[size=18pt]                How Religion And God-fixation Are Underdeveloping Africa. Part 2. [/size]

Written by Adebowale Oriku   
Monday, 23 February 2009
Reposted from VillageSquare

The Christian Religion is still heavy stuff in Africa, it is bread and butter, it still has both blood and body. Africa is now bestrewn with ‘living churches,’ that is over against 'dead' churches like Roman Catholic and Anglican (I understand the latter has done a lot to liven itself up now). There are thousands of denominations on the continent. In Nigeria founding a church has become a veritable no-brainer, a Klondike rage that is on the boil, and the rise in the number of churches has consistently ridden tandem with economic hardship. If any editor is thinking of packaging a copy asking Is Karl Marx Truly Dead? he should go to the continent and get his answer, at least he would be able to flesh out the Marxian axiom of religion being an opiate for the populace. And beyond being an opiate, it is also a sop for impoverished souls, warm compress for the sores and festers of poverty.

It is not unusual for misgoverning fatcats in Nigeria to call on people to pray and fast for a better government, pray for an end to corruption, and for an election (often rigged by the government itself) to run smoothly and bring out the best of candidates. The species of Liberation Theology practiced across Nigeria is indeed liberating, its promise to uplift people from poverty unto wealth and prosperity would have been commendable if it is not an imposture, a gooey nostrum. Well, not to mince words, what is practised is the worst kind of Prosperity Theology. The theology of thievery and cupidity, a theology which borrows heavily from the so-called seven deadly sins. I wonder why a name has not been coined for the sort of pentecostal revivalism characterised by Lagos churches, I mean something suggestive of the term ‘Toronto Blessing’ - Lagos Paraclete or Lagos Revelation? Or to be less charitable, Lagos Hocus-pocus.

I have always been concerned about the recent role of religion in boosting mediocrity and undereducation in my country. Primary and secondary school education is too battered for the deadhand of religion to make any further dent, so I’ll leave that aside. Recently the more affluent of the evangelical churches had begun to outdo one another in establishing universities. Although I think universities established by Christians should evince a certain degree of charity by offering scholarships and bursaries in large numbers, the universities have only turned out to be part of the mercenary projects of the church. But then you may not attend the universities if you cannot afford the fees. There is no law that says a Christian University should not indulge in a bit of free-marketeering and money-making.

I asked a nephew who has just finished the first year in the most grandiose of the new Christian universities how he is getting on. The picture he inadvertently painted is a university that is a tattier twin of the late Rev Jerry Falwell’s ‘Bible Boot Camp,’ the hotbed of illibertarianism misnamed Liberty University, second only to Oral Roberts University for being a monument to the elevation of bigotry and  bleached-out booklearning. Although he was an influential figure in American politics for some time, Falwell was not a pleasant man, his Christianity was so narrow and constricted that he might as well have died of involuntary asphyxiation. Unfortunately, Falwell’s university is a testing ground for his views, the students his hobbled guinea pigs.

In that Nigerian facsimile of Falwell’s university, every sort of moral bottleneck is imposed on the undergraduates, and even postgraduates, in the name of religion. This recalls to me a character in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle telling another character that a university is the only place a youth can really live freely, fulfillingly, fantastically before the drudge of work and other extramural duties will intervene. I can’t imagine the damage that is being done to the reasoning of students in a Physics Department of one of these newfangled universities whose head is an obdurate creationist who will never mention anything like cosmology or string theory to his students. My nephew is studying Physics in this department. In the university the teaching of philosophy is also forbidden. This is even worse than Plato’s Republic where a ban is placed on poets. Universities should be about ‘love of wisdom’ and knowledge, which is a rough definition of the word philosophy. A university that abominates the teaching of philosophy actually belies its being, its integrity, as a place where anything worthwhile can be taught.

George Bernard Shaw once pointed out the ridiculous tautology of the term ‘Catholic University,’ since the old Greek ‘Katholikos’ means ‘Universal’ - it’s as good as saying ‘Universal University.’ To carry the argument conversely, the very fact of a Christian, Jewish or Islamic University is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, especially if such universities intend to see things only from vantage-point of their religions. The word ‘university’ shares a cognate root with the word universe and any university that offers anything less than a rounded, robust, universal curriculum does not deserve the name. Even in enlightened cities of Western Europe, Catholic Universities, despite their overdefined name and pretensions as citadels of great learning, often fall short of teaching anything universal - it is this sort of intellectual limitations imposed by religion that the pentescostal universities in Nigeria have further foreshortened.

