Two Kinds of Religion

Very interesting polemics on the philosophy of faith & spirituality.  Enjoy:

I didn't write the following but it resonates with me, without diminishing my faith and belief in God. YS

Whether Christianity or Islam, all religion is understood based on the time & culture people live in. That is why the ‘word of God’ is often the thoughts of man about the word of God.

So when the jihadis & missionaries brought Islam to the North & Christianity to the south of Nigeria, they brought the version that fitted their mission: to colonize us.

And it has stuck.

Look at this example: two famous American preachers, one black, one white. 

Both speaking on the same subject: about protests.

While Billy Graham complained that protests were becoming too much, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr advocated the opposite: when people are not heard, they will shout louder, or protest.

While Billy Graham preached a gospel of conversion and repentance, with an emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus, so that we could go to heaven, MLK’s understanding of what it meant to follow Jesus was understood through the pain and anguish of Black Americans who were suffocating under the boot of oppression.

So, on March 10, 1968, in a speech titled “The Other America”, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, “…I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the [Black] poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.” 

But a year earlier, in his 1967 sermon titled “Rioting or Righteousness”, the Reverend Billy Graham equates “rioting” with “looting” and “anarchy”, and admonishes that America needs “tough new laws” in order to combat “subversive elements that are seeking the overthrow of the American government”.

Tough new laws could easily mean these killer police that have been murdering America’s black population, non stop, one day at a time.

Same gospel,  2 men of God, 2 different realities. Graham was a rich old white man with no needs his country did not meet. He was satisfied on earth and couldn’t wait to go to heaven. But MLK was the son of enslaved Africans, oppressed on earth, by Graham’s kind.

Religion, of any kind, tends to advance the dominant cultural ideas, and hardly disrupts anything those in power do not want to let go of. 

Even Jesus was killed for standing in the way of Jewish religion & Roman politics.

Imagine if the missionaries had brought us MLKs kind of Christianity instead of Grahams?

But the missionaries who advanced colonization were white, and all people everywhere tend to interpret any and every religion through their culture and present circumstance.

That is why white Christianity supported slavery & colonization, emphasized that slaves should obey their masters and overlooked any part of the Bible that contradicted their exploitative & dehumanizing mission.

We inherited that white gospel, that tells us to overlook earthly problems, and assures us that our reward is in heaven.

The white type of Christianity coaxes us to accept suffering as Gods way of making us holy, and struggle as part of carrying the cross.

But MLK’s Christian doctrine urged us to resist earthly tyranny and begin to build righteousness on earth. MLKs Christianity clearly said that slavery & colonization were wrong, and fought to remove these injustices.

MLKs Christianity did not wait for God. It wasn’t passive about suffering. It wanted heaven now, here, not till kingdom come.

Notice that white people can change their docile doctrine when it suits them. 

When Americans faced oppression by their British overlords, they called it tyranny then, and invoked the Bible to declare their independence from Great Britain.

But when they captured Africans and converted us to slaves, they ignored  the doctrine of God given independence but espoused tolerance & forgiveness.

Till today, we Africans are still following their moribund view of God that does not free us, and makes us look up to our colonizers as moral or political examples. That’s why our economies are in shambles.

Our self view and worldviews have been polluted by our ideology & philosophy, and the biggest ideology is religion and our religion is white and arabic, given to us by the oppressors of our race who enslaved  and  colonized us.

We must decolonize religion, deconstruct Christianity & Islam, and explore what faith means in each human language, without going through mental intermediary cultures of  Europeans or Arabs.

As Nigerians, what would God consciousness look like, without the intervention of colonial and manipultive views of religion? How would we grow, and govern, if we took more control, and resisted earthly injustice, and fixed broken systems, rather than wait and pray for things to change for the better, in Nigeria?

This was what MLK did. 

This is what we should do too in Nigeria.

Deconstruct, & Decolonize Nigeria. Good luck to you all!!! 

By Danladi Dele Agbeyo

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