The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (9 page)

“When you have this attack
on Christians in Yelwa, and there are no arrests, Christians become
dhimmi
, the status within Islam that allows Christians and Jews to be seen as second-class citizens. You are subject to the Muslims. You have no rights.”

When I asked if the men wearing name tags that read, “Christian Association of Nigeria,” had been sent to Yelwa before the massacre of Muslims, the archbishop grinned. “No comment,”
he said. “No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naïve to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet.” He went on: “I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: let
no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence.”

Akinola was more interested in talking about the West than about Nigeria. “People are thinking that Islam is an issue in Africa and Asia, but you in the West are sitting on explosives,” he said. “What Islam failed to accomplish by the sword in the eighth century, it’s trying to do by immigration so that Muslims become citizens and demand their
rights. A Muslim man has four wives; the wives have four or five children each. This is how they turned Christians into a minority in North Africa,” he asserted.

The archbishop believed that he and his fellow Christians living at the periphery of Muslim North Africa knew the future that awaited the West. “The West has thrown God out, and Islam is filling that vacuum for you, and now your Christian
heritage is being destroyed. You people are so afraid of being accused of being Islamophobic. Consequently everyone recedes and says nothing. Over the years, Christians have been so naïve—avoiding politics, economics, and the military because they’re dirty business. The missionaries taught that. Dress in tatters. Wear your bedroom slippers. Be poor. But Christians are beginning to wake up to
the fact that money isn’t evil, the love of money is, and it isn’t wrong to have some of it. Neither is politics.”

Standing in his pajamas at the foot of the living room stairs, the seven-year-old boy struggled to remember his father’s cell phone number. When he tipped his head up to me politely, I noticed that his mouth was scarred with white lines that looked
like someone had sewn stitches through his lips. I was looking for his father, the Middle Belt’s Anglican archbishop. Benjamin Kwashi came up repeatedly as both a victim of religious violence and, like his boss, Peter Akinola, as an outspoken critic of the liberal West. Apparently Kwashi had forgotten our appointment on this Saturday morning in July 2006. When I arrived at the locked gate, two
ferocious dogs speckled with mange bared their yellow teeth and barked. I yelled for someone to call off the dogs, but there was no answer, so I darted past them, sprinted down the driveway, and pushed open the front door. It seemed at first that no one was home, until I heard a pair of small feet thump down the stairs.

The sound reminded me of my own feet on the back steps of a Philadelphia
rectory twenty years earlier, in the days before people locked their doors in the suburbs. On Saturday mornings, with my parents out somewhere on church business, people would wander into the rectory looking for help. I was left, like this boy, to solve grown-up crises. I stood there, sorry I’d come, until the boy eventually remembered his father’s number, his scarred mouth twisted into a lopsided
smile.

“As a result of persecution, we have become more evangelistic,” Archbishop Kwashi said. I found him at the church office, in shorts and a T-shirt, catching up on e-mail. “If you die in Christ, you go to heaven.” On the bookshelf behind him:
The Purpose-Driven Life
and
Body by God: The Owner’s Manual for Maximized Living
, a diet book created by missionary chiropractors planting churches
around the world. Also
Modern Saints and Martyrs
, in which Baroness Caroline Cox, a seventy-three-year-old
conservative British parliamentarian, writes about Kwashi. (Cox started Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust, or HART, which works on behalf of persecuted Christians worldwide. A baroness since the early eighties, when she was appointed to the House of Lords, Cox is a compelling and controversial
figure who melds a hard-line Christian worldview with the language of human rights. She has spoken at Laura and George W. Bush’s church in Midland, Texas, and has been criticized for perpetuating a misunderstanding of Sudan’s war as a crusade against Christians. She has bought the freedom of an alleged 2,281 Sudanese slaves since the 1990s.)
¹
All of these books on the archbishop’s shelf were practical
manuals for living according to a twenty-first-century life: from weight loss to career advancement to the necessary role of martyr.

About five months earlier, on February 13, 2006, while Bishop Kwashi was away in London, a group of Muslim men broke into his house, knocked his nineteen-year-old son unconscious, and blinded his wife. “They also broke my seven-year-old’s mouth,” he said, explaining
the scars I had seen on the boy. “That’s what we face every day. I’ve been running from Muslim persecution since I was a teenager.”