Although large pockets of fanatical Christianity in the US do give a lot of people in the West (especially in Europe) a lot of concern, that vast country with its multifarious peoples and attitudes can manage this. America would never be bowled over with Christian fundamentalism – read Sarah Palin. Extreme diversions like the Jerry Springer Show should also testify to this. And you don’t often see the greatest minds from Yale and Harvard gibbering their precious time away in Jerry Falwell’s sort of church, nor would they wish to be part of any department in Falwell’s Liberty University. And when people talk about American being more religious than most countries in the western world, they often omit to say that 94 percent of American scientists are nonreligious. Americans have won the Nobel Prize more than any citizens of any country in the world and 95 percent of the Laureates were/are not religious.

Recently yet another research had reconfirmed the truism that the least religious countries like Sweden, Norway, Japan and even Estonia are doing far better than countries like Senegal, Indonesia, Malawi, Sri Lanka and Congo where most respondents to a vox pop claimed to be blissfully religious. The researchers had acknowledged the anomaly that is the United States, but then there is said to be between 20 and 40 million people in America who would not tick any box if asked what religion they belonged to, and some would only tick to conform or to let the dog of unbelief in them to continue its dogmaless sleep in private. Again, as I have pointed out above, those who are making major contributions to America’s progress are not often religious.  And there is an omission in the list of underdeveloped religious nations. Nigeria. What an oversight!

What may be defaultedly described as a fledgling state like Nigeria does not need the sort of religiosity it has sunk itself in, it augurs nothing for the country but further stagnation, if not regress. It simply takes a people who place too much emphasis on religion and its sib, superstition, to ensure this. If we must look up to a country like America at all, we must focus our gaze on the laboratories and scientific hubs where things happen, not on the vast prayer concourses where big-suited men, oozing both salesmanly sweat and profanely pricey aftershave, tell ancient lies - or, if not exactly lies, stories and folktales spun thousands of years ago by Semitic and Levantine men in desert robes, with some of the stories later doctored by the patristic hirelings of the Roman emperor Constantine. 

It is useless to dwell on the heinous role the church played during the African slave trade - although I must say the church, or rather some churchpeople, later did some compensatory good works. Nevertheless, it irks me that at the time the missionaries were introducing Christian religion to Africa, Charles Darwin was bringing out his Origin of Species and such a hot-and-bothered debate over the ‘Gaderene Swine’ was in full swing in England. In Africa Christianity was sold as the brave new thing. And knowing how long it took Europe to rumble the obscurantist essence of Christianity, it is really not a surprise that today almost all schools in Africa still have what is called morning devotions. Religious Knowledge is still a very important part of schools’ curriculum and evolution has never been part of any school’s teaching list. And possibly the attitude of overwhelming god-fixation today may be rooted in such an ancient selling of religion as the be-all-and-end-all. Although Walter Rodney only intangibly blamed religion as contributive factor in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, it certainly would have amazed the man today how Africans are busy underdeveloping themselves with religion - together with other things like corruption, Mugabeism (what the snotty VS Naipaul once called Mobutuism) and so forth. Look at the list of men Nigerian government gave national hours recently, two name stand out. Mr Adeboye and Mr TB Joshua - Men of God, so-called. Where are the Men of Science, Men of the Arts, I mean secular savants whose name would stand out as those of these anti-intellectual men of god?

Not once has it been proved that religion and progress in the post-medieval world do not go together. With the advent of the Enlightenment, religion began to dry-rot. Although Voltaire was often described as a deist (shorthand for atheist in those days), no one would read Candide without having second thoughts about god. And we all know about the dark desperation of the church when it introduced the Inquisition: that horrible blot on Roman Catholic conscience was brought to being solely to suppress the rise of scientific knowledge, to scotch any sort of inquiry outside the central quadrangle of the Pope’s main residence, Rome’s St Peters. Which was why Galileo Galilei was forced to renounce the result of his investigation that the earth was not the centre of the universe. Really, there is no time to list the role the church - I mean any sort of church - has played in suppressing knowledge. But if the Roman Catholic Church which prides itself on being the guardian of Christian truth and whose clergy have often truly been well-read and sometimes scholarly could still harbour a lot of obscurantist views up till today, one wonders what sort of education and knowledge an evangelical institution would impart  – a trueblue evangelical sees the bible as his first, if not only,  (definitive) textbook; he is a literalist; he is often anti-science; he believes in such poppycock ‘the world was created only 6,000 years ago.’ Mostly, these are the kind of people we are now leaving the education of our children to. From my understanding, it now even fashionable among lecturers in supposedly secular universities like Ibadan or Ife to parade themselves as born-again Christians, making god and religion the talking points of what should have been more rewarding intellectual colloquies. 

Just before the anniversary of 200 years of the birth of Charles Darwin, in a forum where the troubles of Africa were being debated, someone had asked, What use is the knowledge of evolution to Africa now? A lot of good, I’d say. And more. Whatever arguable good religion may have done for Africans in the past, now it is only an overcrowded bandwagon that’s bearing us backwards and downhill, it is now the most potent force for the desertification of African minds. We need up-to-the-minute science, we need to be part of the latest trends in arts, we need to be counted at the frontiers of varied realms of knowledge: nano-tech, neuroscience, cosmology, quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology etc. Africans need a well-rounded education, the scaffolding of our minds needs a concrete late-modern infusion in every facet, for us to begin what may be a long journey towards self-sufficiency. The kind of comment that Africa does not need to know anything about evolution because the continent is still buried in a welter of problems and troubles is as good as condemning us Africans to live by bread and prayer only.

