The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
Romans 1:18-19
Many of our fellow African young people are turning away from the idea of religion. Many, we see, are denouncing and calling out the idea of “God” as a white man’s religious myth, brought down to us to exploit our land.
Many, especially in the intellectual circles, are becoming preachers of a new kind of ideology. In reality, what these men and women are against, is not the very existence of a deity per se, but the God of the Bible. They don’t want anything to do with the Jehovah of the Old Testament Israel, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
On two main grounds do these “decolonization advocates” abhor Christianity (since very few of them will be heard denouncing either Mohammedanism or the Eastern Religions). Religion, they say, was brought with a definite intention of Colonizing Africans. They see Christianity as a tool used by the 18th century Wazungus (White Europeans) to loot African natural resources, people and land.
But they also think of Christianity as the main reason African is poorer than other continents. They point to China, Japan, and other countries which are more developed, as evidences of a thriving economy “because of their irreligion!” For them, the origin of Christianity from racist, colonial, and power-hungry White people is enough for every thinking African to abandon the myth of Christianity.
I am not writing to prove how each of their arguments is foolish at best, and self-refuting at worst. Taking for granted the fact that any serious student of history knows that Christianity in Africa does not originate with White Colonialists (though assumed by many who should know better). Ignoring also the fact that Europeans brought a lot of changes which Africa could not have dreamed of in its previous ages. I want to address only one point: What is the origin of the new alternative “belief” embraced by these our fellow Africans?
You are so ignorant and duped by white people,” they say to us somehow with a pitiful tone! But what is the origin of the new ideologies most of these people are embracing? Where did this new “enlightenment (or wokeness to be more accurate)”?” come from?
Many of them would be surprised to know that the kind of challenges, arguments, and sentiments against Christianity they are currently swallowing and propagating do not originate with Africans at all. They would be surprised to know that they are preaching the religion of Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Sigmund Freud and others, none of whom was of a black race.
Many would be surprised to learn that in place of the religion brought by “white colonialists (as they call it)” of the 18th century, they have embraced heart and mind, another religion originating from, invented by, and propagated by white Europeans.
To my African irreligious friends, your religion is no less white than mine!
Our friends accuse us of embracing a fantastical religion, a blind faith myth. For the sake of argument, let me suppose they are right.
But what is their alternative? While ours is a blind faith and hope in an unproven God, who promise an unknown paradise…theirs is equally a blind faith in a hopeless religion. They have been sold a neo-marxist, neocolonial, neoliberal religion which tells you that you are an ape evolved from apes. The kind of religion that tells you that some humans are not really humans, since evolution is slow in some, and fast in others. The kind of religion which led Adolf Hitler in his understanding of Eugenics, to try to eliminate some less evolved species, for the thriving of the stronger ones (after all, life is nothing but the survival for the fittest, says another one of your prophets, Charles Darwin).
A religion which taught that since babies are consumers who do not produce, they should be seen as parasites, therefore the lesser babies the better. This, to their shame, is the idea behind the so called Planned Parenthood (abortion clinics).
You are being sold a religion which, after being embraced by foolish and unsuspecting Westerns, is turning their millennium old civilization on its head. Today, this religion teaches that you can never be certain whether you are a man or a woman. One of this religion’s core doctrine is that sexual orientation is a matter of individual private choice, so that man sleeping with man and woman sleeping with woman is as right as choosing to either eat cake or bread.
This new religion is a religion of confusion, of misery, of uncertainty, but worst of all, of hopelessness. A religion that tells you that you are nothing other than a bunch of molecules joined together by random chance, spinning around in a randomly originated universe, which is heading purposelessly to its own extinction. And that you are supposed to be happy that you discovered that “great purpose for your living!” In this religion, your thoughts, your emotions, your fears, your joys, your hopes and all, are nothing but chemical reactions and actions in your “merely material and soulless body.” What a wretched religion this is!
This is a religion of fear mongering. It is a religion that tells you that unless some big experts sit in Geneva to decide on the salvation of the globe, our human activities are going to have the earth destroyed within a foreseeable future by climate change. It is a religion which tells us that in every society, you are either a victim or an oppressor, and your salvation hangs on either “a mass revolution of the oppressed” or the “continual, lifelong penitence of the oppressor!”
We are being taught by this new religion, that all of us are foolish, and only some enlightened “elected officials in the state” know what is best for all of us. We are being taught to worship the creatures rather than the Creator. O, that God may spare us, because the end of this is will be “God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient” (Rom. 1:28).
The passage above says that all men know through creation that there is a God, but sin in us makes us suppress that truth. We are hiding behind the history of colonization, behind a fake and biased science, and behind fake news on the mainstream media to abandon the only hope for humanity; which is the salvation brought to us by our Only and Sovereign Creator through his Son Jesus Christ. Is this not engaging in a lost and hopeless cause? I hope we wake up to see it!
Now, I plead with you fellow young Africans, to run away from this false religion of atheism. You cannot fight against your Creator and expect any success at the end. You will, whether you like it or not, have to stand before the Judge of the universe whom you cursed, ridiculed, blasphemed and rejected all your life. What a dread will it be to finally find out that the Christ whom you mocked was your only hope for salvation? Will you say on that day that ignorance caused your unbelief?
Please turn while it is still day, turn while there is still hope. Turn to Christ in repentance and faith, and he is “rich in mercy and abounding in grace!” He will forgive all your sin, all your pride, all your blasphemies since He came to seek and save that which was lost! What a loss will it be on the day of judgement to finally find out that salvation was all of grace, nothing but free mercy but your pride and self-deception cast you beyond its reach? Please repent, brother and sister, for “all whom come to me I will by no means cast out” says the Lord Jesus (John 6:37).
Gratia vobis!
By Emmanuel MASENGESHO
Kigali, on November 27, 2023