Lakewood Church, South African branch

We are in Pretoria, the nation’s capital, today for our “shopping day”.  The “shopping day” is intended to give trainees a chance to buy things for their living accommodations that might not be available for purchase at their site.  Given that my permanent site is a town that also has relatively easy access to a city, there is not as much of a need for me to buy things before my move.  For that reason, I only bought some toiletries that I was running low on as well as a device that lets me upload photos from my camera to my computer (I left the relevant cable in America).  Hopefully, then, y’all should finally start getting to see some visual documentation of my travels.

The thing I wanted to speak about today is the presence of American evangelicals in South Africa.  This country is extremely religious and that includes the black South Africans as well as the Afrikaners.  The idea of separation of church and state is one that is very foreign here.  All of the schools that I have observed so far begin each day with the singing of hymns, prayer, and a mini-sermon.  These are public schools, mind you.  That was at least somewhat expected, however.

What I did not see coming was having Joel Osteen’s smiling face on the screen when I turn on the television.  No joke, Trinity Broadcasting Network is readily available here.  When I visited my permanent site several days ago, the television in my house was always tuned to an American pastor preaching.  After finding out that I was American, one of the teachers at school wanted to know if I attended T.D. Jake’s church.  Even on the bus ride from Pretoria to the Northern Cape, the bus line was apparently owned by evangelicals such that the bus ride began with a prayer on the intercom by the driver and the movies that played on the television were all American Christian dramas interspersed with messages from Americans like Focus on the Family’s James Dobson.

This American presence was further reinforced today as I walked around the mall in Pretoria.  Every bookstore that we went in had multiple Joel Osteen books displayed, not in the back corner, but quite prominently towards the front of the store.  Part of me wondered whether Joel Osteen ever imagined, or even knows now, that his book would be translated into Afrikaans.  So I guess the moral of the story is that despite the past racial struggles, American evangelicals are one thing that black and white South Africans can both agree upon.