Your righteousness does not fuel my own.

“The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the Ten Commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis.” - Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

Disclaimer: I use ‘Africa/African’ loosely to describe the cultural impact of religion on Black Africans. I am Nigerian, so my opinions stem from being raised in Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Happy reading! <3

There is no way to fully describe the nature of watching a person froth at the mouth in front of you during a church service. Ephemeral, maybe. Terrifying, most definitely. You are knocked back into multiple bodies by the force of their own, a supposed spiritual power possessing them as they scream and seize up, wailing. You might close your eyes because it is startling to watch, to hear, akin to the screaming you’ve heard in horror movies. You aren’t allowed to watch those, but this is a spiritual awakening. This, you must see.

The wailing becomes disembodied, and for the nights following, you dream of a mouth hinged open, drool tugging down on open lips, its jaw melting into negative space. Terror in the spiritual sense, having no control over the physical body.

My first time seeing this sort of thing was in the thick of COVID. I’m sure I’ve seen more at a younger age, but I repress those memories. This one stuck because it was the kind of church that spoke in fire, willing you to give in, and I’d worried every Sunday that I would have no control over what happened to me if I too seized up.

I imagine my body erupting in flames, consumed by its desire to die at the sight of Christ. Song lyrics proclaim that “we burn for you, Jesus”, but I have never once thought to sacrifice myself for an entity I have never seen.

Whenever I think about people succumbing to this force of divinity, I’m ambivalent to the fact that it is an urged form of worship. Intensity is a current necessity for our world, for us to create and love, but it takes a turn when spirits are involved. It’s all so very confusing and somehow an immovable truth that I can’t seem to pick a side. The concept of spirits has never been explained to me, though I don’t think I’d be willing to listen, considering how it’s often explained. When I was younger, the question of spirits and souls was divine and holy, but I dreaded the idea of seeing them. They were indistinguishable from ghosts and ghouls, creatures lurking. I never thought to question this because, like ghosts and ghouls, there was an air natural belief in one opposed to the other. You should know that ghouls and ghosts are bad, in the same way you should know spirits and souls are good. The questions had been answered already. My faith was preordained from birth.

Religion is not something I can dissect with full confidence because it requires too much nuance that I admit I’m not capable of. What I do know, however, is that many religious modes of thought, like the ghouls and souls, are often paired closely with fear. In one case, we have religious excellence and its lack of separation from Black excellence. Where one goes, the other seems to follow.

To disclaim, I don’t mean Black excellence in a prosaic sense. I think there are many excellent Black people, too many to count, in fact. But I’d like to discuss the thinking behind Black excellence, the way, as a concept, it has morphed into a means of controlling and manipulating our ability to discern ourselves from hive thinking in a majorly capitalistic society, much like the way religious figures believe your faith binds you to a singular way of thinking. First, I’ll start with the African Prodigy.

Perfection in the African sense is steeped in all things religion and colonialism, which, if you look closely enough, you’ll see that those two things are forever married. I’ll whittle it down for you, though. I imagine most African children have grown up in households where they share beds with a Western Dream, pruning the weeds of individual desire off their bodies when a father says,

“Tighten up! How will you uphold your household without a bloody job?”

Or when a mother says,

“Omolara! Will your husband find you like this? Focusing on a nonsensical career?”

One praises the endless hunger for work, and another degrades it. Either way, the goal is to be able to present an expectation long established and uphold it, no matter what the individual wants. This is where excellence, the tradition of it, shows its hand. Our society likes to juggle around the gendered expectations of a household. A woman takes care of her home, and a man provides for his family. If you have ever stepped into a devout Christian household, specifically a Black one, these roles play out like prophecy, with feet sinking into sand they believe is strong enough to hold up what is already crumbling, in a trance, guiding you through the image of a broken home with pulsing walls.

Excellence is what lives in those walls. A desire to be seen as, if not to actually be, excellent. A pipe finally snaps and drips its contents onto your head. Nobody else wants to acknowledge it. The dripping. Your eyes twitch because of course they do. You never know when the next drip is coming. How big it’ll be, or if you’ll ever escape it. This determination to ignore what doesn’t work leaves a strain, tension that can’t be relieved unless one day you decide you won’t live like that anymore. Perhaps you finally speak up, you call out the pipes, the cracks, the stains. You finally make everyone around you notice, and you say your goodbyes. Then the ridicule comes. “You can’t handle a little rain? What will you do when it pours? Fine! Go and stay gone!”

All this to say that noticing a flaw within both contexts of religion and Blackness— the way Blackness has been weaponised— is easy to do once the fog clears. The issue is that the trauma still follows.

African perceptions of God are not lost on me, and they never will be. The fear mongering, the acute obsession with guilt tripping, the drip-fed affection. I’ve said many times that when some people describe their relationships with Christianity, it often sounds like an abusive relationship.

Don’t get me wrong. People can be as devoted to Christ as they want to. As mother Broski has said once, “I admire the faithful.”

