CHURCH & STATE—To Separate, or Frustrate?

*This essay was written in the short aftermath of a debate on SEPARATION OF CHURCH & STATE IN AFRICA held in Kampala on 20th, April 2018. It is a personal reflection on the day's proceedings, and an unofficial record of events. Consider it my very own minority report:

Last Friday evening found me riding pillion on a moped—in some haste to beat the ominous rain clouds looming over a darkening Kampala sky.

A few non-believing comrades and skeptic ‘‘co-religionists’’ had invited me, through the good graces of social media, to sit and listen in on a panel discussion in which the topic of the day read: The Separation of Church & State in Africa.

After waiting around eventlessly for nearly an hour, the organizers began setting right what proved to be a disorderly meeting room. I soon lapsed into banter with a heavily-bearded friend named Ruyonza on what each of us had been up to since we last met. The bushy-faced and forest-chinned comrade startled me by asking how many books I read a day—given my seemingly infamous reputation for intellectual interests—to which my answer was an unintelligible stammer.

We were soon asked to shift places, from a corner of the room where we’d unwittingly drifted in the course of my and Ruyonza’s chat, and draw closer to the front in order, as one of the ushers shyly explained, ‘‘for the place not to look too disorganized’’.  

Between our choice of seat and the hosts’ evident lack of preparation, I couldn’t say exactly which was responsible for said disorganization.

Minutes later, the place now fairly abuzz with voices as more of the audience trickled-in, the moderator walked, or more fittingly, swept in. He was a stern-faced fellow swathed in white West African ceremonial robes complete with a bag-like headpiece—he gave one the impression of a colonial secondary school Headmaster.

To further make the point for me perhaps, the crowd’s collective hubbub quickly sunk to a hush—evidently silenced by the medieval royal presence.

This gentleman, who started off his evening-long ramble by declaring his Pan-African credentials (as if the sartorial pantomime wasn’t statement enough)— duly announced that the day’s event was a collaboration of organizations—his own The Pan African Pyramid, and The Uganda Humanist & Ethical Union; whose President he went on to introduce as the day’s co-moderator and host.

It turned out that the event was actually a regular (possibly weekly) talk-show held by Mr. Irumba’s organization and broadcast live on Facebook [Andrew Irumba Live] as well as a little-known startup online broadcaster un-intriguingly named Court TV.

The panel being duly constituted, thus—‘‘Pastor’’ Solomon Moses Male, Ronald Kaddu Kitonsa, Khatondi Phiona Valerie, Serubiri Africa Uhuru, and Don Mugarua (in ‘arbitrary’ order of speaking)—the debate was permitted to kick-off by the eccentric moderation duo.

‘‘Pastor’’ Male plays it safe

The renowned and mostly controversial Solomon Male took to the floor with characteristic flare—announcing how glad he was that his long-waged crusade against ‘partisan politicking on religious podiums’ was finally coming of age in the mind of the Ugandan ‘‘thinking’’ public.

Yet hardly had Male got his trousers off than the coarse voice of Mr. Irumba interjected with an injunction for the former to pause his remarks and attend to the (now much circulated) video clip of an iconoclastic African-American Evangelical preacher, on a Pastoral visit to Bishop T.D. Jakes’ Potter’s House, railing against the inefficacy of prayer in solving Africa’s socio-economic woes. The preacher lambasted Zambia’s misguided privatization of her copper mines and Asia’s meteoric advance despite its largely non-Christian religiosity.

[This unannounced and rude interruption of debaters by the moderator was to be a characteristic feature of the rest of the unweildy evening.]

In this first instance though—Pastor Male, to his credit, listened to the clip respectfully before reverting to form and declaring the playback an irrelevance since he wasn’t ‘‘your average ignorant Evangelical unaware of complex global issues’’.

Indeed, the long, prepared notes he went ahead to read for his speech were a reflection of how (potentially) balanced and objective a mind the man has—were he, in my opinion, to disabuse himself of the opportunistic need to still cling to his indefensible Christian metaphysics, while still calumniating his fellow faithful for misusing and misapplying the ‘‘true’’ faith.

Skirting about the bull’s-eye     

Having listened to Male’s half-hour remarks—passionately if not angrily delivered—my mind began racing in several directions.

I began thinking how the real trouble with our world today is not, as Pastor Solomon put it, the misapplication of an otherwise good and true doctrine to serve the self-interested ends of parochial persons. The real problem was that these doctrines are false and inherently bad to begin with—having no shred of credible evidence whatsoever to support them. No one makes this point better than the American New Atheist, Sam Harris.

Pastor Male attempted to have his cake and eat it—by standing upon the platform of a historically incredible and scientifically falsified theology, albeit widely popular— and that is where in my view, all of his energy-consuming and high-decibel attempts to paint his wayward compatriot-clerics black left him in the awkward position of the soot-coated pot ridiculing the smoke-smeared kettle.

Poverty will keep you popular

A BBC bulletin I’d caught earlier that morning had reported how apostasy was on the rise in Ankara and Istanbul—despite the most ridiculous attempts by establishment clerics to vehemently deny the same, declaring irritably how ‘‘… Turkish youth are strongly grounded in the knowledge of the one true faith, and that is Islam.’’

I am painfully aware how much further down the road Africa has to go, before we can begin witnessing social-evolutionary trends of this nature. The pivotal reason for this, of course—being the biting poverty and abject privations most if not all of our people, have to grapple with daily, through experience or association.