This was why the archbishop kept attack dogs at his house. His son’s experience and mine were nothing alike at all. To Kwashi, the violence against his family was evidence that Christians needed defending. His house and church in the Muslim north were also torched
during the eighties—a direct result, he believed, of Christianity’s growth among Muslims. “In Nigeria both sides are growing, and that growth engenders competition,” he said. On one hand, it was a religious and political zero-sum game: gains for one side implied losses for the other. But for many, devoting one’s life to God had little to do with self-interest. For men like Kwashi, believing even
required a willingness to die. Behind him, a text screensaver slid across his computer’s idling monitor: “For whoever desires to save his life shall lose it . . .” It was Matthew 16:25, a verse used as a call for contemporary martyrdom.

“For Christians, God has moved his work to Africa,” he said.

Kwashi understood that Christians who had not felt Islam’s pressure along this particular fault
line might feel differently; he understood how his anger played into his conservative worldview, but that didn’t change his opinion about what he saw as a global conflict playing out locally here in Nigeria.

“I have lost so many friends, and that makes me hang on to and sharpen
my faith and believe even more strongly in my Bible and that it is true because I am being persecuted for it,” he said.
Scripture provided Kwashi a defense against Islam, as it had since missionaries arrived among the non-Muslim hill tribes two hundred years earlier. The Bible, along with guides to health and hygiene, also served as a practical guide to a new way of life—a syllabus. One popular slogan was “Our Faith and Our Farm.” “Any shift away from the Bible is to strip me naked of my way to develop,” Kwashi
said. “I don’t have the luxury of relativism that the West does.”

Here was the split between the Global South and the West. Beginning in the sixties, Western mainline Protestants moved away from a strict interpretation of scripture. And as many Christians in Asia and Africa told it, over the past several decades the Westerners had left the job of spreading the Gospel to them. This shift, according
to the bishop, is where America, in particular, went wrong.

“All the battles of the West are fought in Africa, from communism on,” Kwashi said. Now, in the aftermath of the cold war, the proxy war between Islam and the West is playing itself out again in Africa. “The Islamic world wants to counter the Christian West. They don’t understand that Christianity isn’t the West. The Church is just a
scapegoat for the West, and nobody wants to come to its help.” What he saw as a chasm between frontline states such as Nigeria and the West was widening. African Christianity and most liberal Western traditions were at a stalemate over not just sexuality; gay bishops simply topped the growing catalog of moral and scriptural divergences between more progressive Western Christians and believers along
the tenth parallel. “We are facing the threats of both America and Islam,” he said.

Democracy, as Nigerians told me repeatedly, is one numbers game; religion is another. Growing a church or a mosque can be a competitive business. To be viable in the twenty-first century, each has to prove that it can offer members something in response to their devotion—a phenomenon
that is neither new nor limited to Nigeria. Yet Nigeria’s religious marketplace is unique in that it’s openly aggressive.

Church is no staid ritual in Nigeria; it is a carnival. One Friday night, I went to the Redeemed Christian Church of Christ at an all-night church ground with three hundred thousand other people. The figure is larger than the number of Quakers in America—the equivalent of
an entire American denomination worshipping at the edge of Lagos. With no traffic, the church ground is an hour’s drive from Lagos. The choir was a phalanx of thousands of young people sitting under a tent, and I wandered among them, swallowed by the rush of their voices. Most attendees would spend the night dozing in their chairs or buying peanuts and soda and tapes and T-shirts and a host of other
amusements. The service started at eight. Around midnight, I left to face hours of traffic and the sizable risk of a carjacking by the bandits who freely roamed the highways, picking off tired churchgoers.

These huge services began during the oil boom of the 1970s, which brought a mass migration of people into cities looking for work. The boom’s collapse also spurred the growth of the Pentecostal
“gospel of prosperity,” with its emphasis on good health and getting rich—or surviving a downturn—and of the African Initiated Churches, or AICs, which began about one hundred years ago, when several charismatic African prophets successfully converted tens of millions of people to Christianity. Today, AIC members account for one quarter of Africa’s almost five hundred million Christians.

