What bishops should be more concerned about is her insinuation that a non-white culture leads to domestic violence and that white, western culture is too civilised and too advanced to allow such atrocities to occur. Roskam fails to recognise that domestic violence affects people regardless of their class, ethnicity, religion, gender or geography.<\/p>\n
But perhaps bishops should not be surprised by her attitude, which has echoes in an incident from the previous Lambeth conference in 1998, when another American bishop claimed African Christians had only just developed from believing that rocks and trees have spirits and did not understand modern science. This rhetoric, and the underlying assertion of superiority, plays into the hands of conservative evangelicals who are fed up with colonialist attitudes, but also of people who argue that religion, its followers and leaders are backwards and irrelevant.<\/p>\n