Church and state: When religion turns into a worldly tool

The emerging falling out between segments of the Church in the Mt Kenya region and the Kenya Kwanza regime casts the priestly class in the delicate crosshairs of a fraternity that has steadily degenerated into an astute political tool driven by powerful worldly appetites. 

It is the tale of an entity that has steadily drifted from the traditional Christian Gospel and orthodoxy, to place itself at the service of profane earthly political and commercial needs on the one hand. On the flip side are the selfish goals of a money-hungry shepherding fraternity. Accordingly, the modern African clergyman passes for a profane worldly individual, caked in a cloak of spurious piety. His external trademarks alternate from the overflowing cassock to the immaculate European designer suit, on to sundry bespoke attire. 

Under the watch of this class, the traditional Christian Gospel of Salvation has given way to the primordial Gospel of Plutus, the god of money. Accordingly, the Church in Africa, and certainly in Kenya, gravitates towards an auction market for the political class, and sundry hunters of fortune. The political class sees in the latter-day prelate an easy soothsayer and owner of an obedient captive crowd. This crowd can be sold to the right bidder at election time. The Church has hence strayed far from traditional orthodoxy to the extent that Christ himself would probably not recognize it, were he to come back tomorrow. The shepherds and their flock could nail him on the cross this Friday if he arrived today. 

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Was this always going to be the fate of Christianity in Kenya, and Africa? What is the looming fallout in the Mt Kenya region telling us? In the beginning, there were the Christian missionaries from Europe. Then came the colonial Government. Historians tell us that the missions paved the way for the colony. The missionaries came with their religion, schools and hospitals. The government with its tools of colonial administration. The two became one and ruled Africa. While Africans did not love the colonists, they loved the new religion. 

When they asked European colonial governments to leave, they retained their religion. Some of them modified aspects of the new faith and its forms of worship, to be in alignment with otherwise aspects of their cultures that Christianity outlawed. These were mostly around some of their bodily appetites that Christianity forbade. To bridge between these and Christianity, some opened independent African Christian churches. Some of the things they brought in included ecstasy in worship and polygamy in the family. Also accommodated was a personal accumulation of wealth, including land acquisition by shepherds. In orthodox Christianity, Shepherds were Levites, who were excluded from worldly wealth, and especially love for money and land (Joshua 13:14 and 33: 18:7).

Yet, it is true that Christianity arrived in Africa in the 19th Century as a political tool. It was bound to remain one, even after colonialism. It is revealing that while Christianity arrived in Africa in the 1st Century AD (soon after the crucifixion and resurrection), as rendered in the story of St Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8: 26–40), it did not spread, until when Europe saw the need to use it as a political and commercial tool on the continent. 

Marriage of convenience

In this context, President William Ruto’s congress with the Church is best seen. Since the coming of independence in Kenya, the Church and the State have bonded whenever it has been mutually convenient to do so, only to pull apart when it is not. The two operate in what could be described as “an abusive marriage of convenience.” Even where Europe has largely turned its back to the religion she brought to Africa, Africa cringingly clutches on the faith. It is unlikely that the reasons are genuinely religious. The Gospel in Africa today presents a materialistic shepherd in search for earthly rewards and glory. On account of this, the calculating politician has found the Church to be a very astute launching pad for his selfish campaigns. It certainly was, in Kenya’s 2022 presidential race.

The consummate politician arrived with bags of money. The priestly class received it with trembling hands. The man of State would be ushered to the front pews, whence he would passively follow the proceedings. But the proceedings would usually be disrupted, to give the politician a quick chance “to greet” the congregation, a euphemism for engaging in a political tirade against his rivals; and for leaving behind a rich sheaf of banknotes. The clergy would pray for him, as he knelt at the dais. He would then be bid farewell with a rich handshake, usually the left hand supporting the right hand, in demonstration of respect.  

Today, in the wake of the Rigathi Gachagua impeachment, the body of Christ is torn between tribe and money. In Central Kenya, the thrust is to protect their own, as they have traditionally done. A number of the clergy in the region have openly called out President Ruto for taking them for a ride. Reverend Teresia Wairimu of Faith Evangelistic Ministry last Sunday used her altar to regret having supported Ruto and Kenya Kwanza. She described the Ruto government as “a government of fights” where it should be “a government of faith.” To grand applause from her flock, she said that she would need a lot of convincing to support a Ruto second term. Ahead of her, Bishop Margaret Wanjiru of Jesus is Alive Ministries also disowned the government that she campaigned for in 2022. 

Elsewhere in Kiambu, several evangelical clergymen were captured on TV, a few days ago, wondering why the Ruto Government was sending spies to their services. They complained of being questioned and harassed by State agents. The State wants to know who is coming to their sanctuaries and what is being preached. It is a throwback to a gone age. Then, the KANU government clamped down on worship, especially in the Mt Kenya region. In a 1983 live religious broadcast on the Voice of Kenya (VoK) English Service radio station, the preacher made a thinly-insulated attack against the Moi government. He made an analogy between the President and a limping sheep. “The flock is starved of grass when the lead sheep limps,” he said, at a service that was also attended by the Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Charles Njonjo. 

The KANU stalwarts took this badly. Njonjo was swiftly labelled a traitor and forced out of government. Live broadcasts were banned on the VoK, except for presidential broadcasts and football commentaries. The Church came under very close watch, especially seeing that it was steadily becoming the new hotbed of Opposition politics, all other voices having been hit into submission. Any political formation outside KANU became effectively illegal, following the enactment of Section 2A of the Constitution in 1982, to make Kenya officially a one-party State. The University of Nairobi, another political hot spring in the day, was coming to terms with the meaning of silence. The sanctuary of exile for Kenyan academics and social thought leaders became normal. 

