Journal for the Study of Religion

Religion and its Integration in Everyday Life:

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It is with great pleasure that we present this edition of the Journal for the Study of Religion (JSR) which focuses on religion as embedded in everyday life, public discourse, ethical reasoning, economic survival, and digital mediation. Since its founding in 1993, the journal has occupied a distinctive and valued place in the academic study of religion in Southern Africa. As a bi-annual, open-access journal affiliated with the Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa (ASRSA), JSR remains committed to fostering accessible, rigorous, and contextually grounded scholarship, particularly from and about the Global South. In a scholarly landscape still largely shaped by Global North priorities, this commitment is not only significant, it is urgent and essential. From its inception, JSR has sought to provide an academic home for work attentive to the diversity of religious traditions, movements, and formations in Southern
Africa and beyond. The journal has consistently foregrounded lived realities, comparative perspectives, and critical engagements with religion as it intersects with social, political, economic, and cultural life. This orientation continues to guide the journal’s editorial vision, even as the terrain of religion and scholarship shifts in response to changing social conditions, media environments, and global
challenges.

Sanctifying Settler Colonialism:

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This paper presents an intersectional discursive analysis of a web statement issued on January 10, 2024 by a group of selfidentified South African Christian leaders opposing the South African government’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Using a critical discourse analytic framework informed by Michel Foucault’s theorization of discourse and power, the paper examines how the statement’s pragmatic, ethical, and theological dimensions work together to encourage and legitimize support for Israel through the language of moral and spiritual authority. Across three identified fronts, the statement deploys distinctive rhetorical strategies. On the pragmatic front, it invokes national interest and religious freedom to construct a regime of ‘moral reasonableness’. On the ethical front, it appropriates feminist and liberationist vocabularies such as ‘victim blaming’ to reframe Israel as the victim and Palestine as the aggressor. On the theological front, it redeploys the language of peace characteristic of apartheidera church theology, sanctifying inaction under the guise of neutrality. Additionally, read alongside the Kairos Document of 1985, the analysis situates the 2024 statement within a changing media ecology that transforms how religious authority is produced and circulated. Whereas the Kairos Document emerged from a slow, consultative print culture rooted in collective discernment, radical pedagogy, and liberation theology, the 2024 statement belongs to the fast, affect-driven environment of digital media. Its authority derives not from theological rigor but from rhetorical immediacy and emotional resonance. Drawing on Mitri Raheb’s notion of empire’s theological ‘software’, the paper argues that the statement exemplifies how digital media now function as moral infrastructure, transforming emancipatory theologies into instruments of ideological power. In doing so, it advances scholarship on religion and media by tracing the shift from the deliberative textuality of Kairos to the affective immediacy of digital circulation, revealing how the Christian Zionist discourse in South Africa performs a distinct kind of theological labor that both mediates and moralizes empire in the 21st century.

A Religious Minority in Post-Apartheid Political Secularism Muslim Active Citizenship

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Cape Muslims perform an active sense of citizenship rooted in their history of political and civic involvement, from slavery and apartheid to the current post-apartheid period. Their active citizenship and sense of national belonging have been fostered by post-apartheid political secularism, which encourages pluralism and inclusive multiculturalism, accommodating a vibrant social life of religion. The postapartheid era has favored a model of political secularism grounded in inclusive multiculturalism, based on equal
human rights and citizenship. Notably, Muslims perceive Islam not just as a cultural difference for a religious minority in South Africa seeking recognition, but as an integral part of this country’s culture. This article fosters an understanding of the performance of Muslimness as the Muslim culturalization of citizenship – negotiating and reconciling multiple, intersecting local, national, and transnational belongings without compromising active citizenship and integration within Cape Town’s broader multicultural society. Motivated by Islamic ethics, Muslims demonstrate an active sense of citizenship, belonging, and social commitment both within South Africa and internationally. The article presents two main points: First, that the Muslim integration of multiple belongings, active citizenship, and societal engagement offers a model for Muslim minorities navigating identity politics in multicultural societies; second, that post-apartheid political secularism, founded on inclusive multiculturalism and equal rights, provides lessons for how other modern multicultural states can integrate religious minorities as equal citizens.