@ huxley 2, thank you for that article.


I hope people read it and actually think about it.

This is a really great article.
The way these religious freaks edit the curriculum to accomodate their bigotry is shocking.and to think the NUC gave more liscences for religious universities is sickening. Nigeria is DOOMED! Instead of teaching our children to think for themselves,we encourage them to look into the clouds.
What has mr adeboye and mr tb joshua done to recieve national awards? What have they achieved? That is just like giving the notorious criminal DERICO national award for his exploits in the science of armed robbery!

Religion is the reason why Africans all over the world cannot unite.

Horus:

Religion is the reason why Africans all over the world cannot unite.

500 yrs ago when there was neither christianity nor islam in Africa, we were more divided into little tribes and kingdoms than ever.

This is why you wonder whether these anti-religious fools have peas for brains. Is religion a greater divisive tool in Africa than tribe or language?

davidylan:

500 yrs ago when there was neither christianity nor islam in Africa, we were more divided into little tribes and kingdoms than ever.

This is why you wonder whether these anti-religious fools have peas for brains. Is religion a greater divisive tool in Africa than tribe or language?

While I disagree that religion is THE (main) reason Africa are not more united, it is worth noting that there was plenty of religions in Africa before the arrival of Christianity and Islam. The notion of African unity is a relatively new one. The majority of the inhabitants of the African continent will probably want to see unity first within their own countries before the notion of a continental unity. When you realise just how it is to build a nation, then you will see just how almost far-fetched the notion of African unity is.

Obviously today religions does play a role in the disunity of the continent, but probably not much more that the other factors such as language divide, tribal affiliations, territorial disputes, poverty, poor education, etc, etc, etc.

davidylan:

500 yrs ago when there was neither christianity nor islam in Africa, we were more divided into little tribes and kingdoms than ever.

This is why you wonder whether these anti-religious fools have peas for brains. Is religion a greater divisive tool in Africa than tribe or language?

The thousands of differents churches are all competing against one another. There are churches who are of the same denomination, in the same town, the same diocese, which mean they have the same beliefs and worship the same God. Yet, they never come together. What is so ironic is that these churchgoers all feel that church is the place for unification and love. How can thousands of differents divided churches who are all competing against one another can create unity?. Just look at The religious forum of Nairaland and you will have an idea.

Horus:

The thousands of differents churches are all competing against one another. There are churches who are of the same denomination, in the same town, the same diocese, which mean they have the same beliefs and worship the same God. Yet, they never come together. What is so ironic is that these churchgoers all feel that church is the place for unification and love. How can thousands of differents divided churches who are all competing against one another can create unity?. Just look at The religious forum of Nairaland and you will have an idea.

Where were the churches 500 yrs ago? why where we still divided?

I doubt you can see beyond your nose.

davidylan:

Where were the churches 500 yrs ago? why where we still divided?

I doubt you can see beyond your nose.

You certainly mean why we are more divided, not only there is still tribalism but now muslims are killing christians and christian are killing muslims. What is next?, christians killing atheistics?, and atheistics killing muslims etc, ? then you have political wars also, some Nigerians cannot even work or do business together just because they have a different religion. I doubt you can even see anything you must be blind.

Horus:

[size=14pt]You certainly mean why we are more divided[/size], not only there is still tribalism but now muslims are killing christians and christian are killing muslims. What is next?, christians killing atheistics?, and atheistics killing muslims etc, ? then you have political wars also, some Nigerians cannot even work or do business together just because they have a different religion. I doubt you can even see anything you must be blind.

We are less divided now than we were 500 yrs ago when there was no religion. Ife was killing Egba . . . what was the basis? Religion?

davidylan:

We are less divided now than we were 500 yrs ago when there was no religion. Ife was killing Egba . . . what was the basis? Religion?

Not only we are more divided by religion today but now You've modernised the division with many already fabricated religions and broke it up into many other little sects: Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Lutherans, Born-Again-Christians, Hebrew Israelites etc, and many others all fighting against each others, even here on Nairaland ,and what is the basis for muslims who are killing christians and christians who are killing muslims?,Religions

nigeria is dying daily because of religion, people do not believe in science and reason anymore most people prefer to believe in imaginary deities to come and help us out of the mess we put ourselves in. students go to school and believe that what they are being taught in school is just the white mans ideas or lies, they go back home and continue to hold unto the discredited beliefs that jesus, mohammed, demons, witches and wizards are the things that matter most in life. its so so pathetic.