Religion And This Hate That Is Upon Us

OKEY ANUEYIAGU

Throughout history and the present day, the core principles of human existence have been co-opted, abused and completely weaponized to represent hate. This is despite the astronomical growth in religion. Christians, Muslims, atheists, heathens and agnostics, have all practiced and promoted hate. There have been rampant cynical exploitations of faith and religion to justify hate and the depravity at the heart of human suffering and deprivation.

Our various religions have been hijacked by extremist groups who seek to flex and impose their puritanical strict, and often narrow views on the world. They have deployed their morality to justify oppressive and hateful practices in all that they do. They have consistently ignored the good virtues ingrained in their holy books and doctrines, such as love, kindness, mercy and compassion, and have embraced all the evils of hate and wickedness. We must all begin to worry, and seek for clarity for why our various religions are being used as a cloaking device and an endearing instrument for hate.

Recognizing the complexities that surround the immigration issues around the world, especially around America, and the American Christian right-wing movement with their xenophobic position on immigrants, I began to worry about Christianity and hate. Where did these Christians find the morality to hate immigrants and ask that they be deported? Did they ever read the Bible? The God of the Bible adopts a consistent and an unambiguous compassionate stance on immigrants. Jesus welcomed strangers, but the followers of Jesus are cruel and hateful towards them.

When Pope Francis in 2016 preached the sermon about love of strangers, the Christian world paid him no mind. His words were strong when he said: “It’s hyprocricy to call yourself a Christian and chase away a refugee or someone seeking help, someone who is hungry or thirsty, toss out someone who is in need of help.” The basic dignity and respect of mankind have been abused, subsumed and consumed by hate, and by reducing the worth of human beings to nothing by these religious bigots and their despicable partners in politics.

I have continued to worry about the hate that human beings have for long spread around the world, beginning from the many years of slavery and the evils of the aftermath, down to the current treatment of immigrants. Searching through scriptures, I have come across many instances of God commanding His followers to have empathy and love for immigrants. In Deuteronomy 10:19 God says: “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” Also in Exodus 27:21 He commanded us thus: “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”

Even as I recognize that every nation is governed by laws that restrict who can and who cannot enter its territory, I find it abhorrent that Christians who support this law and order regime, find it convenient to use and weaponize the Bible as they spread hate and smear refugees and immigrants, some of whom are running away from prosecution and seeking asylum, as criminals. These extremist racist Christians cleverly cite relevant portions in the same Bible where Apostle Paul wrote about obeying the laws of the government, claiming that God had ordained them for the purpose of order. They argue that whoever disobeys the authority is rebelling against God. Therefore, immigrants who disobey the laws of a country must be severely punished.

As solid as this biblical doctrine of law and order appears, one must find the invocation of the numerous biblical themes of love, compassion, justice, equity, hospitality and fair treatment for the strangers, the poor, the hungry and the weak, to be overwhelmingly more compelling than this one message by Paul. But trust these Christian Evangelicals to hold on to this as an impetus to demand that immigrant be brutally treated and deported. They cry that abortion is a deadly sin, but look the other way when an immigrant child, already born is locked-up in a cage and treated worse than animals. Where is their compassion, where is the message from Jesus for self-sacrificial love, for the inclusion, and for love of strangers? Just like the Christians from America and Europe did during slavery, these modern-day Christians – call them evangelicals or Nationalists, have inherited the hate of their ancestors in the maltreatment of their fellow human beings. They have built walls to keep away people who do not look like them and who are fleeing poverty, hunger and war, and unlike Jesus preached, have failed to build bridges to welcome the weak, the poor and the weary.

What is most disheartening to me, is that Jesus who was once a foreign refugee has become an inspiration to these right-wing Christians who are desperately fighting tooth-and-nail to vilify, criminalize and deport immigrants. In collusion with President Trump, they have devised and are implementing inhuman xenophobic rhetorics and actions against foreigners in America. We must recall with repulsion, when Trump said that he preferred immigrants from white countries to those from shithole countries. This shocking and shameful remark has been adopted proudly by these white Christians who carry on spewing this vile and hateful slur of racism while still calling themselves the followers of Jesus Christ, who for all intent and purposes, may have also come from a shithole country, as Nazareth was nothing but a poor remote enclave.

