Corruption and the Church: Voices from the Global South

By Martin Allaby

How do Christians in the global south see the relationship between the church and corruption? This book summarises the views of 101 leaders of churches, Christian faith-based organisations and anti-corruption organisations, as told during in-depth interviews with the author. Capturing voices from across three continents, this summary and analysis of their views makes for some uncomfortable reading, but suggests some constructive ways forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnum Books International
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781912343799

Book preview

Corruption

and the Church

Voices from the Global South

Corruption

and the Church

Voices from the Global South

Martin Allaby

Copyright © Martin Allaby 2018

First published 2018 by Regnum Books International

Regnum is an imprint of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies

St. Philip and St. James Church

Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HR, UK

www.ocms.ac.uk/regnum

09 08 07 06 05 04 03 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The right of Martin Allaby to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electric, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-912343-70-6 Print

ISBN: 978-1-912343-79-9 ePub

ISBN: 978-1-912343-80-5 Kindle

Typeset in Candara by Words by Design.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the brave and determined people who are showing by example what it means to fight corruption. We are all in their debt.

Acknowledgements

Many people helped with the research that went into this book. My research supervisors, Deryke Belshaw and Peter Clarke, helped to shape my ideas by critiquing draft chapters and advising on direction at critical points. David Lumsdaine helped me to think more clearly about social science methods, while Ben Knighton helped me improve my analysis and interpretation of my interview material. Students and staff at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, and friends and colleagues in Kathmandu, helped me develop my ideas through their comments during various research seminars. Gabriele Price gave valuable advice on the multiple regression analysis.

All my key informants were generous in sharing their experiences and opinions. I could not have met some of them without the help of several people who arranged introductions for me: Joy Famador, Vylma Ovalles, and Niels and Amyjay Riconalla in the Philippines; Reginald Nalugala for Kenya; Joshua Banda and Lawrence Temfwe in Zambia; and Graham Gordon in Peru. Anna Porter was generous with her time in helping me to find my way round Lima, and she translated most of the interviews there. My daughters Elaine and Lydia transcribed most of the interviews. Melba Maggay, Ben Knighton, Irene Mutalima and Graham Gordon reviewed the draft chapters on the Philippines, Kenya, Zambia and Peru, respectively. All the deficiencies that remain are mine.

I am grateful to all the individuals and churches that supported this work financially through their donations to Interserve, which was my employer during most of this research. My wife, Sue, was a constant source of encouragement and she kept our family intact in Kathmandu while I was away in Oxford or in the case-study countries, not least during Nepal’s revolution in April 2006.

Contents

Introduction

Corruption: Its Causes and Remedies

Designing the Country Case Studies

The Philippines

Kenya

Zambia

Peru

Comparisons across the Four Countries

Conclusions

Further Reading

List of Acronyms

Introduction

Economic Inequality and Corruption

This short book is an abbreviated and updated account of a research project started in 2004 and published in its full form in 2013. It began with an attempt to understand why economic inequality is greatest in Christian, and especially Protestant, developing countries, and ended up examining how Christians relate to corruption and how they might be able to influence it. That personal research journey explains why this book focuses on corruption in four low- and middle-income countries, rather than on corruption in high-income countries such as the UK. Had the starting point been corruption alone, I would undoubtedly have needed to write about corruption in high-income countries, including the UK.

The Gini coefficient is probably the most widely used indicator of inequality. It