YeKengalé

I will be ever pressing for the common recognition of some basic truths that undergird the preservation of public freedom.

The understanding that the domains of politics and religion are intertwined and in fact quite inseparable despite the shallow conceptions of materialistic humanism and its renewed attempts to deconstruct what it does not understand.

They both, properly defined, reflect essential group activities as natural as breathing. Human collectives must have collective identity, common values. Religion not law supplies that. In fact, Law is a derivative of religion. Every tradition of Jurisprudence issues from a foundation in religion.

Human collectives must have coherent direction – policy – collective decision making capacity. Politics supplies that. You can’t strip either dimension away and be left with anything human. Humans are beings and becomings. We are. We do.  Religion governs the former. Politics the latter. On the level of the collective, religion and politics simply define intrinsic human behavior.

For those who don’t ‘get it’, let’s define things a little further. I understand the confusion over the employ of the word ‘belief’ for the present generation steeped in the mental programming of Scientism (as opposed to Science). So, let me sidestep the program and employ the language of mathematics. Identity is a function of values. And values are ultimately and necessarily axiomatic- i.e. a function of one’s beliefs. Modern secularism (itself a religion) may blur the lines, but the fundamental source of culture, tradition, law and every matrix of group identity is located in the religious realm.

The common error in evaluating the strength and reach of the religious domain the new atheists and failed Marxists make, is the mistaken consideration that religion is essentially about beliefs. It is not. Beliefs are necessary to ground values. That is the central purpose of religion in human society. The grounding of social values.

We should now examine why values are important. Values are a main determinant of choice. What makes a human choose between thing a or thing b? What impels one to seek c and shun d? What influences desire and creates taboo? One’s value map of course – supplied courtesy of one’s religious programming. We can even consider Sam Harris’ idea that a comprehensive value system may be derived from collective reason alone, without recourse to religious metaphor.

The problem with this ancient notion has long been recognized by Kamitic Theologians and the Greek philosophers they trained – The intellect and the conscience are two very distinct faculties of consciousness, and feed on a very different data diet. The difference between dream and fact is vast, but no one denies the possibility of traversing the distance. Well logic is the language of intellect, but conscience is programmed by suggestion. Reason and suggestion interface – hence we anchor human technology in scientific theory, but they are worlds apart.

It is impossible to function without beliefs (whether or not they be of a ‘religious type’.) The assertion here of course is that whatever informs one’s belief system represents their ‘religion’. Bible or Quran, Gitas or Unpanishads, Red Book or I-Ching, Descartes or De-Laurence.

This makes Sam himself a modern religious innovator, and we note how much his present occupation, (using podcasts to give spiritual/psychological support to the interested public who have bought in to his worldview axioms.) resembles that of evangelist or priest.

But here is the fact of human choice making. Regardless of the most comprehensive religious programming, whether from traditional frameworks or modern innovation, there will always be conflicts of interest. Humans are wired for conflict. The tension of conflicting interests is in fact essential to human being. My idea of the right, the beautiful, the desirable more often sets me in direct opposition with yours. Hence the need for the political domain….and its firstborn son –  law. Compromise and enforcement are essential to harmonize collective human behavior.

And if law is the firstborn son of the marriage of Religion and Politics, education would be the daughter, looking just like the mother from whose womb she emerged. The kinetic properties of law and governance balanced by the mind programming aspects of religion and education (and her wash belly sister – The Media) represent collective humanity purposely engaged in determining its own existence.

      Now turning attention from the global to local: I am very aware of conflicts of interests and perspectives after reading the article published by my erstwhile colleague Dr. Glenville Ashby in today’s Sunday newspaper  Church Mafia: The biggest threat to Africa’s progress making note of the strong invective employed in describing a phenomenon he finds repugnant. He speaks of the ‘cancer of evangelism’ and makes the most impassioned appeal for censure, punitive legal remedy against purported harm caused by such.

Why I should embrace Glenville in friendship after having expressed such diametrically opposite and potentially threatening views to my own may well be questioned, both by my friends in the Christian and Pan African communities. But like Glenville, I share passion over the future of African people, my people, on the continent, or scattered in her several diasporas. I do not question his motive or integrity. It is his perspective that I believe must be interrogated for the sake of truth.

