African Christianity and Personality Cult Worship

The most successful acts of fraud in our society today are the ones committed in the name of religion.

Initially, it was politics and politicians that held the number one position. Today, religion and religious leaders have taken over and have even ended up as willing tools in the hands of the politicians to give some façade of legitimacy to their brazen crimes against the state. This is why Nigeria would be so derisively referred to as the poverty capital of the world and yet has the highest number of private jet- flying pastors across the globe. Now, this is not the tragedy.

The real tragedy is that the so-called Christians who are supposed to question the thievery that gives birth to such brazen display of opulence, rather turn around to applaud the same band of thieves milking them dry. A man who is struggling to feed his little family or pay his children’s fees in school, would be excited that his priest or the general overseer of his church, has acquired a multi-million-dollar private jet and would be glad to pay his tithe from his very meagre resources to the same man the next minute. He is so brainwashed into thinking, that he has an obligation to part with that percentage from his little revenue that is not even enough to pay his family’s bills. And what is more? We even have cases where people are made to submit hundred percent of their first salary of the year with the usual religious blackmail that the “first fruit” belongs to God.  And the billionaire pastor or General Overseer smiles to the banks, getting all richer, while leaving the gullible unsuspecting Christian impoverished, in pain and misery and increasingly vulnerable. This is the effect of personality cult worship found in today’s Christianity. Today’s Africa has a brand of Christianity where Christians worship pastors and respect their words even more than they do to God himself. The Christian of today needs to know, that no human figure merits such total and sheepish followership.