Speaking to the press against the backdrop of Pope Leo’s visit to the African continent recently, the Cardinal of the Catholic Church, Rabat, Morocco, Cristóbal López Romero, made an observation. He says the small number of members in North Africa is never a bad thing; if they do what their faith requires of them, then small is good. I nodded in agreement. The cardinal compares the situation in North Africa to the large numbers of religionists throughout Europe that, according to him, live in a state of “calamity, because there is a decline in those who adhere” to the faith. Calamity. Decline. The cardinal spoke about a part of the world he knows well. Here, I state that the situation is not different in my part of the world, where so many people identify themselves as religionists but do not do what religion dictates. Even as things stand, the consequences are no less profound than what the cardinal says of Europe. For it is a profession of religion we see, utterances and actions mostly don’t match what is professed.
While the popular perception is that religions are under attack, I think religionists attack their own religions more than any outsiders do. If you have an organisation with rules and you don’t adhere to its rules, you damage it from the inside. That’s greater damage than what any outsiders can ever do. There’s something called hypocrisy – what one loudly proclaims isn’t what one does; I think religion is a victim of this. At this rate, I imagine that one day religionists may wake up and they’ll be amazed at the wreck they themselves have made of their religions. I’ve commented on this situation several times on this page, and the cardinal’s comment reminds me of it. One would continue to point to it for as long as many don’t do religion, yet they front for religion and fight for religion in ways that their religions don’t recommend. Such people damage rather than build. Outsiders see the actions of such religionists, hear their utterances, and snigger. They snigger because they don’t see any difference between religionists and non-religionists.
What one hears from religionists makes one feel safer with non-religionists. This way, religion will hollow out itself, as a worm inside a fruit eats it from the inside and hollows it. As the Yoruba people of southwest Nigeria say, the worm that eats a vegetable is right inside the vegetable. Religion should look no further for reasons for the decline it suffers. Religionists and some of those who lead them are contributors. A few manifestations give away how religion everywhere has become what it is. Those involved don’t even realise it, for they don’t realise something is off-key in what they say or do. Take, for instance, a preacher who publicly challenged another person to a popularity contest. He says the fellow should contest against him to see whose father’s name is more popular.
I imagine religionists who have that rare understanding of their faith like to show off how many people they’ve drawn into their religion. This one doesn’t boast about what he has achieved regarding the “go ye” mission his religion gives him. It’s his own popularity with the crowd he wants to assert, as though being popular means being right. It’s one way those who lead in religion pass the wrong mindset to those who look up to them. Therefore, when one sees some religionists pursue what is not part of their religion, one gets to know where they’re coming from. Those who should guide them often don’t have any better stuff to offer. Nothing deeper or different. Just this surface-level manifestation of religion, pursuit of personal aggrandizement, laden with the typical everyday manifestation found even among non-religionists. And they’re difficult to correct. They’re so cocky that they’ll defend in their large numbers the absence of any line between them and non-religionists. Raise the point about what isn’t sounding like religion, which they utter and do, and they’ll give you a million reasons why they can’t be told not to undertake what doesn’t resemble religious injunction, which they engage in.
They sometimes sound like, we can do it if the other side causes us to do it. This comes across like there’re no restraints anymore – the kind of restraints which religionists traditionally say make them different. Imagine some religionists saying their objective for forming a group is to arrest and prosecute whoever says what they don’t like. And they did engage the police to arrest people (“Pastor Adeboye and Pharisee Saul’s band”, The PUNCH, Feb. 21, 2025). The “go ye” that their religion instructs is there they don’t do. It’s arresting people for expressing their views that they pursue. Pharisee Saul’s band. They got it all wrong, got through the cracks, in the place where they should have been taught. This group, at one point or another, must have come to the attention of those in a position to guide them. But no leader guided them before they publicly embarrassed their religion. I suspect that such leaders themselves believed the group had enough excuses to justify its sworn objective, which their religion didn’t instruct. Making excuses for a course of action that religion doesn’t instruct adherents is undermining religion. It hollows it out.
There are as well those who, in their everyday activities, don’t adhere to what their religion stipulates. This is already killing religion in my part of the world. As it is in Europe, so it is here. One outcome for religion is that millions of people won’t give it any serious attention anymore. It has happened in Latin America where, in most neighbourhoods, crime and religion thrive in equal proportion.
The greater challenge is that those who should guide don’t really guide. They do not, probably because they don’t realise the existential threats that groups such as Pharisee Saul’s band and other non-conforming religionists constitute to religion. Many who should guide are equally filled with the basics that make these fellows do what they do. For instance, everyone hates across tribal lines, and no amount of religion they proclaim rids them of this poison. Hate for a tribe is drilled into them; they grow up with it, act and make comments based on it. It doesn’t matter the high dose of religion in them. They hate Fulani. They hate Igbo. They hate Yoruba. They say so openly.
Nonetheless, when religious issues arrive in the national space, the same fellows are the loudest to defend religion. It’s a phenomenon I find fascinating, and these people provide some of us reasons to laugh at such contradiction and shallowness on display. They’re the defenders of religion, but the minimal injunction of religion not to hate fellow humans, they don’t adhere to. When religionists hate across tribe, can they be interested in the “go ye” instruction of the originator of their faith? Note that these fellows always have an excuse as to why they hate whoever they hate. Check online. Religionists in their millions demonise and utter hate against an entire tribe for the actions of a few elements. They all feel they’re justified to hate. Religionists? Do their religion’s holy books give grounds for which they can hate? When they’re done online, they show up in places of worship where most preachers don’t condemn the hate that these religionists justify. So they continue. This is another way religion is destroyed from within, losing its power of appeal in most societies. In Europe, especially, science has contributed significantly to the decline. Science began by arguing against anything that cannot be seen and repetitively tested. If you can’t see it, rationalise it, as well as logically state it, don’t believe it. Aspects of science have pointedly rubbished morality as humans know it. Generations down the line, true religionists are gone in Europe, where this particular religion was first promoted and spread across the world.
Often, the damage done from within religion is not helped because many in position to speak against some of the lapses offer justifications instead, such as asserting that those who do what is contrary to religion are new, growing, and know no better. But they don’t speak against such lapses openly to warn that it’s not the way to go. If those leading religionists don’t speak up, how would those growing in religion know what is right and bear it in mind? In the process, the problem festers. More fellows are recruited and roped into ignoble folds by those considered to be growing. They all grow to become non-adhering religionists that we see around even as excuses continue to be made for them. I think most of the challenges religion faces today can only be resolved by religion. Outsiders can’t, because religion is the cause of most of the problems that have led to its decline in many parts of the world.
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