Religion as a means of preventing injury and promoting safety: Christian discourses on embodiment as safety discourses

On the one hand, South Africa is the most religious country in the world. On the other, it is also the country where HIV is spreading the fastest, and which has the highest rape rate, and the highest occurrence of domestic violence. this article explores the faces of corporal religious discourses that render believers vulnerable to abuse. It furthermore describes how these discourses can be deconstructed to help the religious discourses that in power believers against abuse and enhance their physical and emotional safety. The insights of Body Theology play an important role in describing this shift in religious discourse. The research population was 270 patients who had been subjected to abuse and were referred for counseling to Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, Tswane, where the author works as a part-time counsellor. The population testifies to the possibility of exploring the dialogical spaces between harmful religious discourse that leads to injury on one hand, and religious discourses that offer safety only in self-sacrifice, and in the life thereafter on the other hand. Because of a specific tomography, the research population was almost exclusively Christian, and therefore the religious discourses described in this article draw, from necessity, on Christian resources only. In its final analysis, the article focuses on reconstructed religious discourses of safety, which were constructed through the insights of the Body Theology in dialogue with the experiences of the research population. Body Theology of knowledge is that a person has at least four bodies, thus religious discourses of safety explore the physical body as a site of resistance; the symbolic body as a site of a relationship; the political body is a site for sharing energy and not for exercising power; and a spiritual body as a site of recreation.