The Lynn White Challenge: African Independent Churches (AIC) and Ecological Environmental
The article is devoted to the study of the influence of the thesis of the American medievalist Lynn White that Christianity is responsible for environmental injustice, which became the trigger for the formation of a new discipline in Christian theology - environmental theology and a new Christian environmental consciousness, on activities of the African Independent Churches (AIC). On the African continent, it was AIC that made a significant contribution to the development of contextual theology and environmental consciousness. The main postulate of the African Independent Churches (AIC) after liberation from colonial dependence was that countries that received political liberation should also receive environmental liberation. However, it should be noted that, nevertheless, the main emphasis was placed on environmental action, which was an expression of the environmental consciousness of members of the African Independent Churches. The AIC’s attempts to build a system of environmental theology within contextual theology relied on attempts to fit Christianity into a traditional African view that traditionally defined certain trees, rivers, or animals as sacred or taboo. These theological studies are still scarce, but action-based ecological consciousness has a well-rooted history in the AIC and is essentially an Afro-Christian response to the challenge posed to Christianity by Lynn White. The conclusions of the study intersect with the problems of the post-colonial civilizational transit of Africa, and it is in this aspect that the ecological activity of the AIC acquires the character of civilizational transitivity as a special mechanism for social integration at a new value-qualitative level.