The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
A dark joke is told of a pretty and young Christian girl at a Convent. She had become a true thorn in the wrong place for the hard working nuns and holy Fathers. She broke every rule there was and created her own rules that she went on to break. She became a law unto herself. As part of her punishment, she was sentenced to pray to the Virgin Mary for a full hour without a stop as the strictest of the nuns listened to monitor her repentance; our dear girl repeated the same sentence for the whole hour: “Dear Virgin Mary, thank you for conceiving without sinning, I can now sin without conceiving, Amen!” She said all this in a passionately inspired voice.
Critics of Christianity such as Gilbert Keith Chesterton have used the joke about the naughty girl to illustrate how some Christians have used the liberties of Christian salvation and redemption to live the lives of licentiousness and debauchery, counting on the huge price that Christ paid for them on the Cross, they go on to practice true paganism. Slavoj Zizek has picked on the same observation of Christian licence to make the claim that pagans are the true Christians because in their paganism they live in fear of Christian judgement while Christians have become the true pagans because in their faith in the salvation they have grown confidence that permits them to live freely like real pagans. In that way, a paradoxical way, the material world and its pleasures and pains, appears to have captured not only Christianity but religion at large. It appears that in the world religions have fallen into the hands and uses of their opponents. Just like in world politics; in world religions things are not the way they seem to be, and the opposite seems always to be the truth.
In the Global South, Desmond Tutu and Jomo Kenyatta are some of the faces and voices that achieved political fame for observing how: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” That political observation of religion demonstrates how religion and religious faith were abused by Empire for the purposes of colonial conquest and invasion. The name of God was used to soften natives and make them colonisable, and Christian missionaries in that way became complicit in the colonial crime against humanity.
In justice, it must be remembered that many white Christian missionaries were jailed, exiled and killed for their support for liberation struggles in Latin America and Africa. Some Jesuit priests are on record hiding guerillas and transporting Ak47s across borders, right under the nose of colonial regimes. It is also the Christian missionaries that contributed to the education of founding African leaders that became leaders because of the literacy and numeracy, and political consciousness, that the missionaries imparted to them in mission schools and colonial prisons.
Is God not Great?
The Anglo-American philosopher and journalist, Christopher Hitchens achieved world intellectual notoriety and celebrity, combined, for his book: God is not Great, in the year 2007. His famous and notorious observation was that organised religion poisons everything and some of the worst genocides and massacres under the sun have been committed in the name of this and that god and in the service of this and that religious faith. Nothing is perhaps, more dangerous as a politician in the world who believes that their thoughts, opinions and actions are inspired by God or guided by the ancestors for that matter.
The question of the greatness of God and religion brings to the table the philosophical problematic of Theodicy, the attempt to understand why a great and powerful good God would allow evil to befall the world. Courageously, the Prophet Jeremiah (12 v 1) looked God in the eye and asked the question: “You are always righteous, LORD, when I bring a case before you. Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” The question of whether God allows evil or that evil uses the grace of God to perpetuate itself has always troubled theologians, preachers and philosophers. It troubles religious minds and hearts to see the children of Lucifer enjoying the earth that is supposed to belong to the creator. How does a great God seem to work in paradoxes, ironies and opposites? It is mainly evil people and evil Empires that seem to be driving world history, in politics and economics.
Or is God Dead?
From the 12th Century to 17th Century, that is the Renaissance Age, in European thought all inventions and human abilities were credited to the power and glory of God. The power and authority of kings was considered an extension of the power and rule of God. From the 16th Century, effectively, the so-called “Age of Reason” and Enlightenment, philosophers and scientists believed and claimed it that God had died, science and philosophy were the new God. By discovering things and inventing objects with which to master the earth, man began to think that God was a replaceable myth and dismissible fiction. Reason and rationality seemed, at the time to have replaced religious faith. Religious conviction began to be associated with people that were not clever. Atheism came to be the companion of science and philosophy, to be educated meant liberating one from superstitions and religions alike.