I am not just discovering the kryptonite to use only against the Christian racists and fundamentalists, as the other religions are gravely complicit in the dispensation of hate. The practitioners of Islam have carried out hateful practices amongst themselves, and towards others who do not agree with their religion. What about the Jews? Didn’t they kill Jesus Christ? Have they not been blamed for so many upheavals around the world? This hate that is upon us comes from all quarters – Christians, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Pagans, Buddhists, and others.

The paradox of this matter is that many do not realize that almost all these religions believe in a single, omnipotent and an all-powerful transcendent God. Muslims in the Quran revere Jesus as a great prophet, while the fundamentalist Christians observe Christianity as the only pure faith, misinterpreting the scripture that says that; “Jesus is the only way …. no one comes to the Father except through me.” They claim that Christianity is the only way to salvation, and that all other religions are fake, false and inferior. My personal interpretation of the words of Jesus who always spoke in metaphors using parables, is that no one can come to God unless they live by his teachings of loving God and loving all people. Christian fundamentalists have cloaked racism, Islamphobia, and xenophobia in the annals of their countless bigotries as they dispense hate in full measures.

In writing this short essay, I feel that my duty is certainly cut out for me, As a human being, I feel constrained by the deep-rooted diabolical and ruinous events of the past and of the present. It is my job, I believe, to excavate the sordid histories of our past, to examine the contemporary issues, and to give voice to the marginalized, by making the oppressors uncomfortable in ways that are genuinely disturbing.

It will be incomplete not to revisit the debacle in Biafra in which 3 million innocent people, mostly children and women were senselessly slaughtered. The subject of those horrific events as contained in my book; Biafra, The Horrors of War, The Story of a Child Soldier, remains fresh in our memories as one of the most hateful atrocities in the history of mankind. In my writings about this war and the fallouts, I have strongly made it clear that some pasts must refuse to stay buried and forgotten. I ensure that things long believed gone, and histories intentionally distorted and swept under the mat, must come back, and that buried secrets must resurface even as they may throw some lives into chaos. I am in the vanguard of men and women of good conscience who believe that we must explore the pasts, its guilts, truths, and all of the haunting weight of our unresolved wicked, sordid and hateful behaviours – that we must reveal, discover, and hopefully, change the world.

If American Christians and others from the fringes actually believe what is in the Bible, they must recognize and accept that Jesus Christ was a very peaceful and nonviolent person. That he enjoyed the company of lepers, the poor, the sick, the immigrant, and the homeless. That he was a brown-skinned Palestinian who never talked about abortion, gays, and was not an American, nor did he speak English. Jesus did not belong to the white race, the evangelicals, nor to the Catholic Church – he was a universal revolutionary man who abhorred hate. One is then forced to ask these Christians; where they derived their hateful behavior? Certainly not from God. They have fed the world with their version of Christianity that offer us with relentless condemnation and propaganda against people who do not look like them or worship like them. They never properly condemn racism, apartheid, poverty, and the economic and social disparities in the systems. They are hypocrites, liars, fraudsters and racists.

We must arrive at the inevitability of the sum total of what resembles strongly, the Christian wasteland of deceit, lies, deprivation, immorality and criminality, all wrapped around insidious hate spread by propaganda and misinformation through these movements, and through the evil politicians that have sold their souls to these cults masquerading as the religions of God.

Admitting that immeasurable good has come from humanity and some of them from various faiths and religions, the evolution of this reality is compounded by the pain and hate that have also been inflicted by the various purveyors and practitioners. To continue to indulge and allow these fundamentalist Christians, and others hiding behind their faith and fake religions to practice and spread hate, is detrimental to the development and growth of our consciousness and existence.

We must stop those who use and utilize their faith as tools of power, control, polarization, exclusion and dehumanization, and for the enthronement of ungodly policies on the world. We must all align ourselves with the call to equity, fairness, equality, justice, mercy, empathy, love and compassion, and banish the practices of hate by these fake followers of God.

•Okey Anueyiagu is a Professor of Political Economy and the Author of:

Biafra, The Horrors of War,

The Story of A Child Soldier

And

Nigeria and World Affairs,

The Dynamics of Their Complexities