By Prof. Januarius Asongu, author Forced Unity

Introduction: The Church in Crisis—Prophet or Compromiser?

The Anglophone crisis in Cameroon—often referred to as the Ambazonia struggle—is not only a political and humanitarian catastrophe; it is a profound theological scandal. It reveals the uneasy complicity between ecclesiastical institutions and the post-colonial state, forcing a moral reckoning with the question: What is the role of the Church when God’s people cry out under oppression?

While the conflict’s causes are rooted in colonial mismanagement, linguistic domination, and systemic state violence, its moral depth extends far beyond politics. The crisis exposes a deeper ecclesial dilemma—whether the Church serves as the prophetic conscience of society or the conservative custodian of the status quo. Historically, the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC), and the Cameroon Baptist Convention (CBC) were more than religious bodies; they were cultural institutions that safeguarded Anglophone identity through education, language, and legal heritage. Their mission schools and hospitals stood as symbols of human dignity and communal flourishing.

Yet, as the state’s violence escalated after 2016, these same institutions were thrust into a crucible of decision: to stand with the crucified people or to protect their institutional privileges. With few grassroots exceptions, the Church chose the latter—caution over courage, diplomacy over prophecy. This retreat created a moral vacuum, one that secular actors, grassroots organizations, and the diaspora have since filled.

This chapter argues that this ecclesiastical ambivalence reflects not only political caution but a theological crisis of identification: the inability of institutional religion to embody the liberative dimension of the Gospel in a post-colonial context of systemic injustice. It is a story of a Church torn between its prophetic vocation and its administrative survival, revealing the spiritual paralysis of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once called “cheap grace”—grace without costly solidarity.

The Historical and Institutional Context of Anglophone Faiths

The Legacy of the Missions and Cultural Preservation

The Anglophone Church’s complicity must be read against its formative history. The Protestant Basel Mission and the Catholic Mill Hill Missionaries did more than evangelize; they built the moral architecture of Anglophone society. Their schools—such as St. Joseph’s College Sasse, and CPC Bali—became instruments of both education and identity formation. Under British rule, these mission institutions operated with a degree of autonomy aligned with Common Law and the English educational tradition, preserving Anglophone civic culture.

However, this moral capital came with dependence. The post-independence Church grew increasingly reliant on state goodwill to sustain its schools, hospitals, and legal recognition. When the state shifted toward authoritarian centralization, this dependency became a theological trap: faith-based institutions could not speak prophetically without risking existential loss. The fear of expropriation silenced the prophetic voice of the Church.

The Ecclesiastical Geography: The Politics of Naming

The structure of church governance itself reinforced state ideology. The Catholic Bamenda Ecclesiastical Provincial Episcopal Conference (BAPEC) and similar denominational structures were mapped onto the unitary political geography defined by Yaoundé. This alignment, often unexamined, became a theological endorsement of the state’s “One and Indivisible” doctrine.

The Church’s choice to retain this nomenclature—rather than asserting theological independence through renaming—represented a missed kairos moment. A decision to reconstitute BAPEC as the Ambazonian Episcopal Conference would have sent an unmistakable message: that ecclesial identity flows from the people, not from the state. It would have embodied what Gustavo Gutiérrez (1971) called “the preferential option for the oppressed” in institutional form—a peaceful yet radical act of solidarity. Instead, ecclesiastical bureaucracy prevailed over prophetic imagination.

The Foundational Theological Conflict: Critical-Liberative Theology vs. Conservative Political Theology

The Preferential Option and the Sinful Structure

At the heart of the crisis lies a theological divergence between Liberation Theology and Conservative Political Theology. The former insists that faith must translate into praxis—into historical acts that dismantle injustice and restore human dignity (Boff & Boff, 1987). The latter emphasizes obedience, order, and the maintenance of existing structures.

The preferential option for the poor, central to liberation theology, posits that God identifies with those who suffer injustice (Gutiérrez, 1971). In the Anglophone regions, the state’s deliberate marginalization, systemic corruption, and violent repression represent not mere policy failures but what liberation theologians call sinful structures (Sobrino, 1985)—social systems that perpetuate death and dehumanization. Neutrality in the face of such sin is itself sin.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1984) warned that “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Yet, the institutional Church in Cameroon repeatedly invoked neutrality as virtue, using peace rhetoric to mask complicity. This was a failure of kenosis, the self-emptying solidarity of Christ with the suffering. By choosing administrative safety, the Church abandoned the Cross as the site of historical struggle and became what Jon Sobrino called “the Church of the powerful.”

