President Donald Trump’s electoral triumph has exposed and concretised the unremorseful political partisanship of Nigerian evangelicals. In the 2023 Nigerian presidential election, they ignored logic and defied their conscience and went ahead to openly campaign for someone they believed would best represent their sectarian interest, not the interest of the country. They were unbothered by their insularity. At the inauguration ceremonies of US president Trump, particularly the non-governmental and non-political inaugural prayer breakfast, some Nigerian evangelicals ministered, an indication that they rooted for the Republican Party candidate, and exulted his victory. Their Nigerian candidate, Peter Obi, lost badly in the 2023 poll, only for them to discover that the ogre they thought the All Progressives Candidate (APC) to be was unreal. What if in the coming months and years they discover Mr Trump to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Over the millennia, the church has always fared very badly when they foray into politics. Over the centuries they have transmogrified from personifying peace to embodying the most appalling forms of venality, greed, torture, bloodshed and mayhem, and from revivalist dependence on the Spirit to supine embrace of and dependence on the flesh. Their predilections served them badly in Nigeria; they are unlikely, together with their American counterparts, to serve them well in the United States. Before the elections, the devious Mr Trump postured as the champion of the evangelicals, not even the champion of Christianity – for the two are different – but at his inauguration he declined to swear on the bible, though his longsuffering wife dutifully placed them at his reach. The truth is that Mr Trump is irreligious, and couldn’t care less what the rubric of the Christian faith looks or sounds like. He sees Christianity as a tool to be harnessed for political goals, in the service of his deeply divisive, malicious and malevolent career.
Nigerian evangelicals have learnt nothing from the 2023 Nigerian elections. Rather than view society and politics with the circumspect eyes of the Spirit of God, they continue to blunder into partisanship, anchoring it on poor scriptural interpretations. By attending the so-called prayer breakfast last week, they lent credence to Mr Trump’s politics, ideas and lifestyle. They naively see him as a modern-day Cyrus the Great (who founded the Achaemenid Empire in 550 BC and ruled until his death in 530 BC) who was used by God to execute an agenda (Isaiah 44 – 45). But they forget that God neither needs their help nor has he told them he would use Mr Trump’s hateful and spiteful agenda against the ‘enemies’ of America. By the way, Cyrus was a far better and more competent leader than Mr Trump. Read his history. The Episcopalian bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, who coaxed and admonished Mr Trump on the principles and practice of love in the face of immigrant crisis and sexual deviancy, among other pressing challenges to the American society, received the full and remorseless length of his tongue. The evangelicals who hail him think that political and legislative solutions would solve the crisis of sexual permissiveness plaguing America; in other words, what the church began in the Spirit could, because of spiritual laziness, be accomplished in the flesh.
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It is true that previous US administrations had given free rein to all sorts of decadence, and there was indeed danger of American society either imploding or descending into outright bestiality. But there is nothing in the history of the early church, which laid the foundations of Christianity, to indicate that the church excels in political pushback. Traditionally, and notwithstanding technological advancements and information overload, the church had always needed revival and spiritual rebirth to push its Kingdom of God agenda. But in America, which Nigerian evangelicals ape, they believe in electing a political champion in whose unworthy and tremulous hands they repose the hope of societal reformation and change. By lying in bed with characters like Mr Trump, the church signals the repudiation of the scriptures in favour of the power of flesh and horses. Mr Trump will be their ruin. There are millions of sexual deviants scurrying around in America, and millions more of illegal immigrants. The methods advocated by the church’s champion in dealing with these societal challenges will test the fundamentals of the Christian faith to their elastic limit, especially when the shrill cries of children and the dispossessed rend the heavens.
The church in Nigeria has fared badly and embarrassingly in recent years in their exegesis of tithes and prosperity, two topics that have been misinterpreted and exploited; now they seem adamant in toeing the controversial line of their American evangelical brethren. Yet, they were sired mostly by British and European churches, but since those forebears acquired football and went overboard in their secularism, Nigerian evangelicals have quickly adopted American evangelicals as their source and champions. There is nothing wrong with being mentored; but it is dangerous when the Scripture which should be the real and ultimate mentor is replaced by human and charismatic mentors. A terrible affliction is ravaging the body of Christ; Mr Trump will apotheosise that perversion in ways that would be difficult to remedy. While Americans brace for the Trump phenomenon, Nigerians, particularly the evangelicals, who see him as a godsend against queers and all other deviants must also brace for a terrible backlash. The Nigerian evangelicals exposed themselves to ridicule over tithes and prosperity; it is alarming that they appear ignorant of what they may be exposing themselves to in their embrace of the irreverent Mr Trump, a small and modern parallel of the abomination that maketh desolate…