We’re fixated on the fringe
STORIES of driving a car over two “sleeping” congregants, getting followers to eat grass and drink petrol or keeping more than 40 young women in mission houses to sexually pleasure the pastor fill our newspapers.
We know the names of these “men of God” that are allegedly responsible: Prophet Penuel Mnguni, Pastor Lesego Daniel and Senior Pastor Timothy Omotoso.
How is this possible, why would any rational person abandon common sense to follow these crazy requests?
No lives have been lost (so far) in complying with these recent “tests” of faith, but it has happened.
In 1912, Wesleyan Methodist lay preacher Enoch Mgijima broke away from the mainstream church and established his own church at Ntabelanga in the area of Bulhoek (Queenstown). Mgijima had experienced a “visitation” in 1907, followed by a dream in which he grew huge feathers, flew into the sky and finally came across a swarm of locusts the size and ferocity of which he had never seen.
Thereafter, he allegedly began to prophesy that the world would end in that December, after 30 days of rain.
Known as Israelites, the followers of this new faith began to gather at passover on his property to wait out the end times.
By 1919 this group had grown to approximately 3 000 and they were forced to squat on land that wasn’t theirs. The local authority didn’t take kindly to this “illegal” behaviour and various negotiation attempts were made for the land to be vacated. The Israelites refused. While they said they “wished to obey the law of the land . . . Jehovah was more powerful than the law”, and they would not “offend him by disregarding his wishes and obeying the laws of men”.
Eventually Prime Minister General Jan Smuts lost patience, sent in the army on May 23 1921 and – in a typical conflict spiral (like that seen at Marikana) – 200 followers were killed when they allegedly attacked the troops.
The consequence for the prophet was jail time; the consequence for Smuts was a new label, “the butcher of Bulhoek”.
A proper inquiry was never conducted and many are critical of how the matter was dealt with by the state at the time.
Modern accounts by congregants deny that the prophet had made the apocalypse prophecy, and lay blame at the door of police and the army.
But even if correct, why would congregants blindly follow their religious leaders even when clearly their personal wellbeing was at risk?
What seems to be the golden thread in all these instances is a combination of two factors: insular/isolated thinking and interpreting opposition as confirmation of their holy calling.
The more those outside shout, the more those within become convinced they are on the Godly path.
Self-reinforcing malleability of thinking is not unique to the fringes of religious practice.
The same can be seen in the Black First Land First (BLF) argument that white journalists and editors are conspiring to uphold white monopoly capital and thus shouting at journalists that, “white people are going to die with you” is somehow acceptable behaviour?
Or, as in the recent case of President Jacob Zuma refusing the request of the ANC’s integrity commission to resign on the basis that some western governments are planning to oust him and take control of South Africa?
What would any Western power gain through such?
Yet it seems the president’s followers are convinced of this conspiracy.
And before we think we’re unique, take some time to trawl through President Donald Trump’s tweets – we can console ourselves with the old adage that someone somewhere has it worse than us.
But how do we get ourselves out of this circular, self-perpetuating thinking? Ironically religion itself may give us some clues.
We devour forests in producing the paper on which our endless debate of “is there a God” and “whose deity is the true one” are printed.
According to researchers, of the world’s 7.3 billion residents in 2015, 2.3 billion (31%) identified as Christian, 1.8 billion (24%) as Muslim and 1.1 billion (15%) as Hindu.
Only 1.2 billion (16%) persons claim to be unaffiliated to any religion.
So for a question so vexing, it seems that most of the world answers “yes” to the existence of a deity.
But it comes with a caveat – there is a deity, but that deity is known (primarily) through the “club” I belong to.
But diversity of belief doesn’t end there.
Even within the same faith there are multitudes of subordinate belief systems.
If we take South Africa’s dominant religion, Christianity (80% of the population, according to the 2001 census) as an example, we know that it has three main streams – Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant – but there are an estimated 41 000 different denominations within the Christian faith as a whole and 55 000 expected by 2025.
So which denomination has it right?
There are literally thousands of answers to that question, yet the generic idea of a Christian deity still persists.
If the Israelites were willing to die in protecting their belief system, why is the world not at war if there are so many different views of who this deity is?
Most certainly there are wars being fought at present in which religious belief is a driving force – Isis and the Lord’s Resistance Army are cases in point – and most certainly many deaths have occurred through humanity’s history in trying to own the answer.
But generally churches, mosques and temples co-exist within the same space in relative peace.
Religions have solved the potentially deadly difference in two ways – first, by (allowing) diversity of belief and second, by ring-fencing their own version and insisting that membership requires staying within those boundaries.
Sometimes that dynamic fails – as with the Israelites, as with BLF, Trump and Zuma – but generally the symbiosis holds.
The challenge is not that there are many different versions of the deity Christians call God, Muslims call Allah, and Hindus call Brahman.
The problem is that we become fixated on the fringe, on aspects we think are irreconcilable. As humans we are drawn to drama and conflict, and we lose sight of the reality that we’re quite capable of living with the paradox of diversity.
To put it in another way, we believe that there can only be one truth and we have special access to this truth.
Whereas in reality there are more than seven billion truths and our world still works.
It’s only when we insist that our truth must be everyone’s truth and we threaten the other’s freedom to choose that we run into trouble.