Keep The Boundary In The Garden Of Eden: The Relations Between Religion And Politics: The Prosperity Gospellers In Focus

Growing up as a young Christian in Maamobi, Accra, one of the questions that bothered me whenever I read “My Book of Bible Stories", published by the Jehovah's Witnesses, was: why did God plant a tree that could lead humankind into sin? This question was reified following a comment my paternal aunt made when my father died on December 13, 2008.

Following my father’s death and following the hubris of mystical causality, there were rumours that my father did not die a natural death. This was against the fact that autopsy done on his remains at the Police Hospital had clearly informed us about what took him to eternal bliss. But as we know among many cultures in Ghana, there were some people who genuinely felt someone deployed bad spiritual technique to kill him. As part of most cultures coming to terms with the eternal social distancing that death causes, death must always have a mystical cause!

The debate over the “why” of my father’s death dovetails with the basic Akan cosmogony of wanting to know the “way” of life, as opposed to the “how” of life. For many of these persons speculating about the cause of my father’s death, the autopsy report answered the “how” of my father’s death, not the “why” of it. So, they were asking, why did that disease kill him? Why not something else? Why him? And why then and there in Accra? But amid the rumours was the proverbial Akan consolation against evil that, “If God takes His stone, He does not rush to throw it.” This very proverb angered my aunt who said to me, “Kofi, if God is slow to throw the stones He picks, why does He even pick the stones, in the first place?”

We all laughed, but at that point, I remembered Psalm 103:3 and II Peter 3:9. But I also recollected my intrigue about why God placed a tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden. This was precisely because He knew that our primordial ancestors would be tempted to eat from that tree. Over the years, I have read several theological responses to this question. But one answer that appeals to my confirmation bias is that God wanted human beings to keep boundaries. God wanted us to know that He sets the limit to everything. And if we transcend the limit, we face the consequences thereof. Ravi Zacharias was right when he argued that, "God gives us the freedom to choose, but He has not given us the freedom to determine the outcome of our choice.”

In life, we must always keep the boundaries and limits clear. When we cross the boundaries, we pay the price for it. When Adam and Eve crossed the boundaries in the Garden of Eden by eating the forbidden fruit, they paid for it. Today, we are going through the consequence of their transgression. Graciously, Jesus has paid the price, but effectual redemption from the consequence, with death being the climax, will come to a head upon His second coming.

For the past three days, I have been fuming against neo-Pentecostal pastors who have specialised in the prosperity gospel to fleece Ghanaians. Since Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams founded the first neo-Pentecostal church, Action Chapel International, in Ghana in 1979, Ghana has never run out of such churches. They have mushroomed all over the country and have become a challenge to Ghana’s public sphere. The worst is the rise of the prophetic movement. This prophetic movement has become a conglomeration of individuals, including Rev Isaac Owusu Bempah, who claim to have adept in prophesying the outcome of political elections.

Some of them reinvent Akan metaphysical and mystical practices like abisa to interrogate the minds of their deities on behalf of their adherents. This has led to practices like akwankyire – lit. “showing the way”. They provide akwankyire on every matter. In the process, they assume the position of what Prof Karen Lauterbach refers to as small “Big Men” in Ghanaian charismatic Christianity.

In 2015, I was fortunate to have taught a group of upcoming pastors at one of the Bible schools of these neo-Pentecostals (specifically, Dominion Theological College). As I usually do with my students, I gave them more readings to do and forced them to write. Through the reading of critical materials – which I freely made available to them – my interest was to contribute to sanitising the religious landscape in Ghana. Unfortunately, some of these students, with the connivance of a co-lecturer, went and reported me to the school authorities that I was giving them too many readings. They also rightly accused me that I was making them think and reason as though they were in a secular institution. In the end, the school decided to relieve me of my service. Of course, they survive on the school fees of the students, so they had to listen to them. I gladly left, because they could not even pay any decent money for my service. I rather felt sad that such pastors will join the tray of rouble-rousing neo-Pentecostal pastors in the country.

Since 1989, with the passage of the Religious Bodies (Registration) Law by the military regime of Jerry John Rawlings, there have been attempts to regulate the practice of religion in Ghana. Following the passage of the law, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and Jesus Christ of Dzowulu were all banned from operating in Ghana. It must be mentioned that while the Law required all churches to register with the state by disclosing some information, the Christian Council of Ghana and the Catholic Bishop Secretariat refused to comply with it. By the time Ghana transitioned to re-democratisation in 1992, the Law was dropped as unconstitutional.

But since the re-democratisation of Ghana in the 1990s, the proliferation of media houses and the recent upsurge in social media have frustrated the capacity of the state to regulate religious activities. This is to the extent that the democratisation of social media has ipso facto resulted in the mushrooming of neo-Pentecostal pastors. This development has become a major albatross for the state. On the one hand, the state has to respect the constitutional rights of people to freely worship. On the other hand, the state has the mandate to protect the vulnerable in the society whose religious rights may be abused. This enigma is precisely because we have seen some of these neo-Pentecostal leaders openly abusing and fleecing their members. We have seen some of them trading mundane things like a handkerchief and so-called anointing oil at exuberance prices. In some cases, water is sold as if it were gold.

All these practices are going on in the name of religious freedom. And as part of embracing American religious capitalism, the prosperity gospel has become key in the rhetoric of some of these neo-Pentecostal preachers. A colleague of mine at Stanford University in the United States of America is writing about the psychosocial effect of the prosperity gospel on Ghanaians, so I will not pre-empt his research. But suffice it to say that the charismatic churches have done so much damage to Christianity in Ghana. Today, in my conversation with Prof. J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, who is an expert in the charismatic movement in Ghana and West Africa, he did say that the movement has significantly destroyed the foundation of Christianity.