One
bustling Pentecostal hub, Canaanland, the 565-acre headquarters of the Living Faith Church, has three banks, a bakery, and its own university, Covenant, the sister school of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Canaanland is located about an hour and a half north of the city of Lagos, which, with an estimated population of twelve million, is projected to become the world’s twelfth-largest city
by 2020. With another three hundred thousand people worshipping at a single service at the Canaanland headquarters alone and three hundred branches across the country, Living Faith is one of Nigeria’s megachurches, and the dapper bishop David Oyedepo is its prophet. The bishop, whose shaved pate glistens above deep-set eyes and dazzling teeth, never wanted to be a pastor: his interest was in escaping
poverty, he told me. “When God made me a pastor, I wept. I hated poverty in the Church. How can the children of God live as rats?”

Bishop Oyedepo built Canaanland to preach the gospel of prosperity. As he said, “If God is truly a father, there is no father that wants his children to be beggars. He wants them to prosper.” In the parking lot at Canaanland, beyond the massive complex of refreshingly
clean toilets, flapping banners promise: “WHATSOEVER YOU ASK IN MY NAME, HE SHALL GIVE YOU” and “BY HIS STRIPES HE GIVES US BLESSINGS.”

When it comes to gaining followers, Archbishop Akinola’s Anglican Church is more threatened by the rise of Pentecostalism than by Islam. (This is one of the growing fissures between older and newer Christian groups that reveal deepening divides within Christianity.)
Akinola finds its teachings suspect, since they are engendered by a focus on spirits and by the promise of worldly goods. Christianity means being willing to suffer and die for your beliefs, he argues. “When you preach prosperity and not suffering, any Christianity devoid of the cross is a pseudo-religion.”

But Bishop Oyedepo’s followers say that those who criticize don’t understand what’s happening
in Africa. “There’s a kind of revolution going on in Africa,” said Prince Famous Izedonmi, a professor at Covenant University. I met him in the college cafeteria, where he overheard me asking my tour guide questions. The professor was a Muslim prince who converted to Christianity as a child to cure himself of migraine headaches. He was also the head of the university’s Accounting and Taxation
Department and director of its Center for Entrepreneurial Development Studies. “America
tolerates God. Africa celebrates God. We’re called ‘the continent of darkness,’ but that’s when you appreciate the light. Jesus is the light.”

When I asked how this came back to money, he clucked at me. “God isn’t against wealth. Revelations talks about streets paved with gold. Look at how Jesus dressed.”
Since the soldiers cast lots for Christ’s clothes, they were clearly expensive. In Canaanland, clothes matter: the pastors are flashily dressed and drive fast cars as a sign of God’s favor. They draw their salaries from sizable weekly contributions. On Sundays at some Nigerian Pentecostal churches, armored bank trucks reportedly idle in church parking lots, and believers hand over cash, cell phones,
and cars during the service—all in the belief that if they give to God, God will make them rich.

To see Pentecostalism as simply a get-rich-quick scheme is to miss its real relevance for Nigeria—and America. In many ways, Pentecostalism has updated Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic for the twenty-first century. Pentecostals profess not to drink, gamble, or engage in extramarital sex, so all that
formerly illicit energy and cash can go into either business or education. Covenant has been voted the best private university in Nigeria by Nigeria’s National Universities Commission. Education is an essential element of the prosperity message; so is hard work. “Abraham was a workaholic,” Professor Famous Izedonmi said. “He worked sixteen or seventeen hours a day.”

During my first visit to Covenant
in the summer of 2006, school was not in session, so I poked around the empty labs until I ran into a lone student, Mchenson Ugwu, twenty-two, studying mechanical engineering in hopes of getting a job in the oil industry. Ugwu was born again in 2004. “Once in a while I backslide and have to rededicate my life to Christ,” he said. “That’s how it works: backslide, rededicate.” For him, salvation
had very little to do with the next world; it was all about this one. “Because he owns everything here on Earth, if you make God your father, beginning and end, he’ll keep you up. Our bishop is the perfect example. He tells us he hasn’t been poor in twenty-five years, and God takes him from one level to the next.”