Joel Cabrita. Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church

Of the very many African-initiated churches that populated the continent's spiritual landscape from the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps none is as prominent as the Church of the Nazaretha, a denomination that has grown in recent decades beyond its KwaZulu-Natal homeland to claim at least six million followers throughout southern Africa. Academics have been particularly fascinated by the church in part because of its intentional fostering of Zulu tradition within the framework of evangelical Christianity. As a result it has come to be seen as a deeply conservative institution, one that acted as a bulwark against the presumably corrosive nature of modernity. In this remarkable study, however, Joel Cabrita pushes back against this characterization, arguing that far from simply embracing tradition, the Nazaretha reworked almost every aspect of their lives by espousing a living Bible; one in which a wide variety of written and oral sources combined with charismatic authority to produce a popular if volatile community of faith.

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