When Caesar Ruled Khartoum: The Hermeneutics of Church–State Relations in Wartime Sudan

This paper examines the relationship between missions and the government during the early years of the First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972). I approach the matter of religious liberty by looking at missionaries’ references to Scripture and their understandings of the roles of Church and State during a period of political change. Acknowledgments that Christians are called to ‘render to Caesar’ were coupled by defiance to the government’s aim to inculcate Islam in Southern Sudan. Mission articulations of religious thought allow for a useful comparison to the liberationist religious rhetoric that Southern Sudanese Christians fashioned during the First Civil War. Missionaries were co-architects of political theology during an era of sociopolitical change.