I am convinced that there is a reason why Afghan or Bangladeshi youth aren’t renouncing their commitment to Islam—and young people in economically empowered Turkey, which is on the brink of joining the EU, are gaining more confidence to break decisively with said 7^th-Century Muhammedan superstition.

It seems one of the key ingredients to sustaining religious faith in any society is poverty. In short, if you want to keep your people religious, keep them poor.

Poor people have the uncanny tendency of being obedient and ‘disciplined’—they don’t ask too many uncomfortable questions, aren’t needlessly ambitious, don’t take any credit for the work of their heads or hands (or lack any achievements to seek credit and acknowledgement for to begin with)—and above all else, poor people are thankful for whatever little they get; they do know how to count their blessings.

Pastor Male a bigger problem than that he seeks to redress

The trouble with the tough-talking liberal is that he succeeds in blunting our sensibilities to the magnitude and acuteness of the problem at hand. Be that problem racial inequality, gender disparity or theocratic stupidity—the liberal, who very often is a well-educated, glib-tongued advocate of redefinition and reappraisal of the problem and its perpetrators—succeeds in painting a wholly different picture from that which in reality exists.

The liberal will say that the problem isn’t Islam, but rather the ‘extremists’ who misuse an otherwise innocuous and peace-promoting faith to further their own terrestrial ends—that the problem isn’t the white Nationalist racists propagating Apartheid in South Africa under the spiritual guidance and patronage of a convicted Dutch Reformed Church, but a ‘complex milieu rife with multi-faceted socio-political intricacies in which black and white have failed to understand each other …’.

The liberal will say that the solution isn’t to attack the Quran or the wonderful ideas of brotherhood exemplified by the Prophet, but to ridicule the fundamentalists who wish to stain and slander the good name of the faith. The liberal will say that the solution to Apartheid isn’t to teach Black Consciousness or to encourage blacks to identify their problem as white people and the oppressive system they prop-up through commission or omission—but rather that the trouble is a ‘narrow’ and ‘mere’ white crony-elite at the ‘‘top’’ bent on keeping all good whites and blacks divided.

In short, the liberal is the mother of all spinmasters.

  

*

And this precisely is my dis-ease with Pastor Male and the ‘solution school’ he represents.

The man portrays himself as a reformer—a kind of new-age, revivalist neo-Christian whose ‘‘divine’’ mandate is to rescue the Contemporary Ugandan Church from the depravity and rot it has sunk into on account of its failure to stay the course of true Christian worship. One wonders what true Christian worship entails in Male’s opinion?—his own interpretation of the scriptures, most likely.

But who is he to rank his subjective and keyhole interpretation above other competing ones?

In matters of scriptural interpretation—the only sustainable arbiter is God himself—who must settle the competing questions once and for all—not through clandestine appearances made to self-deceiving, solipsistic and delusional individuals in the quiet sanctums of prayer; or whispered ‘truths’ conveyed in the vestries of supplication—but God must solve this conundrum by beaming down from his celestial hideout, preferably on a blinding cloud trailed by tendrils of fire, and sit in mediation (or judgment) over the contending parties.

Short of that—all interpretations of whatever scripture are equally true—or indeed, equivalently and manifestly false.

OUGHT WE REALLY SEPARATE CHURCH FROM STATE?

My own conviction on the broader matter of the day—SHOULD CHURCH BE SEPARATED FROM STATE?— is that Church should not be ‘simply separated or merely culled’ from State life—Church should be extirpated  and permanently excluded from all pretensions to social influence and political authority.

In fact, Church as an idea should be stamped out of currency.

The Church I refer to here is not the human clergy, congregants or physical edifices that comprise the material corpus of religion—no. I speak rather, of the Church as an idea, a way of life, an approach to truth and the world. I speak of the ideology that informs superstition and beliefs in the metaphysical, especially as concretized in the numerous contradictory, disparate and mutually antagonistic theologies of each religion’s ‘‘Holy’’ scriptures.

There can never be a sustainable and meaningful ‘separation’ of church and state—in terms of gazetting constitutional roles or mere legalistic rhetoric—not as long as religious theology still seriously believes in and actively teaches citizens and their children things like the omnipotence of God and the totality of religion.

Scripturally sanctioned statements like—‘God’s ways are higher than man’s ways…’, ‘all leadership comes from God…’, ‘touch not my anointed…’, ‘store your riches and rewards in heaven…’, ‘the watchman watches in vain unless God watches beside him…’ —and all of the litany and raft of other nonsensical gibberish that is rotely spouted and ritualistically spewed by religious spokesmen and their converts (or more accurately, victims) in an attempt to undermine the efficacy and potency of human institutions, abilities and problem-solving interventions developed over the many millennia of our heuristic, pang-ridden, jolty and start-stop civilizational experiment—flies fully in the face of the laughable idea that the Church, after all its centuries of historical privilege and blood-inspired power lust—can take a back seat and let ‘mere humans’ in State government do the work on earth that is rightfully God’s.

We cannot mollify a rabid dog with confectionaries—a quick death is always a mercy.


©Surumani Manzi

Group photo with all key/leading ‘‘suspects’’ identifiable

Short Clip of the response detailed in ere-going essay

23rd-April-2018.