Never since the days of Reinhard Bonnke, the televangelist and mass rally preacher who visited Kenya nearly three decades ago has talked about God seizing this country as it has today.

In those days, when Kenya had only one television station, the German preacher with a booming voice and electric performance wooed the public at the expansive Uhuru Park urging Kenyans to turn to God.

For those with long memories, Uhuru Park was a sea of humanity with probably a record attendance including that of the Head of State in a Christian service that was beamed through television across the country.

The then President Daniel arap Moi, famed for his mastery of the holy writ and confession, was a known believer who seldom missed a church service whether he was in the country or not. Certain places of worship such as AIC Milimani, Christ is the Answer Ministries sanctuary on Valley Road and the president’s beloved chapel at Kabarak University were stages from which news bulletins that would run into double-digit minutes broadcasts were beamed.

Power is attractive. All manner of charlatans and ne’er do wells with hardly any fidelity to the Christian faith followed the president in his Sunday forays to church. In the end, it was difficult to differentiate who was a Christian and who was not for sometimes the non-believers, to cover up for their conflicted allegiances may mourn more than the bereaved.

Moi was followed in power by the late Mwai Kibaki and later Uhuru Kenyatta, both members of the Catholic Church, a denomination more reserved in its expression of faith and more conservative in its theological advocacy.

But two decades after Moi, it seems Moi is back. In these last general elections campaigns, Kenya has taken God from the pulpit into the political rally. Time without number political rallies have started with a salute to the divine, extolling his attributes, often limited to “God is good, all the time and all the time God is good and that is His nature” with a “wow” exclamation mark attached to its end.

The tragedy has been that this salutation to the divine has tended to be followed with insults and language that is antithetical to the Christian faith.

Almost every act of a Kenyan now is attributed to God. Unlike those who make the pronunciations, feeble individuals in the audience have no way of authenticating and are reduced to merely nodding in agreement.

Invoking God brings finality to an argument. God is immanent, omnipotent, omnipresent, and transcendent. He reveals himself to whom he wishes. Those to whom He has revealed himself to He commissions to go out and preach it, in season and out of season, when it is convenient and otherwise. A public rally is as good a platform as any other to preach.

This is where the danger lies for there are both true and false prophets and who is a mere mortal to differentiate between the two? It is fine for the prophets to go out and preach but who is to tell when a false prophet mounts the platform with a microphone in hand?

Most politicians who triumphed over the recent elections have attributed their victory to God. Even the Supreme Court appears to have followed suit and similarly attributed their judgement to divine intervention.

But as is typical of religion, it is a boundary-defining philosophy with its own rituals, in-language, and as the late Prof John S. Mbiti told us a long time ago, Africans are deeply religious, and religion could easily be used for justification for many of our acts whether good or bad.

In history when religion has dominated statecraft, the church has come to grief. It becomes a big tent with all manner of practices adulterating true faith. For this, the church in Kenya ought to be careful for her exuberance could be her waterloo. Do not quench the spirit, the holy writ warns, but the multitude now appropriating the language of the pulpit could just be doing that.

—The writer is the dean, School of Communication, Daystar University