As one of the students to experience both excursions, firstly the trip to Ghana in February and secondly the tour of Basel and southern Germany, I was able to get a unique perspective onto lived religiosity in Ghana and Switzerland. This short think-piece is concerned with my thoughts about lived and perceived religiosity, its differences and contradictions, the importance of religion in one’s private life and how the excursions shaped my way of thinking about religion in the past and present.
When I first arrived in Ghana, the first thing I felt very clearly was the humid heat as I exited the plane. Hitching a ride with a group of nursing students and driving through nighttime Accra, I tried to catch glimpses of what I would see when the sun would rise the next day. Turns out, the first misunderstanding of the trip already happened in the plane, as the nursing students did not actually book the same hotel I was supposed to go to. Luckily, catching a cab is not much of an issue in Accra and I was able to get to my destination soon enough. The hotel (or hostel) seemed like a refuge in the midst of a suburban area, Europeans gathering around the bar, drinking beer and accommodating to the heat. It felt familiar. I would however find out very soon, that my first impressions of Accra were warped by my nightly odyssey to the hotel.
During the excursion we traced the remnants of the Basel Mission (BM) in places where it is still visible and others where it is not. Reading about these places or how they functioned is vastly different to visiting them and thinking about how they have been shaping present-day Ghana was (and still is) a quite overwhelming task. Something that struck me immediately was the very prominently distributed funeral announcements. “Prophets” and pastors advertising themselves along the highway and all over town in huge billboards. Bible verses pretty much everywhere you look: on cars, shops, walls etc. I was only able to compare this to Basel’s infamous bible billboards with yellow writing on a blue background that try to convey a simple message. As you are almost never confronted with Christianity in a public space in Basel, I get an odd feeling when I have to stare at a bible verse printed onto a public transportation bus in Basel, while I was behind it riding my bike.
“Basel” as a place did not mean the same thing to us Swiss students as it did for many Ghanaians we spoke to; it was revealing to find out how “Basel” is more often associated with “church” or even “discipline”. Some institutions had “Basel” in their name, such as the Akofi-Christaller Institute, which was once known as “Basel house”. Another prominent example would be the “Basel Church”, nowadays known as the Presbyterian Church of Accra. Naturally, people would have certain expectations of people native to Basel (which I am), they would however find out quickly that I was very different from what they imagined me to be like.
Growing up in Basel and living there my whole life so far, I learned that Basel was a city intent to be independent from its bishop rather sooner than later. While we do have a huge cathedral where mass is still held and of course many other churches in town and countryside, religion is rather something private than public. My only connection to religion is funerals and holidays like Christmas. Of course, my experience may differ from others, but I have not met many openly religious Basel people. In fact, over 40 precent of the inhabitants of Basel do not belong to any religion.[1] Friends of mine are planning to leave the churches in which they are officially registered, if they have not done so already.
Therefore, I expected our Ghanaian friends to share this experience of Basel and southern Germany as rather non-religious places. In the end, though, I feel like the opposite has happened. In July, during the second part of the excursion, we visited the origins of the BM missionaries in Gerlingen, Stuttgart (southern Germany). A former mayor told us that the only traditional tenant of pietist faith to survive until today was the regular weekly bible readings. Furthermore, pietism is remembered only in connection to the missionaries Rebmann and Zimmermann. A distant relative of the missionary Zimmermann, a pastor himself, explained how some of his friends were “damaged by pietism” as it was too strict, narrow-minded and controlling. Nowadays, Sunday service is mainly attended by the older folks of the town. In order to improve attendance, pastors emphasized blending cultures to reach more people. He joked that people in northern Germany would smoke, whilst they would drink in the south, but in Gerlingen, where protestant and catholic morality meets, they would do both. This came as a shock to some, as the BM and evangelists in general were known for their stance towards alcohol.[2] Still, attendance is low, Sunday service just is not part of everyone’s routine anymore. To me, much of this was not surprising in the slightest. It reflected how I experience religion around here.

While Gerlingen does not practice pietism anymore, it is well and alive in the Brüdergemeinde Korntal, one of the origins of pietist faith. There, we had a conversation with pastor Andersen, who seemed glad to welcome our crowd, as we had at least a neutral or slightly positive stance towards the Brüdergemeinde. Typical for pietist places, service is held in a Betsaal (prayer hall) that notably lacks religious decorations and is very modestly designed. Mr. Andersen continuously reminded us of the great work Korntal’s founder Gottlieb Wilhelm Hofmann had done. Something that struck me as odd was how Andersen emphasized the importance of children to Hofmann and the Brüdergemeinde today, but then I did not know why I found this peculiar. Only shortly after our excursion, the documentary Die Kinder aus Korntal – Missbrauch im Namen des Herrn[3] was released. It tells the story of people that grew up in the pietist children’s homes, where systematic abuse was practiced for decades and not talked about publicly until 2013. One of the survivors in the film mentions how instead of a lullaby, they got beaten. During our visit none of this was mentioned and we were not aware of it ourselves, although in hindsight it could have been a tell, just how uncritical Andersen was in comparison to the people we spoke to in Gerlingen. The only time Andersen mentioned some wrongdoings was in relation to colonialism. He was very vague and tried to emphasize the seemingly positive things over the bad things. Today, this visit leaves a bad taste, as we were probably too uncritical during the conversations but similar to when we were in Accra, it was not easy to voice critical thoughts in a religious atmosphere.
In Basel, some of us joined the hike to St. Chrischona, the biggest mountain in Basel-City and namesake of the free church “Chrischona”, to which even I have a family connection as I found out recently.[4] It is striking, that when you climb the highest mountain of Basel, you almost have to walk past infrastructure of the Chrischona church, which in itself paints this picture of a religious Basel, that, as I tried to argue so far, is not accurate. One could argue however, that the geographical distance of the Chrischona church to the city of Basel is quite reflective of the place of religion in our city.

What I noticed the most during visits to Korntal and Chrischona is just how familiar some things appeared to be to our Ghanaian friends. In turn most of it felt very strange to me. I realized just how little I knew about religiosity in Switzerland, especially lived religiosity in the past. This piqued my interest and led to my current research for my master’s thesis, where I look at a pietist healing institution in Zurich in the nineteenth century. I doubt that without this project I would have developed a greater interest in the history of religion. It taught me to look at religion in a different light, both historically and in the present. To be confronted with people and places that radically challenge my world view was an eye-opening experience. My personal stance towards religion has not changed a lot, however I think more openness would benefit both sides. Critical research around pietism and its influences has a lot of potential both in Ghana and Switzerland.