ABSTRACT
Ethiopia takes pride in a long history of peaceful coexistence among several Abrahamic religions that are locked in violent contentions elsewhere. The Ethiopian socialist state subscribed to Marxist ideology and rejected religion as superstition as well as deemed it an institution of exploitation. This chapter shows how competition among religious institutions has contributed to challenging unjust social and cultural forms while giving rise to, knowingly or unwittingly, new kinds of unjust practices including social exclusion. This analysis is informed by scholarship on religion in Africa that links religious change to issues of neglected development, deprivation, poverty, identity politics, injustice, human rights violations, and unequal treatment of religious communities. The chapter analyses the interaction between three competing religious institutions: Protestant Christianity, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church, and the indigenous spirit mediums. In Dawro, the local term sharetcho that means a holy person to his/her followers appears in Protestant sermons as the incarnation of the devil and thus an evil spirit.
