Existing nexus between poverty, cult-driven deaths
Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was on track until one preacher took to the pulpit. Videos emerged of the senator’s former pastor, Rev Jeremiah Wright, making incendiary comments about America and the white people that almost threatened to defer Obama’s dream.
Wright, who preached at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, officiated at Obama’s wedding, baptised his daughters and was his spiritual guide for decades.
In one of his sermons, he appeared to suggest that terror attacks in the US were self-inflicted, Hillary Clinton who was Obama’s main opponent in the Democratic primaries attracted less scrutiny because she was white and that successive governments had persecuted black people even as they expected them to be patriotic.
His famous sermon “damning America” was deployed to question Obama’s patriotism, attitude on race relations and judgment.
The reverend told his congregation after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” he said.
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he told his flock.
The major argument by Obama’s critics was that with the preacher having been his spiritual leader, then he shared his world view. That Wright had a significant influence on Obama’s thinking. In fact, Wright inspired the title for Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope.
There is some merit in the proposition that you are as good as your spiritual guide and aspirational role models. Religious leaders have the ability to instill unreasoned loyalty and blind faith to their teachings—even to the sophisticated.
That is why Americans were outraged by Wright’s preaching. Sensing the damage the sermons were inflicting on his campaign, Obama denounced the preacher saying he was like that “old uncle in a family whose views you disagree with.”
Back home, the influence of a wayward preacher in Kilifi on his flock is the subject of police investigations. The man encouraged his followers to starve to death in order to meet Jesus and some heeded his word.
Paul Mackenzie preyed on the vulnerabilities of followers – mainly poor women and youth – to deprive them of their property. He then led them to death with a promise of life in bliss on the shores yonder.
The cult leader promised his poor followers, better life in Heaven borne out of sacrifice, disdain for material wealth, technology, education, modern medicine, the court system, science and, more importantly, reason.
The deaths should stir the conscience of the nation and debate about the place of religion in a civilization. In many parts of the world, organised religion remains a powerful force in society. Billions identify with the main four biggest religions.
The body bags of Shakahola and chilling victim accounts remind one of the thinking of German philosopher Karl Marx on religion.
In his much-quoted dictum, Marx declared that “religion is the opium of the masses.”
An opium is a drug that dulls the senses and helps one forget the miseries of the present. For Marx, religion recognizes that suffering of earthly life for the poor but it offers a false comfort by insisting on a happy afterlife. Was that not the Gospel according to Mackenzie?
According to Marx, religion is an expression of material realities and economic injustice. He argued that problems in religion were ultimately problems in society. Religion is not the disease, but merely a symptom. It is used by oppressors to make people feel better about the distress they experience due to being poor and exploited.
There is a nexus between poverty, ignorance and exploitation in Shakahola fatalism. That is where the conversation should begin.
—The writer is the Political Editor, People Daily —[email protected]