Pentecostal Moral Bricolage and Women’s Survival in Zimbabwe’s Kukiya-Kiya Economy:

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This study examines the ethical considerations of Zimbabwean Pentecostal women in cross-border trade. I examine how they navigate the ethical tensions between religious convictions, which value hard work and moral discipline, and the survival imperatives of an informal economy marked by systemic corruption and punitive policies that penalize the poor. Using a hybrid ethnographic methodology, this study combines in-person and online interviews and participatory observations to gather data from 22 traders. The key finding is that these women do not abandon their faith-based ethics; instead, they engage in moral bricolage. They reinterpret morally ambiguous practices such as bribery and smuggling, through a Pentecostal lens, framing these as divine tests and forms of
sowing seeds for future improvisation (kukiya-kiya) in a corrupt system. The study’s primary contribution is a nuanced theorization of how Pentecostalism provides a language of justification, enabling agency, and critiquing the state’s failure. It moves beyond the binaries of piety and corruption or formality and informality, offering a critical understanding of religious ethics, gendered power, and
economic survival in Zimbabwe’s crisis.

Religious Communication in the Digital Sphere:

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One of the African Pentecostalism scholars, Mookgo Kgatle, has described Prophet Shepherd Bushiri as one who has mastered Pentecostal prophecies and is famous for ‘Prophetpreneurship’. This study investigates that claim by examining Bushiri’s YouTube sermons through the lens of Paul Gee’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. The framing theory illumines this study while using ATLAS.ti to code texts into themes. It explores frames in Bushiri’s sermons and his dependence on the new media’s capacity to
expand influence. While CDA is commonly applied to political texts, this research extends its reach to religious discourse, revealing the ideological dimensions embedded in Bushiri’s rhetoric. Findings reveal frames such as cultic tendencies, self-promotion, prosperity gospel, and extrabiblical teachings. These frames and the themes that they generate enhance scholarly understandings of the dynamics of digital evangelism and the commodification of religion in the digital world, offering insights into the non-neutrality of some religious narratives. (The term ‘non-neutrality’ is used here to illustrate that religious narratives like every form of
communication is designed to achieve a particular aim – intended or otherwise.)

Kingdom come: The politics of faith and freedom in segregationist South Africa and beyond. Durham: Duke University Press. 264 pages.

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In this book, Tshepo Chéry delivers a powerful intervention in African religious historiography and postcolonial political thought. With remarkable clarity and archival depth, she chronicles how Christian theology and African spirituality converged in South Africa’s long and complex history of racial segregation, nationalism, and liberation. Focusing on the pre-apartheid period through to the emergence of the antiapartheid movement, she foregrounds the often-overlooked role of Black South African clergy who, long before formal resistance efforts, engaged in theological and political struggles for freedom.

Religious communities and ecological sustainability in Southern Africa and beyond. Geneva: Globethics Publications. 339 pages.

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Climate change and environmental degradation are current realities worldwide. This book is a result of two interdisciplinary groups in the field, A capacity-building Webinar for Religious Communities and Ecological Sustainability in Southern Africa held on September 1, 2020 (Öhlmann and Stork, 2024, p. 13) and A Conference on Churches in Southern Africa as Civil Society Actors for Ecological Sustainability held at the University of Pretoria in Pretoria, South Africa, from October 28-31, 2019 (Öhlmann and Stork, 2024, p. 14). The book is a result of global engagements such as the International Conference on Religion and Environment held in India during 2024 and the Interdisciplinary Conference on Sustainability and Climate in Religion held in Norway during 2020, therefore presenting a contribution to ongoing debates by bringing a voice from
an African religious space. The editors of the volume, who are renowned scholars in the field, make an important observation that ‘[r]eligion shapes social imaginaries and people’s values’ (Öhlmann and Stork, 2024, p. 9). As a need to explore the role that religious communities play in ecological sustainability is critical, this book is timely. At the back of our minds we understand that most religions have a strong anthropocentric orientation and Christianity has been accused of such (Mylius, 2018; Setume and Phili, 2020),
which has unfortunately contributed to the degradation of the environment. This book raises an important question: What
are religious communities doing to attain ecological sustainability in Southern Africa? Given the extent to which the relationship between human beings and the environment has deteriorated over decades, a book that explores the role that religious communities are playing or could play better is very important. Global warming and its effects serve as good indicators of this broken relationship.

Lived religion and lived development in contemporary society. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 511 pages.

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This book review critically examines Lived religion and lived development in contemporary society. The book honors Wilhelm Gräb. It explores the complex link between lived religion and development using interdisciplinary, empirical, and decolonial frameworks. The book offers insights into practical theology, indigenous epistemologies and ecological ethics. Its strengths include an African focus and theoretical innovations. Limitations exist in conceptual density and chapter quality. The book’s importance for Southern Africa will be discussed. Recommendations for future scholarly inquiry will conclude this review.