). Bruner mixes generalizations and specific examples from Rwanda, south-western Uganda, north-western Tanzania (then Tanganyika), and Kenya to display the movement's tendencies as manifested in the daily lives of adherents. Revivalists did not simply adopt a new religious discourse, although their language remains distinctive. Nor were they simply dissenters from political and religious orthodoxies, although they threatened hierarchies in both church and state. Influenced by practices of Keswick spirituality that originated in late-nineteenth-century England, Balokole adapted those forms to their own particular circumstances. Balokole pursued the moral renewal of Uganda and elsewhere by changing their personal lives after being convicted of their sins. They ignored ethnic food taboos, resisted and mocked existing authorities in churches and schools whose holiness they felt was lacking, paid restitution for things they confessed having stolen, and refrained from perceived social vices linked to alcohol and sexual misbehavior. Through preaching tours and rallies they then tried to bring others to similar rebirth through confession of sin and conversion.
Bruner's clear prose and interesting stories, along with this book's modest length, make this a strong teaching text for undergraduate or seminary classrooms. Distinctive contributions that Bruner makes to the academic study of the Revival include his close attention to converts’ narratives, his skilled deployment of colonial-era outsider accounts for other perspectives (notably the papers of British anthropologist Derek Stenning who studied the Revival in the mid-twentieth century), and his coining of the term ‘ascetic cosmopolitanism’ to describe how the Balokole adapted to social transformations (74–78). Revivalists differed from the ethnic nationalists described in Derek Peterson's Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival (2013), who sought to adapt their ethnic distinctiveness to the new colonial realities of urbanization and the monetized economy while planning for a postcolonial nation. And the Balokole scorned the allegedly amoral migrants to African cities decried by fearful late-colonial officials as ‘detribalized’ (83, 119). Instead, they pursued the way of salvation by faith-based changes in their domestic and personal habits, an asceticism that united them across ethno-linguistic differences.
Lacking here are impressions from the large group of Catholics in Uganda, whose institutions also faced Balokole-driven challenges, if less so than Anglicans. In addition, the self-congratulatory tone of many of the narratives Bruner adduces makes one wonder if he does not, by accepting them at face value, at times jump too quickly from claim to historical fact. A longer book, which would spend more time on how to interpret his narratives, might also have been less manageable, however, and the organization and scope of what is presented here is admirable.
Compared to other parts of Africa, eastern Africa has seen relatively few independent churches, especially Uganda and Tanzania. One potential explanation for this absence lies in the effective way the East African Revival, despite the tensions it created in the Anglican Church of Uganda and beyond, only rarely led to schism or new churches. Bruner's work, highlighting the personal transformations that the Balokole underwent, shows that their energy went toward religious innovation aiming not at new ecclesial structures, but at transformative spiritual energy, similar to today's African Pentecostal churches. The Revival's vitality represents one likely reason for Uganda's relatively few independent churches.
