SCOUTING FOR VOTERS IN GOD'S HOUSE SOUTH AFRICAN STYLE

THE SUNDAY TIMES
JOHANNESBURG, SA
By Fred Khumalo
Mar 22, 2009

Religious leaders who climb on the political bandwagon are selling their flocks to the politician with the sweetest tongue

When the head of the most powerful church on earth flagrantly tells people to stop using condoms, I begin to lose hope

Lately, we are seeing signs of a blurring of the lines between the church and dominant parties on the election trail.

I am a very religious man at heart. In fact, I am of staunch Catholic stock — hence my name, Frederick. But I haven’t been to church in a long time because there are some intensely personal moral battles that I am engaged in with the church.

I refuse to be a hypocrite who will join the flock every Sunday while my heart is bleeding with discontent. Every now and then, I do feel a certain stirring of guilt in my heart for staying away from the church.

However, this week some things happened that ameliorated my guilt for turning my back on the church.

An article in the Christian Science Monitor this week asks the question: “Why is it that Africa — a continent of bloody conflicts, forced migration, rampant health problems and profound poverty, where as many as 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger — contains some of the most exuberantly religious people on earth? How do Africans find so much hope amid the hopelessness?”

My answer would be: because most Africans have nothing else to look forward to; they have nothing else to hold on to except hope itself. Religion’s underpinning is hope itself. When you are hungry and have no food, hope for a full stomach the following day can sustain you. When you are sick and have no money to go to a doctor, sustenance can come in the form of the hope that some angel of mercy, some good Samaritan, will emerge and whisk you off to hospital.

When you are wallowing in prison, accused of wanting to overthrow a government, you can only retain your sanity by feeding your heart with hope that the authorities will, somehow, see reason and set you free.

Hope. That’s why we Africans, in the vicissitudes of all manner of hardship, are still hopeful.

But when the Pope, the head of the most powerful church on earth, flagrantly tells people to stop using condoms, this on a continent ravaged by Aids and over-breeding, then I begin to lose hope. With due respect, I find the statement simply irresponsible because it does not take cognisance of the objective reality of this continent. Many Africans who are uneducated will take this message at face value and, in the process, spread Aids and create children they can ill afford.

After all, their spiritual father, their oracle, has spoken, and who are they to question him?

In an ideal world, abstinence is the most logical alternative, premarital sex is a sin and chastity a virtue.

The harsh reality we find ourselves living with is that we are already in the grip of Aids. Banning condoms is therefore downright silly.

We need practical and sensible intervention and not idealistic, highfalutin notions from one who lives behind tall walls, away from the masses who have to deal with a lack of education, hunger, disease and pestilence of the soul.

The Pope comes to the continent to spout moral platitudes — the same continent where priests are known to have sodomised children and the church did nothing about it.

I am sorry, but some of these things have to be said, especially when the pontiff has already set the ball rolling in terms of speaking uncomfortable truths.

These are just two of the truths that have poisoned my relationship with the church, and I have friends with similar concerns. Despite this, they still go to church — and that is a matter between themselves and their God.

When I consider the broader edifice of Christianity, and how it has conducted itself in this country in recent months, it is my submission that the church, as a living social entity, must continue to grapple with social and socio-political concerns if it wishes to remain relevant.

When there are human rights abuses, the church should speak out. It should help to alleviate poverty, offer shelter to the homeless and all manner of physical and spiritual sustenance.

I am also aware that some founding fathers of the ANC, including its first president, Dr John Langalibalele Dube, and chief Albert Luthuli, its Nobel peace prize-winning president, were both men of the cloth.

In the days of Black Consciousness, we had the likes of Professor Itumeleng Mosala and Barney Pityana, who were also highly political. While these churchmen prided themselves on their political philosophies, they never fed their congregations interpretations of the scriptures coloured by a narrow, parochial party political line.

Yes, they railed against the injustice of apartheid and offered scriptural evidence about its evils — but they embraced congregants of all political stripes.

That is to say, while the church cannot avoid the political environment in which it finds itself, I am of the opinion that it cannot afford to directly and actively participate in party politics. That is why I had issues with the Dutch Reformed Church.

Not only did the church actively promote apartheid by creating race-based wings of the church, but it went further by trying to find scriptural justification for apartheid. The line between state and church had become so blurred that it became known as the National Party at prayer.

Lately, we are seeing signs of a blurring of the lines between the church and dominant parties in this country.

Mvume Dandala, once a leader of the Methodist Church in Southern Africa, decided that he wanted to lead COPE. It is, of course, within his rights to have a political opinion and preference.

But he should be aware of the fact that, in South Africa’s highly charged political climate, as a church leader who openly expresses a political opinion he runs the risk of dividing his own church. Maybe that’s a risk he is prepared to take.

Yes, I know he has recused himself from active duty in his church but, in the minds of many, he remains a father figure of that church. An impression might be created that the Methodist Church is a COPE church.

This week’s decision by the Rhema Bible church to invite ANC president Jacob Zuma to address its flock left a bitter taste in my mouth.

There’s nothing wrong in inviting Zuma to a church service. But to allow him to use the pulpit as a campaigning platform makes a statement against the independence of the church in question. Calculating man that he is, Zuma tried not to pronounce overtly on political questions. But his appearance was an advertisement in itself — what the advertising and marketing people call “top of mind”.

Rhema was not his last stop. Later in the week he was hosted by a group of religious leaders, who unequivocally voiced their support for the ANC.

Zuma took advantage of the occasion to declare: “It (the expression of support) is an unequivocal biblical declaration that if God is for us, who can be against us?” That sounds just like the National Party at prayer!

Religious leaders who openly consort with politicians are making cannon fodder of their flocks, offering them to the slaughterhouse of politics.

Individual members of churches must make their own informed political choices and shouldn’t be confronted with these choices in God’s holy house.

From time immemorial, the church and state have coexisted as centres of power — and have tolerated each other. They have also acted as a moral sounding board for each other, which is a workable arrangement.

Why, then, descend to the barbarity of reducing God’s holy house to an auction block, where souls are sold to the politician with the sweetest tongue?