The Amorality of ‘Men of God.’

I know that Nigeria’s ‘men and women of God’ are not only allergic to commonsense and common humanity, they are also bereft of altruistic ethic, their amorality is abysmal. In 2009, I was probably the first person to question not only the truth but also the reasonableness of ‘Pastor’ Enoch Adeboye’s 'testimony' that he ‘miraculously’ drove his car without fuel for a couple of hundred miles. This had become a vexed question and the pastor had come in for a bit of pillorying, at least from those who, like me, could see the inherent falseness of the claim.
Again, this afternoon I happened on another ‘testimony’ of the pastor: now this is even more shallow and self-absorbed than insensible. He goes back to when he was living with an impoverished uncle in the 1950s, a man in whose house a mini-famine of sorts was raging. They were all blankly wondering how to slake their hunger one afternoon when a young woman – presumably someone’s ‘maidservant’ – brought a basinful of food into their home. The young woman told Adeboye’s uncle that the food was a ready-meal gift from her ‘master.’ Here is a rough explanation of a meal gift. In days of yore, before Nigeria drained its very soul into one vast economic and normative ditchwater, it was in keeping with etiquette to send hampers of prepared food to relations, friends, neighbours and acquaintances.
According to Adeboye, his uncle and the whole famished household were surprised to receive this manna – brought no less by a human. Frugal Socrates – certainly not Jesus – would have told the maid that there was a mistake and that the food was not meant for him and he would have rallied his household in self-denying stoicism (Jesus would believe his father in heaven, Jehovah, had sent it). But the man of the house gathered his quiverful of children and relatives around him and set about polishing off the food. But then, Adeboye’s uncle was not Socrates, and in so much as he and his household were starving, it would be problematic to put any moral blame on them, this might lead us onto the slopy realm of trolleyism. In as much as there is no way of knowing whether or not the hamper was meant for another starving family, I’ll easily cut off that supposition with Ockham’s razor. And even though Adeboye and his family discovered that the food was not intended for them, they had eaten it anyway.
Many decades later, Adeboye, desperate for any pabulum to feed his gluttonous god with, had thought it was time to regurgitate the matter of the food he ate almost 60 years ago. Adeboye had used the tale as a way of singing a Te Deum Laudamus to his god for being a provider, unexpected provider, a benevolent deity. Trifling as this might seem to many, it had brought up the moral philosopher in me. Far from being a gratuitous ‘attack’ on the ‘pastor,’ this response is meant to point out why evangelical Christianity often finds itself at cross-purposes with humanism and morality and how its topdogs are no more than purveyors of moral crap.
Agreed, there is nothing the septuagenarian Adeboye can now do about an occasion of decades-old happenstance. But why gloat over it now? A moral philosopher might add this ancient minor incident to his fund of anecdotage but he would also wonder, introspectively, what happened to the poor maid who made the mistake of bringing the food to them. Was she flogged, thrashed (not improbable at the time)? What about the family the food was meant for? How did they take the matter of the hamper that never reached them? Were they expecting the meal gift – and if they were would they not have further starved for some hours after the Adeboye family had wolfed down the meal that was meant for them?
No one expects Adeboye to rue the day he ate the food which was meant for someone else many moons ago, or immerse himself in a goo-filled vat of retroactive consequentialism, but is this something he should be mouthing hallelujah about and giving glory to God for? A more thoughtful person would have questioned his god why he made his Uncle poor, so dirt-poor that he could not feed his family in the first place? And what about the years they had been starving before the errant servant made the mistake of bringing the food into their household? Did any meal materialise the next day, and the next? (Well, not likely.) Didn't they continue to languish in hunger and want – at least for a while? Above all, why make a testimonial big-deal out of a half-century-old error? One can conclude that though Adeboye and his family did not commit any immoral act by eating the food, in the light of his recent preachment the pastor can be said to be deficient of philosophic moral sensibility, if not sensitivity. If Adeboye had retained a bit of his mathematical wit (he was a mathematician, I gather), he would have seen that there was nothing miraculous or preternatural about the mistake, long as they may be the odds of a misdelivered ready-meal gift are calculable. And that the prepared food ended up in Adeboye’s house can easily be set down within the moral confines of Nagelian circumstantial luck, the sort of luck which the maid also had in the obverse.
I have always argued that post-industrial ‘divines’ like Adeboye are doing more harm to people’s psyche – and intellect – than good, they are not only committing the ‘sin’ of grandiose acquisition in the name of religion they are also blunting the finer edges of people’s minds with their logicless, obscurantist and infantilising pulpit offerings. In their Christianised, evangelical way they preach and appropriate what Aristotle describes as ‘living well and doing well’ in Nicomachean Ethics, in other words, eudaemonia, yet they often overlook its moral and virtuous adjuncts which Socrates and the Stoics emphasise. Even the species of eudaemonia that Nigerian evangelicals peddle today is a far cry from the pious derivatives adopted by ‘early Christian fathers’ like Augustine and Aquinas, it is a belly-centred and earthier version.