In that way, the God that the missionaries brought to the colonies was in many ways a God that had become so doubted and dismissed in Europe. Most Empire builders like Cecil John Rhodes for instance, were proud atheists. Modernity and its epistemologies, that is knowledges and understandings, did not only murder God but also rationalised colonisation and slavery. Capitalism as an economic system grew out of the logic of reducing people to things and things to commodities in the market place. The name of God came to be used not for religious reasons but for political and profitable reasons. In that way, God was not only symbolically killed by Empire but was also stolen to be used and abused for conquest, colonisation and domination of one by another.
Liberation theologians such as the Argentinean Philosopher of Liberation, Enrique Dussel, have argued strongly that Christianity as a religion of liberation should be distinguished from Christendom as the religion and politics of domination. The religion of Christ, the humble Messiah whose Kingdom was not of this world, goes the argument, was captured by Empire and its capitalism and reduced to a Kingdom of this world that is decorated by political power and big money. In that argument; what was used to colonise and dominate the natives of the Global South was, therefore, not Christianity par excellence, but Christendom as a corruption and abuse of Christianity.
Christianity and Islam are both Abrahamic faiths, and so is Judaism. These religions are at war in the world. Each religion accuses the other of being primitive and irrational, and makes claims of itself to be the one and only true religion. Looked at closely, what is in clash in these religions are human cultural, economic and political interests that have nothing to do Judah, Mohammed or Jesus. Judaism without the tribe of Judah, Islam without Mohammed and Christianity without Christ have become the post-modern religions of the world that fight for control of the earth and its resources, not for spiritual salvation and redemption. In justice, in the present world religions appear to have been captured by the world that they sought to change and save and now the true spiritual revolution is in fighting to save religion from the world and rescue it from captivity and abuse, to recover the gospel and the scriptures from the wild lips of Lucifer might be the present religious utopia.
God Otherwise
God has been colonised and killed in many ways including giving him a race, a class and isolating him as the property of Empire. God has otherwise been reduced to a possession and instrument of Empire. It is Walter Rodney, in his usual boldness, who made the claim that Jesus should have come to Africa because with our legendary human values of ubuntu, we would not have killed him. Africans, in that argument, should not be asked to be guilty about Jesus’ death because it is not an African habit to murder religious messengers and mystics of any kind. In other words, the murder of Jesus was the true work of Empire. A spiritual messenger was crucified by a materialist economic and political regime for pure political rather than religious reasons.
In that way, Jesus gets murdered every other day when his religion gets captured and abused by present day political Pharisees and other Apostles of Hell, the killing of God is something that is continuing in the way politics and economic greed use the name of religion to perpetuate themselves. The habit of all good politicians and business tycoons is to drop the name of God everywhere so that one can proceed with sin without feeling the guilt. In that way, many name droppers of God, circulate as men and women of God, and get rewarded for the trouble. Like the naughty girl at the convent, they want to enjoy the benefits of religion without doing the spiritual homework.
Otherwise, in true Judaism, Islam and Christianity, God makes a lot of scientific and spiritual sense. There is no division between science and God except in the schemes of political and religious mischief makers. Before religion was stolen and God was murdered by Empire, all scientific discoveries and lofty philosophies were credited to the inspiration of the divine. If one wrote a good poem or invented a tool for digging the ground, the creativity and discovery was considered from a higher power, to God be the Glory. Life was Pentecostal as every human achievement was understood as a divine inspired artefact and gift. The capitalist ethic of the private ownership of ideas, copyright, and individual property killed divine ownership of ideas and things and made a true earthly kingdom out of the world.
The Christian church in particular, once entertained the interesting idea of “intelligent design” in reference to how even such scientific theories as the theory of evolution and principle of relativity were in practice guided and led by the divine. In their stupidity, the idea goes; some atheist scientists and philosophers thought they were discovering electricity, the wheel and other wonders, not knowing that a creative and philosophical God was making very small revelations to them. In that way, given that most great philosophers and scientists became self-confessed atheists, God might be changing the world bit by bit, using the hearts and minds of the atheists.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN),
