Who’s Afraid of Religion? Tensions between ‘Mission’ and ‘Development’ in the Norwegian Mission Society

Abstract

There has been a recent surge of interest in the topic ‘faiths and development’ in the United Kingdom, at universities and research institutes as well as in the UK Department for International Development (DFID). This interest throws up a series of new questions within development studies and related disciplines: from the perspective of development studies it raises questions about how donors and faith-based organizations (FBOs) can most constructively engage with each other; from the perspective of social anthropology it raises questions about the very different ways that diverse groups relate to that common human experience known as ‘faith’, and, specifically, how the grand twentieth-century project of development may have more intimate connections to faith and religion than it acknowledges.