Barbara Leivang

“It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the “developed” and the latter as the “developing” world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of “development” are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of “development”? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more “developed” than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter?”
― Vinoth Ramachandra, Gods That Fail, Revised Edition: Modern Idolatry and Christian Mission