The Exodus Paradigm: Liberation as Divine Mandate

The Anglophone struggle finds its most resonant biblical parallel in the Exodus story. “Let my people go” (Exodus 8:1) is not an appeal for reform but a demand for emancipation. The Exodus narrative provides a theological grammar for understanding the Ambazonia movement as a quest for liberation from Pharaoh-like oppression—a totalizing political order that enslaves rather than governs.

Within this paradigm, God’s presence aligns with the oppressed, not the oppressor. The Anglophone people’s cry for freedom is thus not a rebellion against divine order but a participation in divine justice. The state’s claim to “national unity” becomes analogous to Pharaoh’s demand for stability at the expense of freedom. The Church’s reluctance to invoke this paradigm is a profound betrayal of its own scripture. Instead of proclaiming God’s liberating word, it echoed Pharaoh’s rhetoric of order and peace, turning theology into an instrument of pacification.

The Misuse of Romans 13: The Doctrine of Unity as Pacification

Conservative theologians often cite Romans 13:1—“Let every person be subject to governing authorities”—to justify submission to the state. Yet, Paul’s injunction presupposes legitimate governance: “for rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad” (Rom 13:3). When rulers themselves become the source of terror, the passage ceases to apply.

Throughout Christian history, theologians such as Calvin, Luther, and Bonhoeffer have affirmed resistance to tyrannical authority. Bonhoeffer’s own stand against Nazism arose from this theological conviction that obedience to God sometimes requires disobedience to man. The Cameroonian Church’s literalist reading of Romans 13 therefore represents theological malpractice—a failure to discern the difference between order and oppression.

By preaching submission under tyranny, the Church sanctified political violence and invalidated the faith of its suffering members. It replaced the God of Justice with the idol of Stability.

Institutional Case Studies: Silence, Caution, and Complicity

The Catholic Hierarchy: Diplomacy without Prophecy

The Catholic bishops’ approach—expressed through BAPEC communiqués—focused on peace, dialogue, and unity. These were well-intentioned but ethically hollow appeals. They avoided naming sin and failed to confront the state’s violence with the moral clarity demanded by prophetic witness.

Moreover, the hierarchy neglected its global leverage. The Vatican possesses one of the world’s most influential diplomatic infrastructures, capable of shaping international attention. Yet, the Cameroonian bishops did not utilize their access to the Holy See to present the crisis as a violation of the Church’s own social teaching on human rights and subsidiarity. Their silence allowed the global Catholic conscience to remain largely indifferent to the Ambazonian suffering.

The Protestant Churches: Fear and the Failure of Global Solidarity

The Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC) and the Cameroon Baptist Convention (CBC) have historically been centers of literacy, civil service, and moral formation in Anglophone Cameroon. Yet, during the crisis, their leadership mirrored the Catholic hierarchy’s caution. Their continued use of state-aligned nomenclature and their reluctance to invoke global Protestant networks effectively localized the conflict, preventing international advocacy.

Had these churches reconstituted themselves as the Presbyterian Church in Ambazonia or the Ambazonian Baptist Convention, they would have activated powerful international alliances—Baptist World Alliance, World Council of Churches, or the Reformed Ecumenical Council—that historically supported liberation movements in South Africa and Latin America. Their failure to act transformed theological caution into moral complicity.

The Muslim Community: Inter-Faith Silence and the Trial of Abdul Karim Ali

The moral crisis extended beyond Christianity. The life sentence in absentia handed down in 2025 against Abdul Karim Ali—a Muslim cleric and peace advocate—epitomized the regime’s persecution of moral voices. Ali’s refusal to recognize the jurisdiction of a military court represented a spiritual act of resistance against unjust authority. Yet, his conviction provoked no unified interfaith outcry.

The silence of both Christian and Muslim institutions betrayed the prophetic mandate shared across Abrahamic faiths: to defend the innocent and denounce tyranny. In failing to protest Ali’s persecution, the collective religious establishment confirmed that institutional preservation had replaced the ethics of solidarity.

The Theology of Suffering and the Church of the Detained

Christ in Kondegui: The Church from Below

Amid the silence of ecclesiastical elites, a new theology was born in the prisons, refugee camps, and burned villages of the Anglophone regions. In facilities such as Kondegui Central Prison, believers forged a living theology of the Cross. Here, the suffering faithful encountered Christ not in sacramental abstraction but in the solidarity of pain.

