The church oppresses

DEAR SIR — Organised religion, or the church, to be more specific, is increasingly becoming oppressive — as well as irrelevant.

While the church has in the past produced excellent theologians and priests who stood up and sacrificed life and limb for justice, many in the leadership of the church today, including bishops, are a disgrace to the church.

In his article (Despite devastation in His name, God is not African, April 8), Adekeye Adebajo makes an important observation about “marriage between the Bible and the gun”. He alludes to Jomo Kenyatta’s well-known words: “The white man came and asked us (Africans) to shut our eyes and pray. When we opened our eyes it was too late — our land was gone.”

That is hitting the nail on the head. The “theology of imperialism” continues unabated. The church continues to be oppressive. This, we might sadly add, is despite attempts to liberate theology through a heavy dose of black theology, feminist theology and liberation theology, and to help liberate the Christian religion to come to grips with the realities of context.

For theology to be relevant, it should never be “out of context” but should be informed by the material conditions of the people who assimilate it.

Today, the Christian church fails to pass muster. It struggles to embrace the human rights culture and other philosophies and practices. Its dogma holds it back, and so it continues to struggle to embrace the normal practices of homosexuality, which it erroneously depicts as inconsistent with biblical teaching.

The “racist depictions of Africans as morally depraved and backward” continue in different guises. Racist allusions are replaced by authoritarianism. Those in authority, such as bishops, treat black congregations as subhumans, just as their colonial masters did. The examples are there for all to see.