Why I wished Nigerian Christianity R.I.P. (2)
The hypnotic enslavement of Nigerian Christianity oday, the worth of the Christian believer in the household of faith has become virtually tied to the size of his pocket. Some pastors claim to have the keys to God’s kingdom, so they grant access to whomever they wish. If not how do we make sense of this kind of message from a pastor at a big religious carnival in 2017: ‘The windows of heaven will be shut on those who do not pay their tithe.’ This statement was carried in a national newspaper. No one has come out to deny it. Invariably, this pastor must be the sole trustee of the keys of heaven! This sort of preaching is what is now in vogue in Nigerian Christianity. Pastors, well schooled in communication and marketing psychology have mastered the art of creating and instilling fear in the minds of believers, thus holding them in spiritual bondage. If things are tight for you, they ask you to check your tithe - nice play on words that conceal an acidic religious doctrine. The man who strikes his foot against a stone begins to feel that it is because he has not paid his tithe that such misfortune has befallen him. God is thus portrayed as a wicked deity who apportions both punishment and reward on the basis of tithing.
Furthermore, in the name of Jesus, some pastors today are resorting to primitive African traditional sorcery, superstition, and occultism in which human beings are at the mercy of the cold hands of dangerous forces of nature and deities constantly at
Twar with one another. Although Jesus Christ came to liberate us from the palpable fear of this world of evil, some pastors today prefer to take Christians back to that worldview of primitive religious savagery and spiritual brutality, in which the life of the Christian believer is helplessly at the mercy of the influence and manipulation of dangerous spiritual forces. That is why many Christians today are living under paralysing fear. They feel that somebody or something is always after and against them.
Another pastor recently tweeted this message on his church’s Twitter handle: ‘Any relative or anyone blocking your way, if they do not repent, they will not see the New Year.’ This is the type of cursing prayers that many pastors are used to today! But why do we have to live in such religious climate of hate and suspicion? Why do some Christians think that they must always have enemies for whom death should be the reward? Why do we have to think that our lives are perpetually under siege from external spiritual forces? Didn’t Jesus come to liberate us from this paralysing fear of the powers of darkness? Why do we have to live in spiritual bondage? Why do we have to glorify evil and make fighting the devil the sole preoccupation of our spiritual life? Why do some Christians have to spend most of their prayer time casting the devil instead of praising God? Where lies the allegiance of the Christian: God or the devil? What is the rationale behind contemporary Christian romanticisation of the devil? The answers to these questions will reveal much of what is wrong with Nigerian Christianity today.
The obsession with demons and cursing prayers
Today, Christians going through difficulties on account of the harsh economic situation in the country are hoodwinked to believe that witches and wizards in their villages are responsible for their predicaments. These witches and wizards are transferred to a human agency, perhaps an old grandmother. So these Christians keep praying that their enemies would ‘Die by fire!’ and that ‘Holy Ghost fire’ would ‘destroy them!’ This is the sort of prayer that many Christians today have resorted to. They ask God to destroy the creatures of his own hands. I am often tempted to ask: Are these Christians praying for the death of their enemies the only ones who want to inhabit this world after their enemies are dead? Is this how Jesus taught us to pray? What if you were your own enemy? What if your enemy were your wife or husband? Is that how you’d want them to die? If a tragedy eventually occurs, these same Christians wishing death and on their ‘enemies’ soon come back to say ‘the devil has done it!’ Who is the devil?
It is an open secret today that some churches have a list of prayers against enemies, with various fees for special kinds of prayers from the man of God. I am sick and tired of this relentless solicitation to hate and curse and I have come to the conclusion that much of what we call Christian prayer in Nigeria today is simply a call to vilification, full of all kinds of venomous aspersions, bile, and vituperation that would make Jesus recoil in disbelief. I am hard pressed to find any nation on earth today that has attained development by merely cursing enemies and casting demons. I know of no nation on earth that has prayed people out of poverty to prosperity by simply invoking earth-shaking prayers. Yet this is the noisemaking that many Christians have canonised as spirituality today. Even those who claim to possess a critical mind seem to lose their common sense in this spiritual charade. They are quick to defend and approve of all that oozes from the mouth of their pastors as prophetic utterances.
In June 2017, I published a three-part essay on the basis of Christian prayer in Daily Trust Newspaper (June 4th, 11th, and 18th). It is available online via Google. In those articles, I noted that prayer is dialogue with God. It is about growing a relationship of love and communion with God, in such a way that our lives begin to reflect what we pray. Prayer is not decreeing for God or armtwisting him to do our will. True prayer seeks to do the will of God. True prayer seeks the glory of God and not the destruction of others. God does take any glory when our prayer request is for him to kill all those who are against us. Jesus did not pray to God his Father to kill all those who put him to a shameful death on the cross. Rather he prayed that the Father should forgive them for they did not know what they were doing. He provided a rationale for their action (cf. Luke 23:34). The Prophet Ezekiel is clear that God does not take pleasure in the death of the sinner but in the sinner’s repentance (cf. Ezekiel 18:23; 33:11). In another place, the Bible asks: ‘If you O Lord should mark our guilt, Lord who would survive?’ (Psalm 130:3). Those Christians who engage in death wishes should ask themselves whether their prayers are in line with the will of God for his children.
A religion of exploitation and servitude
Some pastors today capitalise on the poverty, misery, and desperation of innocent believers to keep them in perpetual servitude. Skilled in the art of psychology and motivational speaking, they have mastered how to package and instil fear in the minds of poor believers. They succeed in playing very well on people’s emotions and making them believe that they alone have the key to their liberation from ancestral curses withholding their destinies. The pastor becomes the focus of attention, no longer Jesus. We see this situation at work with many sick people who flock to miracle centres in the hope of divine healing. Sick people who should go to the hospital for proper medical diagnosis and treatment are made to believe that having faith in God is all they need to be well. You would wonder if God was stupid to endow human beings with knowledge of medicine. I do not doubt the power of faith. Prayer for healing is not a bad thing. Even in the Bible Jesus healed the sick and restored them to health. But should promises of miracle replace medical care in the 21st century? Should faith substitute reason and common sense?