It is good to believe in something better. I do believe in something better. I don’t think I would be alive if I didn’t. My idea of spirits and souls has evolved, but I still question religion as intently as I used to, if not more so now, because I have separated my ability to think about it as both a man-made institution and a mode of worship. Even as I say this, a part of me wants to believe what I’ve been told. It might be easier. It’ll be less affronting. I recently finished Assembly by Natasha Brown, and I’ve been trying to make sense of it for the past few days. A lot of heavy concepts in a sleek, one hundred or so words, but the same idea of assimilating is explored through this excerpt:

Assimilate… Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack, and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate. - Assembly, Natasha Brown.

This comes as the protagonist is staying with her rich boyfriend’s family. They’re setting up for a party, and this protagonist, a nameless Black woman, surveys their wealth with a watchful, sterile eye, though in truth she’s the one being watched. The story follows her as she decides to finally do what she wants after climbing the corporate ladder of a bank despite the many obstacles, past and present. She looks back on the history of British Colonialism and the onus on Black people to be the ones who fit into British society. Black excellence is no longer aspirational. It is an expectation.

There is fear in questioning a pre-established belief, especially one built through centuries of systemic control. In the same way, I also believe that, as forgiving as religion claims to be, there is a fear that even when you are in it, you still can’t give enough. Not doing enough or believing enough. To question God’s plan is to be an unbeliever, and the language that’s used to paint you in this way is always so demeaning. I’ll expand on this later.

A mini derailment: I’m watching a lot of anti-MLM content these days because I find MLMs to be abhorrent cults. In a video I watched recently, a woman—driving in her car and filming from her phone in her lap, mind you—insinuated that Jesus recruited her into an MLM. She mentions how her life before the MLM was unworthy, she lost her faith, she kept asking ‘why God, why’, and she considered herself to be ‘playing the victim’ in her time of genuine need. This baffled me because she was a victim. Of homelessness, of a failed system, and of the people who convinced her that she wasn’t doing enough. Now, she’s in an MLM, and if you know how an MLM works, you know that she’ll make an income quicker gambling than she will at the bottom of this pyramid (disclaimer: PLEASE do not gamble omg).

This is how most MLMs operate. They target vulnerable individuals and warp their way of thinking with widely exposed cult tactics under the smokescreen of ‘mindset training.’ It’s vile, it’s exploitative, and it extends way past MLMs.

The other side of this is the obsession with hustle culture in MLMs. Much like hustle culture in any other context, you’re trained to work for barely any rewards and believe your life is changing with every Instagram reel you post. I have many thoughts on MLMs, but I digress.

As much as people have judged younger generations for their lack of direction, there aren’t many solutions that don’t require a total acquiescence to capitalism or a desire to excel by way of forgoing your humanity. A need for time freedom is, ironically, what people in MLMs paint as one of its benefits, but as soon as you’re in the MLM, you find your time being stretched thin, very unlike the soft urgency for a better life you were initially promised.

This, concerning religion, always makes me think of the way God is portrayed through predatory churches. You’re drawn in with the promise of safety, of kindness, of care. But once you’re in, the requirements become heavier, the requests become obligations, and suddenly you’re forced into giving much of yourself to the culture of religion rather than an actualised belief in God. You’ll find that this is often the case in Nigerian Pentecostalism; the culture of religion is the thing that’s worshipped instead of God, or rather, their image of God is the culture. And there is no questioning culture.

I’m sometimes self-conscious of my spirituality because it doesn’t look like the arduous devotion Christians give to God, because sometimes, my God looks different.

Sometimes, I imagine God as a child. Probably wise but carefree, the way most children are. I talked about this in another essay, about children being the purest form of human life, and I still believe that, which is why it makes sense to me that God would be in this form. I’m aware of how silly this might sound, but humour me. He’s eating a lollipop, sugary streaks of red, probably a berry flavour, staining his tongue and cheek. In this imagining, God is a human child, open to everyone who is trying to be a good person.

Now, despite humans never having seen God before, there are a lot of drastic opinions about his physical appearance. Blue-eyed Aryan Jesus on stained glass is an interpretation I can never fully erase from my head, perhaps as a metaphor for religious trauma, but I digress. Looking behind that image means realising that we can’t all have the same interpretations of God, but in African Christianity, and I speak specifically to the culture of Christianity rather than a true belief in Christ, there is still a sense that this trauma still lives and breathes.

Like a lot of historians will tell you, depictions of God brought by white colonisers were used quite explicitly to brainwash Black people into believing that their enslavers were human conduits of God. Now, I am not a historian, but the effects of this have been lasting and entirely damaging to the spirituality of Black individuals in and out of Africa. The same goes for Black excellence; whose excellence are we chasing? What does this excellence look like in a capitalistic society?

