RELIGION AND NIGERIA.

Tourists to Nigeria’s popular cities -- Lagos, Abuja, and Port-Harcourt -- may query statistics that suggests Islam to be the peoples’ major faith. Arguably, there are twelve churches to every mosque in each local government area, in, say, Lagos.

Majority of these churches are privately owned organisations, e.g. Winners Chapel: formerly world’s largest church capacity, with fifty thousand seats, until recently upstaged by the Apostolic Church of Nigeria’s one hundred thousand seats church auditorium, also in Lagos.

Approximately 160 million people, individually affected by two or more of the following: Tribal racism; Post-trauma of a civil-war (Biafra); Societal under-development stemming from thirty-two-years of oppressive military rule; Poverty; and now Terrorism. Taking a social science approach, expected loss of human dignity and social cohesion in such society, especially having evolved through slavery and colonialism, prior, it’s understandable why the world’s largest church capacities are in Nigeria today. 

Oppressed beyond a fight back, the human mind seeks escape, creating its own happy realities, if only temporary, using “positive thoughts” or other mind-altering substances. The average Nigerian needs succour: an assurance of a bright future. And this is found in religion, which German social scientist, Karl Marx, equates to opium.

The bigger the mosque or church in Nigeria, the more the people fills it literally to brim; some content to be under canopies outside the auditorium, called overflow. Each devotee absorbs words of exhortation, repeats hypnotic chants, in hysteric atmosphere. It relieves, but for a while. So, returns as oft, even during the week, for more. And as found with drug addicts, each devotee believes their Imam’s or Pastor’s supply is the ‘best’. 

With this state of religiosity, it is again understandable how, despite living in harsh conditions, Nigerians were rated happiest in the world, according to a WorldValues Survey, between 1999 and 2001.

Religiosity isn’t peculiar to Nigeria, nor Africa. Notably, minority communities in North America are, too, recalling '1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott' organised by Martin Luther King (Jr.), a Baptist clergy, and Islamic version of same civil rights movement led by Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Luis Farrakhan. This, again, validates Marx’s theory. Today, segregation/racism is considered distant history in America, but fanatical religion remains. Despite tremendous scientific advancement, four in 10 Americans believes the earth is 6,000-years-old.

In Asia and the Middle-East, religion -- Buddhism; Hinduism; Christianity; Islam, to mention a few -- one can argue, immunes the people from reality of oppression by Emperors, Sheikhs, and now mono-political party systems that restrict the peoples’ freedoms. 

Recently, the world saw the people resist – Arab Spring – but a behaviour learnt over many centuries is hard for any society to abandon. Mid 2010, a Friday prayer leader in Iran persuasively preached that earthquakes are a result of women dressing “seductively”, rightly dubbed Boobquake by Jennifer McCreight.

Britain, officially having its English version of the Bible, early fourteenth century, has today, over 600-years later, put fanatical religion in the back seat. I remember attending Sunday Mass at a London church. And after mass, the Father led worshippers down a side staircase into a basement pub, to buy pints of lager and shots of whiskey. This was a very strange sight to me. Also, I could’ve sworn I was in a senior’s home, as average age of worshippers on that Sunday would’ve been 65, and attendance scanty.

If weighed against Marx’s theory, Britain doesn’t celebrate “Independence day,” indeed one-quarter of the earth annually celebrates their freedom from Britain, “the Empire where the sun never sets,” America, and Nigeria, inclusive. Religion can’t be the society's priority – they’re free, not oppressed to point of hoping a supernatural being will deliver onto them physical things. Having fair share of human existential problems, however, “suffering” in Britain today, doesn’t include, three hundred thousand dying annually from a curable illness; or fear that winged-people tour the dark skies at night; neither are persons living with disabilities left to crawl on uneven sandy roads begging for alms; or minority groups in society declared unfit to live.

This explains why an unemployed youth in Lagos will attend church daily. Soon as they get a job, rent a comfy-pad, own a car, maintain a steady bank account balance, they begin to backslide. Church or mosque is no more a ritual, they attend only when chanced.

This isn’t to suggest there are no grave needs that prompt people to seek help from the supernatural: child-bearing, terminal disease, bankruptcy, rape, fear of death, and other forms of trauma, even heartbreak. Since time immemorial, the human animal has sought 'divine' help when faced with difficulties. But, a physical approach: psychotherapy, and other tested scientific methods, now help people get through these difficulties with peace and dignity. 

Furthermore, law prohibits psychotherapists from exploiting their patient’s vulnerability. Shrinks are to guide patients to find answers to problems within themselves, like a guide-dog leads the blind.

But, in a country where psychotherapists, too, are in church, praying; and people who walk into mental health facilities are considered “mad,” one can be sure that an industry which rakes in billions of dollars annually, in America, is non-existent in Nigeria. 

Mind unsettling matters land at door of a spiritual leader, whom diagnoses them as spiritual attacks, and prescribes one medication only: Fasting, Prayer and Donation “gbogbo ni'se” (All-In-One-Medicine). Although testimonies abound of effectiveness of this approach, but observers are sceptical. The flock are collectively out-of-pocket with no significant proof of change in circumstance, while Senior Pastors fly in private jets, and Chief-Imams are chauffeured in a convoy of exotic cars.