Coming Out

A few years ago, a nineteen-year-old youngster, a second-year university student in Nigeria, contacted me. He'd read stuff I wrote and was (according to him) impressed with my freethinking, irreligion, etc. He wrote that he had a problem and he'd be happy if I could help. Oh no, it wasn't a begging letter but something more spiritually affecting and humanely exigent. The problem was that he didn't know how to approach his parents. Come out, not as gay or a cross-dresser or a genderfucker of some kind, but as an atheist, a nonbeliever in God, in Jesus, the H. Ghost and all the Judeo-Christian jazz. Nigerians, as I should very well know, are heavily opiated with religion but his folks binged on the God dope. His father, a university teacher, was a part-time pastor who, like Adeboye and Kumuyi, considered giving up his job as a don for God and Church. His mum was not only a devoted Christian wife and mother but also multitasked as deacon, chorister, usher and all-around busybody for Jesus, or shall we say, dogsbody?
He was one of three supposedly godfearing children, the oldest. Indeed, he used to fear God - fear mixed with worshipful love, I would think. He used to pray as hard as any member of his family. Then, around the time he got into university, something happened - or began to happen - in him. He began to think beyond the Bible, prayer, God, Jesus, John, Paul, apostles, prophets and the horde of 'heavenly hosts.' At the end of the Platonic period, he came out of the cave of woo-woo shadows into light, into the sweet-sour reasonableness of rationality - although he was still trying to adjust his eyes to the light. But he could only do these things inwardly; he dared not show his hand or come out as a 'freethinker,' that wasn't an option. So far as his engineer-lecturer father was concerned, there was no such thing as atheism - theism was a given. The young man might as well go batshit first, streak onto the street, shouting 'God is dead,' then at least everyone would know he'd gone stark raving mad, which would be more comforting than knowing that he was sane yet 'blasphemous' - after all, the Yoruba Bible mistranslates the word 'fool' for 'madman'. The centuries-old amping-up of 'fool' into 'madman' shows that the Pavlovian dog of Christianity and God and Fear was not only let loose among Africans but that it has now spawned a continent-wide intellectual stupor and hysteria.
Clearly, the young man was caught in a bind, which wouldn't have been any better even if he were a few years older and fending for himself. Even then, he would have agonised over it, although since a certain degree of independence, even agency, would come with being self-sustaining, he might not need to get in touch with anyone. But now he was a university student: he still lived at home, and he still had to attend church - which he had to do because he was still tied to the purse strings of his parents; they also paid his school fees, so it was important for him to play along, even if he often felt like leaping up from his seat in the church to tell the smug-faced pastor that the 'man of God' got a lot of things wrong. I knew how unthinkable it would be to his parents that anyone would not believe in God, particularly under the banner of Christianity or Islam - and then to know that it was their beloved son who had spurned God! The parents would have raised hell if the young man had told them he'd become an 'idol worshipper,' to use that silly update of the colonial 'pagan,' but they would not just raise hell if he said he no longer believed, they would picture him right there in the inferno.
It's really a shame that, for some fogeyish reason, in 21st-century Nigeria, a 19-year-old young man cannot let his parents know that he has a mind of his own. It was also a moral crisis. The young man was in a quandary. Aptly, it'd brought a 19th-century autobiography by Edmund Gosse to me - Father and Son, the coming-of-age story of an adolescent son who rejected his father's religious belief and heavy strictures. But to the extent that Africa has stagnated, even abysmally antiquated, itself with religions which were midwifed into existence millennia ago from the antediluvian imagination and the historical womb of Semitic people, the adolescent Gosse was able to exercise more freedom of choice, more intellectual expressiveness, in fin-de-siecle Europe than a young intelligent Nigerian in this day and time.
I could fairly imagine the desperation, the seething frustration, that had driven the young man to seek advice and an irreligious paraclete to help him see his way through the crypts of false piety in which Nigeria and Nigerians have buried themselves. But in reality, I could not do much to provide any equilibrium to the dividedness which assailed the young man's 'soul,' soul in that 18th/19th-century sense. It was Henry Miller, I believe, who wrote at the height of modernism that the 'soul problem' perhaps went away with Dostoevsky or had, at least, been chemicalised. In Nigeria, 'soul' is still in that stage Dostoevsky left it - no, it's even pre-Dostoevsky, because here was a young Nigerian Ivan Karamazov, a contrarian, a budding atheist, made forlorn of soul, of voice, even of personhood. If you are not part of the Abrahamic mass orgy or do not wish to be part of the happy-clappy menagerie as in the case of the poor guy who got in touch with me, living in the whitewashed and rotting ark of Africa's parodic religiousness can be suffocating, even noxious. Even here in the UK, where there is a degree of sociological sophistication, it is not all that easy for a young Nigerian or Ghanaian, say, to segue into being an unbelieving 'black sheep' of his family, particularly if it is a family which prides itself on its piety.
I have a philosophical allergy to self-aggrandisement in any guise. I hate to take on the role of a 'wise counsellor,' I hate being a pastorish mouther of feelgoodisms. Anyway, I wrote to the young man that he must continue to dissemble, to deceive his parents that he was a Christian - pretend Christian - he should carry on with a caricature of filial piety and try to sustain it for as long as is necessary. This was an existential crisis, and for all Sartre wrote about 'bad faith,' about 'authenticity,' it would not be in the young man's best interests to announce to his parents that he had backslid (I'd call it forward-slid), or had taken a leap onto counterfaith. He lived in a society which provided no safety nets - a society where things like student loans no longer existed, so he needed his parents to do their duties, and if appearing to be a Christian was the quid pro quo, so be it. But only for as long as he was under his parents' thumb. He only had to wait for the right time to let them know that he no longer had any time for their Christian/evangelical baloney. No, it wasn't going to be easy, but if they had any generosity in them - which even the Nazarene showed in some of the stories written about him - they should accept that their son was now truly reborn, although there is no doubt that they would expect him to come crawling back, prodigal-son like. That is even being generous to the parents because if they had belonged to a fundamentalist movement like the Jehovah's Witnesses, their son might be 'disfellowshipped,' excommunicated, godsped onto the highway to perdition.
In my reply to the young man, I had no personal experience to draw on. As I had written a few times, I had slipped effortlessly into irreligion - no hangups, no familial feelings to spare. At 19, there was no need to express my doubts; the Nigerian society I grew up in - though considerably religion-minded - was not so obsessed and bloated with Abrahamism. I spent much of my free time in university drinking beer in a smoke-filled Student Union's 'buttery;' I never crossed paths with religion and the religious. Well, not to stray too far into gonzo territory, I should wrap up with the advice I gave the young fella. Be strong, don't buckle to the pressure; deafen yourself to the overwhelming and spellbinding drumbeat of 'God' and its heady accompaniment of pentecostal 'praise and worship.' And when the time is right, come out and free yourself from the chains and tyranny of religious faith.