Sunday America and Sunday Africa

Someone posted this meme to Facebook, so I thought I would comment on it.  In the upper left is "Black Friday".  Upper right is "Sunday America".  On the bottom is "Sunday Africa."

America generally refers to US citizens. [1] But there are 300 million plus people in this country and about 40% of them attend church almost weekly. [2] (The particular church in question is a small Calvinist congregation of 25-50. [3]) Less than one half of one percent of American churches are mega churches and they are attended by 10% of all church attendees.  Half of the approximately 120 million church attendees attend the top 10% of churches. [4]  While most churches in the America may look like the church in question, there are many churches in this country where thousands attend every Sunday.  Of the approximately 12 million people who attend mega churches, 30,000 attend Lakewood Church on Sunday mornings. [5]

This brings us that bottom picture.  Africa is not a country, but a continent populated by over a billion people who are spread out over 54 nations. [6] This picture was taken for a 2009 revival in Maua, Kenya. [7]  Those who took the picture only counted about 3000, about 10% of those that attend Lakewood regularly.  Also, though the revival went till Sunday, this was not a normal Sunday service.

Black Friday 2011, a record number, 226 million Americans, shopped at retail stores.  Surely they did not all wait in long lines before sunrise.  Still, more Americans shopped than attend church regularly.  Yet "regularly" is the key word.  The revival service in Maua is not a weekly event and neither is Black Friday.  For that matter only 40% of Americans attend church while 78.4% profess to be Christians. [8]

Like most memes this picture is very misleading and borderline ignorant.  Africa is the most genetically diverse continent on earth, yet it is treated as if it were a country. [9] Also, two out of three of the pictures do not refer to a weekly event.

Yep D'Souza, King was anti-colonial.

I am two hours into my seventeen hours of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches.  Two things have struck me.  One, King repeats himself a lot.  Two, he praises anti-colonialism a lot.  King's anti-colonialism brought this to mind.

Obama has little or nothing to do with the civil-rights movement. His roots are in Kenya, and he is shaped far more by anti-colonialism than by anything that Martin Luther King said or did. ~  Dinesh D'Souza [1]

Well, King thought colonialism and segregation were linked.[2]

For I can look out and see a great number, as John saw, marching into the great eternity, because God is working in this world, and at this hour, and at this moment. And God grants that we will get on board and start marching with God, because we got orders now to break down the bondage and the walls of colonialism, exploitation, and imperialism, to break them down to the point that no man will trample over another man, but that all men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. And then we will be in Canaan’s freedom land. ~ Martin Luther King Jr. [3]

Now we are all familiar with this old order that is passing away. We have lived with it and we have seen it in all of its dimensions. We have seen the old order in its international dimensions in the form of colonialism and imperialism. As you know, the vast majority of the peoples of our world live in Asia and Africa. For many, many years, people of these two continents were dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated by some foreign power. But even there we notice change has taken place. I can remember when Mrs. King and I first journeyed to Africa to attend the independence celebration of the new nation of Ghana. We were very happy about the fact there were now eight independent countries in Africa. But since that night in March, 1957, some twenty-seven new independent nations have come into being in Africa. This reveals to us that the old order of colonialism is passing away, and the new order of freedom and human dignity is coming into being.  ~ Martin Luther King Jr. [4]