The sharpness of his apparent revulsion for Christian evangelicalism is not for me personally offensive. In fact, given the facts of history, such a disposition is quite understandable if not defensible. And although he employs the rhetoric of materialistic humanism, which I believe to be politically strategic on his part, knowing him to be initiated in the priesthood of Voudon (and whether mentioning this may seem  counter strategic on my part or not,  those who know my story will recognize this to be my authentic, unprejudiced voice)….the charges levied against the force behind what he typifies a religious ‘invasion’ need to be considered.

A tangent here – this tendency to strip Africa of agency in her intercourse with modernity needs to stop. We may have indeed been historically raped. But the Spirit of Africa is today, and arguably always has been a sanguine and vital participant in the determination of its own destiny. My brother and myself need to have a conversation. I think he is ill advised in publicly attacking a hugely popular and very successful African religious figure whose politics (though understandably unexpressed from the pulpit – much more than I can say for his North-American counterparts)  may much more align with his (Glenville’s) than he may be aware, regardless of his religious affiliation.

Publicly correcting Glenville’s errors of judgment is not the purpose of this article. Hopefully  private conversation might lead to expansion of perspective on both our parts; however he touches on two things of importance I will address, the first from the religious domain, the dimension of world view, which gives potency to his assumption of the rhetoric of philosophic materialism as weapon of choice to attack a religious movement he is not in agreement with. (Not that he does this exclusively, he gives equal opportunity by quoting moderate Christian leaders as well in attacking the charismatic prophetic movement, or as he calls it, the new evangelicalism. The enemy of my enemy is after all my friend.)  

When asked to choose between Google and Reason, I will choose reason, because I can. However there is an entire generation of millennials for whom Google is God, or who in other words, are not capable of  discriminating specialized information and totally reliant on Google’s summations in shaping their opinions. I note that Google’s opinions are distinctly reflective of the secularist materialist prism of its techie informants, themselves inhabiting a space deprived for the most part of the kinds of ‘supernatural’ experience that both competing religious schools of thought Glenville mentions – the Sangomas and the Christian prophets inhabit, as I assume Glenville himself understands, by virtue of his spiritual initiation. The inadequate and somewhat misleading language therefore that he is forced to employ in order to condemn and protest these activities belie the orientation of an initiate.

Here is the plain truth. The world awaits a more truthful investigation into the nature of reality. Our religious and education systems do need to be updated. And let the politics adjust itself to the new reality. The tendency is for tradition to seize the levers of power but at the expense of growth and development

Secondly, the business of the regulation of religion in the public interest, as uncomfortable a subject as it is to those who so prize religious freedom that they would turn a blind eye to public harm occasioned by religious abuse in order to defend it; was invoked, I believe appropriately, by my brother; although his perspective is extreme (one recognizes the radical spewing forth of invective and hyperbole expected from an agitated activist does little to qualify one’s competency as a fair-minded judge). It is people employing rhetoric such as Glen invokes in his piece who have historically (and hysterically I might add) been responsible for the assassination and suppression of our religious leaders in the past. Our Alexander Bedwards, Nat Turners and Leonard Howells.    

The CPR (Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities) in South Africa, chartered to protect the interests of cultural religious and linguistic communities, may not be the appropriate institution to ensure against the kind of public abuse religion by its very nature is capable of when its internal politics fall into the wrong hands; you cant be advocate and police at the same time effectively.

 But despite all the cult crying concern that sees another Jonestown in every young charismatic leader (and no one should brush aside the Jones Town atrocity; nor seek to deny our community of hot headed, robust egoed leadership, so essential to revolution and change); there is no religious abuse that can compare in scope to the historic damage perpetrated on indigenous populations by the Roman Catholic church, whose historic and contemporary church scandals make Jones Town look like child’s play, although our warped Eurocentric religious and educational programming is wired to give them a free pass almost every time.

What we need is balanced perspective…or we end up being our own enemies’ best friends.