The advent of the industrial revolution in Britain
coincided with when men like Thomas Paine began to see through religion for
what it is. His Age of Reason still
makes reasonable reading today as it did at the time it was published. When the
book came out in 1794, Britain was furiously industrialising and religion was
subtly backtracking, men like Paine began to question what God had got to do
with anything. The transatlantic Paine made some impact with his writings in
America as he did in Britain. His sojourn in the United States converged with
the acme of America’s revolutionary ferment and this had inspired his Rights of Man.
Today there is the myth that the so-called ‘Founding
Fathers’ – hey, there were Mothers too – midwived the United States using
Christianity as their frame of reference. Nothing can be farther from truth.
Certainly, there was a kind of revivalist mentality at the time, but this can easily
be put down to the air of triumphalist redetermination of history that America
has, today, done to a fine art. America was the Promised Land, the New
Everything, the New Jerusalem and Mecca for erstwhile British subjects. But the
architects of America’s independence and constitution were far less religious
than some would like to believe. Thomas Jefferson was more of a deist than a
theist. George Washington was more of a closet freethinker in the sense that
the word was used then.
The men who ‘founded’ the United States may just as
well have put a seal on their decisions in a Masonic temple rather than a
church, which are not the same thing, in spite of wrinkles of whispered
kinship. And it was spelt out from the first that there would be a separation
of church and state. The trope that is imprinted on American money, In God We Trust, was only
self-consciously adopted in the 1950s as America’s national motto after a long
chequered use, a phrasal relic whose origin is woolly. The words were culled
not exactly to proclaim any sincere trust in God, they were only fully adopted
in those heady days when paranoid Uncle Sam thought he was about to be upstaged
by ‘godless’ uncomradely Comrade Stalin.
Although the extreme religious right do use the
‘godless’ pretext for the Soviet Union’s collapse, the fact is that today, a
country like the UK or Holland has more people who are gleefully irreligious
than the Soviet in its heyday. The Soviet Union’s failure was the failure of
communism, a system whose integrity is often compromised by needless
introversion, dehumanisation and hypocrisy, and the fact that its chief
praxists always try to make a religion of it. In other words, the failure of
communism is a failure of a state religion that has its minor if ruthless gods.
Stalin’s Soviet. Castro’s Cuba. Ceausescu’s Romania. Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Mao’s
China. Today, China’s leaders are no more or less religious than Mao, but they
have been able to take China in another direction. China, in spite of its
vestigial, if repressive socialism, now proudly and brutally aspires to be the
new Golconda. Needless to say the Chinese are not appealing to any god to help them
develop, again it’s all about hard graft (not the sort of rank ‘graft’ we do in
Nigeria), a kind of new-age-thin Confucianism is only used as a rough guide to
growth.
I remember a reply I gave in a forum when someone (a
Catholic) said that Western civilisation owes everything to the Christian
Church. A startling, although not uncommon, declaration, considering how the
Catholic imperium still casts a shadow over reason and the quest for knowledge
beyond the intellectual rims of the Church, a carryover of its persecutions of
scientists – or natural philosophers as they were called – like Galileo and Giordano
Bruno. I countered this widely-held misconception with the riff that Japanese
might as well thank Shinto ‘religion’ for their 20th century leap.
By the way, those who are working in the overwhelmingly busy anthills of
American sciences do not begin their day muttering In God We Trust. Nor do they spend time singing In Science We Trust, they just get on
with their boffinage and hope for results.
Now I shall hypothesise the possibility of God. As it
is, ‘personal relationships’ between God and his (or her or its) creatures have
always been so fraught that someone who is patently ‘sinless’, or rather
‘righteous’, might find himself in the grip of cancerous calvary which no
medicine or prayer would be able to assuage, which of course might, again,
conveniently call forth the convoluted obfuscation of God’s way being
mysterious. Now if the relationship between an individual and God is so tricky,
how would it be between him (okay, let’s make God a man, Mr. God sounds good) and
something as impersonal as a country? And even if the hypothetical God wishes
to favour a country, how does Nigeria qualify? Are the millions of churches and
chapels and camps and prayer & worship lean-tos we have erected enough
justification? Or how we have made idiomatic mimicry of his name? We all abuse,
insult and deceive one another with the constant and perfunctory references to
God, as if we are some kind of malfunctioning androids echoing a long-declassified
codeword. Our appeals to God are no more sincere than the oaths taken by our
politicians to be our servant – they are commonly hollow, magnificent examples
of self-hoaxery. Although the bleating of God’s name is becoming louder and
deafening, things are getting worse and worse in the country. It is no longer a
secret that we love Mammon far more than we know this nondescript slippery thing
called God, most of us have built shrines for the former in our hearts and
heads while using our mouths to shout God.
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