Religion: A commitment to the ideology of suffering

By Rachel Adams

As far as religion is a form of acknowledging a higher power and of connecting with the creative force that is responsible for this incredible universe, I have no problems. But if there is any group of people that has gone one step further and adopted religion, Christianity particularly, as a legitimator of and explanation for all sorts of social, political and economic deprivations, it is Africans. Steve Bantu Biko put it aptly in an address at a Conference of Black Ministers of Religion when he stated: ” … if Christianity in its introduction was corrupted by the inclusion of aspects which made it the ideal religion for colonisation of people, nowadays in its interpretation it is the ideal religion for the maintenance of the subjugation of the same people.”

True to the point, and decades after Bantu Biko made this observation, there probably has not been one single system that has been used effectively and consistently in convincing black Africans that our condition of perpetual poverty and suffering is one that was somehow divinely decided and not created by deliberate oppressive political and economic processes, particularly in our more current colonial and postcolonial history.

The effectiveness of this belief system lies in the fact that while initially it was preached to us from a pulpit by the coloniser, it has now spread like gangrene into our own language and dialogues, from pulpits to households, from pastors and priests to the retorts of black mamas, from churches to political activists and yes even politicians themselves, subtly but powerfully whispering to us that if God can see the suffering of so many masses and “allow” it, then surely God must have a divine plan to “deliver” us from our deprivation. I cannot count how many times I was advised in my childhood to not question the condition of black people in my country because “God understands”. Or that I should not insult God by complaining about the disparities that I observed socially because “God will deliver the poor from the injustices of the land, but in his time”.

What this did to me, and I am certain to many Africans across the continent, is that it made our political and socio-economic deprivation seem somewhat noble and gloriously shrouded in the mysteries of God’s secret plan that would, in the sweet by and by, deliver us from all suffering. When I went to church and lifted up my hands in praise, and cried for deliverance, it gave me a tingling and warm feeling all over my body, knowing that God had a special plan for the “blessed poor” and that he held us in a more sacred place in his heart than the “stingy rich” who had horded all the earths resources for themselves. It was a divine plan, and because it was a divine plan, there was nothing really that we could do to change it.

If you think that this is a gross exaggeration of the mindset that many Africans share, then you have not fully understood the psychology of religion amongst the masses. Nietzsche put it very well when he observed that Christianity in particular, has acted as a sort of sedative amongst the poor or the oppressed. This is because in the absence of a credible explanation for why people actually suffer on earth, it seems easier, and again more noble, to resort to an esoteric explanation as to why that suffering occurs. In Nietzsche’s analysis therefore: “Powerlessness [becomes] ‘goodness’, baseness ‘humility’, submission to people one hated ‘obedience’ and not being able to take revenge turned into ‘forgiveness’.”

I could not agree with his philosophy more. The thing that bothers me the most about religion amongst many Africans is not that it exists, but that amongst the most deprived of us, it replaces concrete social and political action with endless prayers of deliverance. Night vigils replace social, economic and political revolution and the reading of Psalms replaces active protest. And in cases were people are not even actively religious, there is a subtle psychological conditioning that exists to convince us that we have very little power to change our conditions. We have been psychologically and spiritually convinced that if we accept suffering with grace, then our courage is to be applauded and encouraged. And it is this belief that has allowed us to endure poverty, wars, political and economic bullying from within and without: the basic dehumanisation of our human experience for centuries.

The effectiveness of this mental conditioning is that we have become disengaged from the power that we have here on Earth, to question, to protest and to actively seek to change our dire conditions. We perpetuate our own poverty and political disadvantage by failing to create systems (here on Earth) that empower us and allow us to reclaim even the most basic material and social rights that have been taken from us. We expend more energy “praying for our leaders” than we do actively removing them from their illegitimate thrones of power. While we are building empires in the clouds, the powerful amongst us are building systems here on Earth that will effectively decimate us as a people, if they have not already begun to do so.

I would like to see an Africa in which the spirit of revolution is borne within us again. An Africa in which our spiritual leaders actively preach against a commitment to the ideology of suffering (“blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven” etc) and inspire people to believe that their protests are valid and their situations unacceptable. An Africa in which workers do not feel unjustified or that they are ungrateful for what they already have when they demand a decent living through decent wages. An Africa in which our education systems actively teach our children that until the African condition is no longer equated to chaos and depravity, then our economic and political revolutions are far from over: and that it is our spiritual responsibility to continue in those revolutions.

I would like to experience an Africa in which we cease to use the religious language of “evil” or “it’s the devil” to limit a more useful intellectual exercise of understanding and thus eradicating the conditions that feed the greedy tendencies of our leaders. An Africa in which we cease to support leaders because they are black and fought the liberation struggle for us, even when they begin to abuse their power. An Africa in which we truly cease to buy into the mythology that white people are superior (or closer to God as I have had many older relatives tell me), and actively challenge the white supremacist attitudes that stifle the real empowerment of black people on every economic, social and cultural front.

An Africa in which we demand that every person, from the field worker to the domestic helper and the security guard should have access to a more than decent standard of living. An Africa in which we acknowledge that within a money system, people need a certain level of monetary capacity to exchange resources, and that they have a right to demand that money, not based on their qualification but based on the fact that their quality of life is valuable and must be made possible within that system. An Africa in which dark bodies cease to be representative of all the things that we detest: poverty, suffering and a lack of any visible progress. An Africa in which we cease to normalise depravity and where we actively seek to challenge those in power who create and perpetuate our current nervous conditions.

I am reminded finally of a most popular psalm in black churches: “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord”. Perhaps a different psalm that we could now adopt would go a little different: “I will lift up mine eyes and cease to look shamelessly at the ground beneath me as though I have created my poverty and deserved it. I will look at the human being next to me and say come now brother, come now sister, let us go the hills of power and ask those who claim to understand systems why it is that our system despises and abuses us so. I will look squarely at my leader, at that foreign corporation, at that profit-making machine and ask how long more with the primitive upliftment of profits over the value of the African man, woman and child. And finally, I will look at this history of mine, no longer with religious justification and acceptance, but with a fervour that inspires me to once again ask why it is that the African is still treated as the lowliest of us all. Surely it’s not divinely meant to be so.

Rachel Adams has a master’s in African studies from Oxford University. She is a social scientist who is openly disgruntled by current world systems and seeks to make commentary that will make us uncomfortable with them.