Misuse of Religion and Government’s Complicity

What is Religion? Religion can be defined as a way by which a people try to reach their gods or God. Religions are human creations. However, not a few people believe that religions were founded by men under the guidance and inspiration of God. And, almost all religions in our today’s world have the doctrinal foundation of love as common denominator. To the best of my knowledge, no holy books - whether Koran or the Bible or Gita- contain teachings that encourage people to perpetrate acts of wickedness such as murder, armed robbery, slander, and others. Now, globally, we’ve many different religions, to wit: Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Christianity, Islam, African Traditional Religion, and others.

Today, in Nigeria, Christianity and Islam are the two predominant religions. And millions of Nigerians from diverse ethnic backgrounds profess Christianity. Christians believe that Jesus Christ, the son of God, is the ransom for our sins. And the Bible, which is the holy book of Christians, says that those who exercise faith in the redemptive death of Christ on the cross and abide by His teachings shall enter the kingdom of God when they shed their mortal garments.

In the time past, Christian clerics always preached about righteous living and holiness to their congregations. And they would inculcate the virtues of charity, forbearance, temperance, and forgiveness into adherents of the Christian faith. Not surprisingly, then, Christians would exhibit good and exemplary behaviour. Righteousness was their trade mark. And they became the

beacon of hope in our vile and morally depraved world.

However, sadly, with the passage of time, men of the cloth, especially those of the Pentecostal hue, started espousing and enthroning the message of prosperity above the teachings of love, righteousness, and faithfulness. Nowadays, the founders of Pentecostal churches glamourize ostentatious life styles, and despise poverty in all its grotesque manifestations.

In those churches, the dirt-poor are despised and made to believe that they are the scum and the accursed of the earth. But the Bible says that we shall always have the poor among us. While the billionaire church founders fly in private jets, a vast majority of members of their churches wear disintegrating shoes and threadbare clothes. And their faith-based schools were built with the money collected from poor church members. Yet, the children of the poor cannot attend those schools as school fees charged in those schools are priced beyond the financial means of poor parents. What obtains in those churches is a case of extreme wealth sitting side by side with abject poverty.

Again, the Pentecostal pastors are not exemplars of Jesus Christ’s teachings. Most of them are religious mountebanks and spiritual charlatans. In the name of being actuated by the Holy Spirit, they deliberately utter gibberish and jabbering, which they call glossolalia to beguile us into believing that they are true men of God. In addition to this, they fleece unsuspecting members of their churches of their hard-earned money and stage-manage miraculous cures of people afflicted with terminal illness.

Worse still, debauched men of the cloth with fake piety prey on naïve gauche female teenagers in their churches. Those ministers of God who are supposedly the spiritual fathers of the gauche teenagers do take advantage of them to deflower them. Recently, Busola Dakolo, who is married to a famous musician, alleged that the senior pastor of the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly (COZA) deflowered her.

But, it is not only Christian clerics who do hide under the cloak of religion to commit atrocious deeds. Members of the Boko Haram group, who are fired up and indoctrinated with distorted teachings of Islam, have embarked on the mission of turning the north to an Islamic theocratic state. They justify and rationalize their execution of the orgies of blood-letting by mouthing religious shibboleth and piffling. The insanely blood-thirsty religious vampires have added the abduction of school girls to their repertoire of egregious religious activities.

When they raided the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Maiduguri, they took many of the school girls away as war booties. All the abducted Chibok school girls save Leah Sharibu had been released. But, Leah is still in the Boko Haram captivity for refusing to abjure and renounce her Christian faith. Today, Leah Sharibu has become a symbol of resistance to forced religious proselytizing. The pleas and negotiations carried out by the federal government to secure her release have not yielded positive result. Leah Sharibu’s story is simply heart-breaking. But more worrisome is the likelihood of Nigeria exploding into a huge religious conflagration with dire consequences owing to the proscription of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN). The government’s clampdown on the Shiites Muslims following their bloody clash with soldiers on a highway, and subsequent violent protests staged by them is too heavy-handed, inhuman, and unjustifiable. It negates the practice of the rule of law; and it is an infringement on their right to freedom of association and assembly. Now, the federal government is killing a fly with a sledge hammer.

Going down memory lane, we should remember that the federal government tried to squelch the Boko Haram group in the past as it’s doing to Shiites (IMN) now. It’s their unsuccessful repressing of the Boko Haram group that gave rise to the group’s mutation to a murderous insurgent group. Can’t the federal government devise a strategy to handle the IMN issue with the tact and seriousness that it demands? The members of the IMN appear to be suicidal religious nuts that are ready to become martyrs for their religious cause so as to enter heaven. The federal government that cannot eradicate the Boko Haram incubus wants to create another blood-thirsty monster by its callous and injudicious actions.

Sadly, here, it is obvious to us that imported religions like Christianity and Islam have become our albatross. Instead of leveraging religions to cause moral rebirth in our country, our Christian clerics and Moslem Mullahs are putting their religions to bad uses. And the government’s identification with Sunni Muslims at the expense of the Shiites is a provocative deed. (See concluding part on www.thisdaylive.com)