The Hallelujah Challenge swept across Nigeria in October. It was an online Christian program hosted by Nathaniel Bassey, a pastor and singer. It is an annual program that runs for most of the month of October every year. And it always sparks online debate on religion. This year, a boiling issue was on the segment where attendees did a cosplay: “dress like your miracle”. Some people dressed as if they were going to the airport to jápa. And there were those who showed that their interest was to get visas, with how they dressed, among other things. There was backlash to this amongst Naija netizens. There were people who said it was stupid and made no sense. The question the legitimately asked included “why not protest for a better country rather than pursuing a visa to go to other countries?”
The Hallelujah Challenge made me think about the role of religion in our society and its hegemonic importance in maintaining the current social order. In a conversation, a friend who detests the manifestation of organised religion as much as I do expressed his disappointment in the persistence of religious fervour or what he characterised more as “religious psychosis” among young people. As he put it, “this is the 21st century and we as young people are exposed to enough information. We should not fall for religion. We should be smarter.”
While I understood his frustrations, I don’t think that religious orientations stem simply from a lack of knowledge. The truth is that religious people are not necessarily stupid people. Isaac Newton, who was one of the smartest persons in human history, was deeply religious and thought of his scientific work as advancing religious thought. So, if not knowledge and intellect, what makes people very religious?
In the first part of the book The Essence of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach argued that God was created by man to worship his perfect self. For example, Christians often talk about how God cannot lie and he cannot go back on his word. These are two things that human beings often do. The worship of the “Perfect Man” is at the heart of religion. I also think that in earlier social formations, religion was a way to understand the world. This does not really apply to religions in today’s world as was the case in the earlier polytheistic religions of pre-colonial Africa and ancient Greece among many others. In those religious traditions, specific gods were put in charge of specific things and phenomena. The existence of these traditions was an attempt of ancient societies to understand their world. The third and most important reason in my mind for the existence of religion is poverty and as a hegemonic tool for reinforcing the this condition for the poor, by encouraging them to accept their state of poverty and the class society which enables this as something inescapable.
In Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he writes the now famous line that religion is the opium of the people. The complete statement is as follows: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
Religion provides pleasant illusions to endure suffering. And in the age of the prosperity gospel, it assures the poor that they will be rich if they just trust in God. This embedded illusion is meant to obfuscate class antagonism, and draw them mentally during normalcy, to the side of their class enemies. This happens because the process of expecting “miracles” from God, as the Hallelujah challenge puts it, is “dressing like your miracle” or at least thinking like your miracle.
People aspiring to be like the rich and not just live comfortable lives whether or not they be religious, are not likely to be interested in criticisms of the rich, not to talk of class analysis which could foster understanding of the exploitative dynamics behind the wealth of the rich few.
Another trick of the prosperity gospel is that of legitimising the ruling class of the capitalist era. In the feudal era, the church legitimised the rule of the aristocracy by claiming that God had given them the right to rule. Similarly, the prosperity gospel cleverly puts up the claim that God makes the rich rich and not with the exploitation of our labour. They have thus created a principle similar to the divine right of kings in the past, for the capitalist era.
There are now more opium-like tools for hegemony than religion, such as consumerism and celebrity culture. But religion still plays a big role today. Now, this distraction from the real world and soothing illusion of religion could undermine revolutionary potential if left unchallenged. If working-class people are fixated on God making them rich, class analysis as a basis for organising for class war could have lower traction.
Also, another harmful effect of religion, which I think is not often addressed, is its role as value extractor and in amassing wealth without production as well. The role of the church as an extractor of value from the lower classes is well documented. In the European feudal period, it extracted value from serfs and peasants in different ways. One way was through owning the land like any feudal lord of the period and extracting the value of the labour of the serfs. Another important way was through the mandatory collections of tithes from peasants which has become semi-mandatory from Christians today.
The church also amassed wealth from the lords. This was mostly through donations and indulgence payments. Paying for indulgences just meant that the aristocracy could pay the church and have their conscience clear as they committed horrific acts on the peasants and at war, or for the sins of their dead loved ones to be forgiven and for passage onto heaven. Donations were also given, and this created a very good relationship between the clergy and the aristocracy, which prolonged and helped nurture the era of feudalism in Europe.
We see something similar in today’s churches. In an era of extreme poverty in Nigeria we have the pastors demanding more in terms of tithe and using the tithes and offering given to them by working-class people to fund their extravagant lifestyles and invest in massive real estate projects and other investments like extremely expensive private primary, secondary and tertiary schools.
The Winners Chapel headquarters is about 11,000 acres, while Redemption Camp, the headquarters of the Redeemed Christian Church of God is about 6,000 acres. Of the top 10 largest evangelical auditoriums in the world, seven are in Nigeria. In a country of 24 million homeless people, we have pastors, all members of the ruling class, with enormous churches, all collecting massive amounts as offering. Very little if any bit of these is ever used to aid the welfare of their poor members. All these churches have parishes which in a material sense function as nothing other than as vehicles for value extraction to their headquarters. Most of the offerings in these churches, running up to 70 per cent in some instances, are remitted to the national headquarters. When people critique religion and in this case Christianity it should not be from an idealist standpoint or as simply something rationality and science can fix. Such analyses should rather start from understanding the material conditions of the people and how religiosity as a dominant ideology in society is rooted in the power of the dominant class, and promotes the interests of this class.
by Emmanuel IRO-OKORO