My personal observations inform me that most of these neo-Pentecostal prosperity gospellers are thieves in cassocks. While a few of them have been educated to the tertiary level, the founder of the movement had basic education. But they deploy confident trickster techniques to fleece Ghanaians. Through the re-articulation of Akan cosmogony about salvation that is deeply materialistic, these neo-Pentecostal prosperity gospellers take advantage of people’s gullibility and desperation for instant success in life to dupe them.

In Ghana in the late 1970s, the prosperity gospel met with an economic milieu that was deeply in need of infusing of economic relief. The founder of the movement and his contemporaries took advantage of the situation to bleat aloud “name it, blab it, and grab it” gospel. They turned the Gospel of Jesus Christ upside down. While the Bible says that the Christian journey is full of pain and difficulties and those who endure to the end shall be saved (Matthew 24:13), these prosperity gospellers argue that a Christian cannot even fall sick. To suffer poverty, according to their distorted theology is to wax cold in faith. And to show that they are living examples of what they preach, they use the monies they craftly steal from their members to dabble in ostentatious living. They flaunt their ill-gotten wealth in public. They create the impression that the Christian journey is a demonstration of wealth. As religious entrepreneurs, they thrive by bleating "Catch it, claim it, receive it" instead of using their brain and brawl to work.

In response, it is alleged that some of their young men in the church have also resorted to all forms of duplicitous means to demonstrate to their patrons – prosperity gospellers – that they too can be examples of the prosperity gospel. It is rather curious that while the Protestant Ethic, which John Calvin and other Calvinist theologians taught to incorporate hard work in Christians contributed to the rise of measured western capitalism, the prosperity gospellers, until very recently, encouraged consumeristic culture. This is against the background that the spirit of Protestant Ethics (and to a larger extent Christianity) is based on three main principles – working hard, spending less, and investing more. While these principles contributed to the civilisation of the western European countries, according to Niall Ferguson, in Ghana and other African countries, the prosperity gospellers have reversed all traces of the good legacy missionary Christianity left us.

Following the extent to which these prosperity gospellers are fleecing Ghanaians, in 2019, the speaker of Parliament, Prof. Aaron Mike Oquaye, opened a discussion on how the state could regulate religions in Ghana. Given that the speaker of parliament is both a political historian and reverend minister of the Baptist church, his concerns were genuine and legitimate. But the Ghanaian community, including some sycophantic politicians, resisted every effort by the state to regulate religion. My main concern has been that the state should do two main things to regulate religion: First, it should retool the registered religious bodies to control religious activities in Ghana and second, it should compel all religious groups to register with these regulatory religious bodies. My recommendations were that the state CANNOT regulate esoteric issues – spirituality. But the state MUST regulate mundane issues. So, if spiritual matters spiral into the mundane sphere and become treacherous to human rights, the state has every right to intervene.

This is in tandem with what I stated in the beginning that life must have boundaries. In the Garden of Eden, God set the boundaries and limitations to regulate His engagement with His creation. This resonates with all aspects of life. There are always boundaries. Unfortunately, since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, we have been made to think that boundaries are irrelevant. Through technological advances, we have violated the boundaries between human beings and nature. In response, we have been caught in the quagmire of environmental degradation. In the seventeenth century, we broke the boundaries in politics. Republicanism gave rise to unlimited political and liberal rights. In the nineteenth century, we broke the boundaries in culture. Instead of having a standardised culture against which everything is measured, we called for cultural relativism. No boundaries, no limits. In the twentieth century – especially 1960s – we broke the moral boundaries. We no longer have limits. What is good and bad is based on individual taste and preference.

In the end, we live in a world without boundaries and limits. But in all this, since nature itself imposes boundaries on us, we always face the consequence of breaking them. What is becoming clear is that some of the viral pandemics are probably because human beings have broken the boundaries between them and nature. As we invade the natural spaces of animals, we face the consequences. It is either we face excessive drought and/or flood or depopulation – based on adopting sex styles that are inimical to population growth.

In Ghana, we also pretend there are no boundaries. We have allowed the prosperity gospellers to do harm to Ghanaians in the name of religious freedom. But we live in a society where poverty is exposing the vulnerability of many of our compatriots. This has made them the easy targets of exploitation and manipulations from prosperity gospellers. Some of these prosperity gospellers have had their wives and children suddenly become pastors. Because they are not only religious entrepreneurs. They are also building a religious empire. Last year, I spotted a billboard at Perez Chapel International (of Bishop Charles Agyin-Asare) advertising the meeting of an Association of Pastors’ Children. Quickly, I realised that these religious entrepreneurs are bent on bequeathing their wealth to their wives, who are called “Ladies” and their sons and daughters who are either junior pastors or head pastors in some branches of their (prosperity gospellers) churches.

In my next journalistic article, I will discuss the modus operandi of these prosperity gospellers. But I must conclude that they are a pain in our necks in our country. The state should, therefore, ensure that the boundaries between religion and politics, esoteric and mundane, and rights and abuse are clearly defined and kept. If these prosperity gospellers would fleece their members by selling anointing oil and water at exorbitant prices, the state should intervene to tax them, since such practices are not just esoteric, but they are also brisk economic activities. More importantly, the state should clamp down on neo-Pentecostals who openly and evidently violate the rights of their members. This is precisely because religion could be “irrational”, and it is the duty of the state to ensure that its citizens, especially the vulnerable ones, are protected from being preyed on by prosperity gospellers.

Satyagraha

Charles Prempeh ([email protected]), African University College of Communications, Accra