This “Church of the Detained” became the truest ecclesia—one defined not by cathedrals but by crucifixion. Every unjustly imprisoned teacher, lawyer, or activist became a living icon of the Crucified Christ of Ambazonia. Their endurance exposes the moral failure of the official Church while embodying the redemptive hope of liberation theology: that God’s grace is most active where human dignity is most violated.

The Diaspora Church: Prophets in Exile

If the Church of the Detained is the Church of the Cross, the Diaspora Church is the Church of the Prophets. Free from the suffocating control of the Cameroonian state, diaspora congregations across Europe, North America, and Africa have become the loudest theological voices for justice.

These exiled communities rearticulate the liberation message that institutional religion muted at home. Their sermons, vigils, and petitions channel what Walter Brueggemann calls the “prophetic imagination”—the capacity to envision alternatives to empire. In them, the spirit of the exilic prophets lives on: speaking from displacement yet preserving divine promise.

The diaspora clergy and laity together sustain what Asongu (2025) calls Critical-Liberative Theology—a theology that reads exile not as defeat but as the space for new covenantal consciousness.

The Secular Prophet: When Politics Became Theology

Grassroots and Diplomatic Praxis

When the institutional Church abdicated its prophetic mission, secular and civic organizations inherited its moral mantle. The Alliance for Peace & Justice (APJ), under the leadership of Prof. Januarius Asongu, has become a paradigmatic example of this secular prophecy. Through advocacy at the UN and engagement with international partners (APJ, 2024), APJ articulates in political form what the churches failed to say theologically: that liberation is not rebellion but the moral restoration of violated dignity.

This alignment between theology and diplomacy exemplifies the prophetic continuum between faith and praxis. It echoes the words of Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24)—justice as a historical, not merely spiritual, demand.

The Persistence of the Moral Imperative

Despite institutional silence, the moral vitality of the Anglophone people endures. Their resilience demonstrates that faith, though abandoned by its custodians, cannot be extinguished. In their communal prayers, their refusal to surrender identity, and their shared hope for justice, the people themselves become the living Church—the sacrament of resistance.

The true tragedy of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is not that it failed to end the war, but that it failed to bless the people’s cry for freedom. By denying divine legitimacy to the oppressed, the institutional Church alienated itself from the very body of Christ it claims to serve.

Conclusion: The Enduring Theological Challenge

The Anglophone crisis exposes the fragile moral architecture of post-colonial Christianity. The churches’ fixation on the Doctrine of Unity—rooted in political conservatism and colonial-era ecclesiology—betrayed their liberative vocation. Their silence in the face of suffering revealed the persistence of what Latin American theologians call structural sin—the captivity of theology to power.

The question remains hauntingly urgent: When does the Christian obligation to preach peace end, and the duty to demand justice begin? The answer, whispered through prison walls and refugee camps, is clear: True peace cannot exist without justice. Silence in the face of tyranny is not prudence—it is heresy against the God of the oppressed.

The Ambazonia conflict, therefore, calls for a new ecclesiology—one rooted not in preservation but in participation; not in concordats but in cruciform solidarity. The Church of the future must learn to be born again in the fires of its people’s suffering—to become, once more, the voice that proclaims liberation in the face of empire.

The true Church of the Anglophone struggle lives among the detained, the exiled, and the mourning. Their prayers, their pain, and their perseverance form the living gospel of emancipation—the only gospel credible in an age where the cross stands again in Bamenda and Buea.

References

Alliance for Peace & Justice (APJ). (2024, December 5). Press Release on diplomatic engagement and the future of the Anglophone territories.

Asongu, J. (2025). Beyond doctrine: A critical-liberative theology of faith and emancipation. (Forthcoming manuscript).

Boff, L., & Boff, C. (1987). Introducing liberation theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Bonhoeffer, D. (1959). The cost of discipleship. New York: Macmillan.

Brueggemann, W. (1978). The prophetic imagination. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.

Gutiérrez, G. (1971). A theology of liberation: History, politics, and salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Sobrino, J. (1985). The true church and the poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Tutu, D. (1984). Hope and suffering: Sermons and speeches. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

*This is one of the chapters in the book: Forced Unity: A Critical Appraisal of the Ambazonia Struggle for Emancipation and Self-Determination