But the Church remained steadfast, and not without a history since independence. It will be recalled that in the years soon after independence, the Church left the Kenyan State alone, while the State also said nothing about the Church. In a sense, it was a compliant continuation of the colonial Church-State legacy, in which the Church, and especially the Anglican Church, had been a silent – and sometimes not-so-senten bedfellow with the State. The amity between the two was such that the residence of the head of the Anglican Church was adjacent to the Government House (now State House), which was the colonial governor’s official residence. The colonial church’s support for the government manifested in such acts as the exclusion of children from families perceived to be Mau Mau, and other radical backgrounds, from missionary schools. 

Self-preservation instincts

Ngugi wa Thiong’o has preserved the memory of these happenings in such literary works as The River Between, Weep Not Child, A Grain of Wheat, and Petals of Blood. The African answer to this exclusion was to establish independent churches and schools in the Kikuyu countryside. While they had a challenge with getting both official recognition and teachers, they slogged on all the same. The sensibilities that were generated by this exclusion contributed to a strong sense of local nationalism and solidarity among the Kikuyu people and the faith-based fraternities in their midst. 

Indeed, one of the things that the rest of the Kenyan nation has often failed to understand is the swiftness with which the Kikuyu – together with their Embu, Meru, Tharaka, and Chuka cousins – among other kinspeople, solidify very quickly against perceived external threats. It is hugely as a response to self-preservation instincts that were built into these populations in colonial times, when the colonial ruler isolated, docketed and demonized them as “a people apart.” The government even developed a special travel pass for them, clearly labelled, “Kikuyu, Meru and Embu Pass.” Without this pass, complete with a valid written reason, they were not allowed to be anywhere near Nairobi, in the period after the oppressive Operation Anvil that rounded up all of them and ejected them from Nairobi, in April and May 1954. 

Naturally, the African Church fraternity in the Mt Kenya region resonated with the rest of the population. The solidarity was carried into the independence era. Inter-ethnic tensions that sprang in the faith-based fraternity as a factor of this alienation have persisted. These are mostly pronounced in the City of Nairobi, where sensitivity abides in the mainstream churches, in considerations of who to post where in the holy orders. In the succession processes, when Africans began taking over from Europeans, the trends indicate that leadership at the very top in these churches favoured individuals who seemed to be friendly to the State, or “non-confrontational” and mostly non-Kikuyu, except in such churches as the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, and the Methodist Church, which have little presence outside the Mt Kenya region. 

In the Anglican Church, the “safe hands” of Festus Olang’, a Luhya, were preferred to those of the fire-eating Henry Okullu, a Luo who kept the Jomo Kenyatta government on its toes with trenchant editorials in the Target and Lengo periodicals, then published under the National Council of Churches of Kenya (later the National Christian Council of Kenya – NCCK). Kenyatta was believed to have favoured Obadiah Kariuki, to Okullu.

Kariuki was a relation of Kenyatta’s by marriage, and an ardent supporter of the Kenyatta regime, especially in the turbulent times that followed the assassinations of Tom Mboya (1969) and JM Kariuki (1975). 

However, a remarkable moment was in 1976, shortly after the fiery Okullu and David Gitari had become bishops when the Church in Kenya began taking on a clearly radical character. Okullu, in the volume titled Church and Politics in East Africa, dismissed the then recurrent call by the political class for the Church to stay out of politics as an invitation to the Church to be pliant and supportive of the State, regardless of what sins the State committed against the people. It was a call the Church found difficult to take up. Instead, in 1977, when this writer was an “A” Level Divinity student in Kenya’s Cardinal Otunga High School (a missionary school), the NCCK declared itself “a forum for alternative political viewpoints.” And it did not disappoint.

Social justice

To the very end of his life, in 1999, Okullu remained a votary for social justice. In January 1991, he opened the year with a clear message to President Moi that the time had come to free political prisoners and detainees and to open multiparty democracy. Despite raucous verbal assault against him and others who joined in, KANU caved into popular demand. Section 2A was removed from the Constitution of Kenya in December 1991, and multiparty democracy was restored immediately after.

The Church in Kenya in the past was very distinct from the case today, on account of its stoic attitude to money and woolly materialism. It was not available for hire by the political class as is the case today, choosing instead to speak the truth to power, without fear or favour. When the story of the Church and liberation in Kenya is written, future generations will read of such stalwarts as Gitari, Okullu, Manases Kuria, Timothy Njoya, and Alex Muge (the latter who paid the ultimate price with his life). Others will be Maiyoo, Stephen Kewasis, Ndingi Mwana a’ Nzeki, Anthony Crowley, Father Kaiser, and Archbishop Anthony Muheria in our times. 

But history will also frown at the present priestly generation, and especially at the emerging family shrines, that seem to define themselves as ecstatic personality cults.

It will be remarked how they slobbered as they led their flock to a profane State and drooled at the thought of money from dubious origins.

The need for the Christian Church in Kenya to have a deep dialogue with its soul would seem to speak for itself, even as many in its midst begin to rue their previous support for President Ruto and Kenya Kwanza.

For, it’s a lost fraternity that does not seem to stand on any useful spiritual high ground from which it could lead anybody to Christian salvation and to God.