RELIGION AND LOW PUBLIC MORALITY IN NIGERIA By Victor Mong Nigeria is a very religious society, no doubt. Available record shows that the nation has the world’s largest Anglican congregation with some 18 million members. The Bigard Memorial in Enugu is undoubtedly the largest Roman Catholic seminary in the world with five times more students than the largest US catholic seminary. Away from Catholic and Anglican orthodoxy, there are gigantic protestant cathedrals and mega churches such as the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Deeper Life Bible Church dotting every corner. In fact, the Winners’ Chapel is famed as the world’s largest church auditorium, while Christ Embassy continues to assume global outlook. What is more, Nigeria has hundreds of thousands of pastors sent abroad as heads of churches in Europe and Africa. Back home, there are committed believers who pray, worship and sing almost at every turn. At first glance it would seem that against the backdrop of such monumental spiritual boom, the nation will experience equal and corresponding surplus of public virtue. Alas, there appears a paradox of increasing religiosity and declining public morality. Every aspect of our social, economic and political realities provides stark contrasts to the growing religious proclivities. We are beset by poverty, conflicts, terrorism and weak statehood. Official graft is widespread. In March, the Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington-based research and advocacy organization paced Nigeria at 7th position out of 20 countries with worst record of illicit flows of public wealth. The report revealed that between 2000 to 2010, N3.04 trillion ($10.66 billion) of public funds were stolen. As it stands, a conservative estimate of between $4 billion to $8 billion of Nigeria’s money are stolen annually. Our ‘sins’ do not end there. There are mind-boggling incidences of bribery across board, intolerance and fractionalization along ethnic, linguistic and cultural lines. What bugs us as a nation are quite innumerable within our unbelievable religious consciousness. But what could possibly be responsible for such dissonance between excessive religiosity and our damning deficit of public morality? Why are daily multiplications of churches coinciding with social and moral bankruptcy? These are sobering question and daily experiences continue to make urgent answers vital. It is not out of place to locate this phenomenon on the theology of the ‘prosperity’ which interprets salvation in overwhelmingly personal term, in which the individual is divinely placed to achieve success in spite of society. The mainspring of this theology is that events in society are immaterial to the fortunes of the individual believer. Thus, the individual in a very personal sense is at the centre of God’s love, grace and redemptive works. This sort of teaching, while leading men to God has also tended to create a rather unquestioning population that is that seems theoretically non-engaged from secular activities. It has promoted passivism in its wake. Those who are deeply committed to this movement argue that entanglement with secular affairs posed the risk of subverting one’s salvation. In plain terms, church and politics do not mesh. The only legitimate sphere of social engagement was the fellowship within the church itself. The larger society was a lost cause. All efforts were directed at fulfilling the level of righteousness required to qualify for heaven. One may ask: is holiness and social responsibility mutually exclusive or complementary? Is it possible to be deeply committed to one’s faith and be an active citizen? Does the pursuit of ‘holiness’ imply social disengagement? Our responsibility should be to encourage the synthesis of civic and spiritual. As John Wesley said, “there is no holiness but social holiness.” Every Christian has two responsibilities: the first is to put on the mind of Christ; the second is to carry that mind into the public square in whatever the individual is involved whether business or politics. Religious people and Christians must carry their supposedly ‘superior’ virtues to pubic dealings because all of us live here as flesh and blood and suffer the same cruel fate of bad leadership, hunger and corruption no matter what which faith you profess. The decisions, conspiracy and mistakes of those who have taken up secular responsibilities are collectively borne and suffered alike. It is only by bringing the immense teachings of our Christian and religious faiths into the secular that we can build a society that truly uphold fairness, justice, equity and oneness. It is no longer sustainable for those who are Christians to live in a bipolar reality in which on the one hand, we share in a common social experience marked by decadence and on the other hand, we function as believers in the controlled events provided in our churches. As a result, the values and virtues imparted by our faith are hermetically sealed off from social reality. Consequently, the society persists in its ethical decline despite what appears to be a renaissance in religious propensities.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 10:39:29 +0000
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