As part of their R29Unbothered series, a collection of pieces supporting and championing Black people in media, a 2022 Refinery29 article explored what this excellence looked like. “Being excellent meant ascribing to a certain set of rules — British ones, passed on to him through literal colonisation — and achieving tangible, braggable things like newspaper clippings he could send back home to his siblings, trophies we could put on a mantle, papers with A+s written in red, and professions he could say with pride: doctor, lawyer, engineer.”

Our meritocracy is ruled by Western Ideals, and for a lot of Black people living in this part of the world, we’ve never known any different. As for religion, the same applies, where the abusive ideations surrounding religious thought are passed from household to household, man to woman, woman to child. The freedom of thought in both contexts looks like Black sheeping yourself into a corner no one else wants to covet.

Previous methods of endlessly striving for approval have ruined the perception of excellence and merit for a lot of Black people, but your aliveness is excellent. Your dedication to the people you love is excellence. A patriarchal and religiously abusive household is nothing to be proud of because it hurts us all in the end. Who survives on one struggling back? One arm or one leg? Should we resort to eating each other until the blame subsides?

I think that in all the worst things capitalism has done, demonising a desire to walk at your own pace has been the worst for me. I have never known how to relax. My body is revolting against my watchful nature, and still, I’m pushing towards another thing. Another goal that fulfils me for a second before dispersing.

Nowadays, I am loud in my mediocrity. I’m trying to create with intention, even if that intention is to be a little silly. I believe the fact of relaxing is resistance. I’m sure you’ve heard that enough times now, but really, is it a crime not to strive for the best and most righteous option at all times? Despite the mentality of working twice as hard, I still desire a pace I can manage. I’m capable of creating something beautiful and unforgettable, but I am also trying to eat. I am trying to make a living. Balancing both is not impossible, but it also cannot demand so much of me when I am already trying to just get by.

It would be a lie to say that there isn’t one competitive bone in my body, but I will say that if it came down to it, I would lose for the sake of peace. As I type this, I’m sensing that it might just be an untapped fear of conflict, which also contradicts my desire to argue with everyone. I sometimes talk as though I know everything there is to know, and yet I’m terrified of true, discomforting contemplation. One of my fears when it comes to religion is that I cannot distinguish the voice of God and the voice of myself; an angry, disembodied mouth preying on my anxieties. Fundie christians would call me insane and God would call me— well, I don’t really know what he would say.

I am not built to persevere through a system as galvanising as religion. The fact of its permeation, seeping into the skin and through your soul like some sort of osmosis, does not sit well with me when it has been used so flippantly by dictators and rulers who adorn their white skin with white robes. It’s hard to see any goodness religion can bring when the amount of bad is lying beneath the rubble of cities and towns flattened in the name of God. I fear that kind of power, and yet in my culture as an African, I’m meant to revere it.

I’ve come across a lot of TikToks recently by Black people admitting to either leaving the church and their subsequent religion, or sitting somewhere in the middle, believing in a higher power without committing oneself to the culture of it.

I am also mediocre in this way, too. I don’t pray enough, I barely read my bible, and I don’t like churches. The latter is the worst of it. The wailing, the chanting, the spiritual disembodiment trapping me between pews. I keep my eyes shut all the way. I can’t look at anyone otherwise, I’d turn into dust. Then we leave, we do something else, occupy ourselves with the rest of eternity.

I’ve also had this thought about the balance of giving and taking in Christianity, especially when it comes to love. The bible says wives must submit to their husbands, and husbands must love their wives as God loved the church. Submission is tangible, is agreeable, is quantifiable. What measure of love can a human man give to his wife as God gave to the church? Unconditional love? Are human beings capable of that?

This isn’t a diatribe about how humans are naturally evil and we’re all doomed to hell, or about how submission is right (I understand what it’s trying to say, but the verbiage feels very gross), but I do wonder how it’s even remotely possible to conjure up those feelings.

One of the symptoms of scrupulosity has to do with this immeasurable love. It questions whether we as humans are even capable of such a supermassive feeling. I think we aren’t because the human condition is just that, a condition. But we can try. We can try and try again until we bleed out of our eyes, but will we ever love as God loved the church? Let’s say the answer is no. What then? Do we do what we can? Do we feel guilty for not being enough? Or do we create our own measures of love, good or bad?

Even now, I can’t quantify this because I’d get a headache trying to wrap my head around the concept. I am a jealous and mean person sometimes. I am irritable and conditional. I get annoyed at the silliest things. Sometimes I wonder if I can ever truly be loved when I am like this. Like a church, standing on one shaking plank of wood, whilst a man of God stares at me with contempt, wondering why his love is not enough.

With this in mind, I am also wondering why it is so hard to call myself a Christian. I’ve applied to several jobs in the past few months and found my finger hovering over the mouse of my laptop when I’m asked about my religion.

Just don’t answer. Or maybe do. You need this. No one’s looking anyway, you’re fine. But God can see anything, can’t he?

I have decided not to label it. Somewhere in between agnostic, spiritual, and Christian is where I reside. I believe in God, and it is difficult to begin to tell you why, but I can tell you that you don’t have to. The structural integrity of religion as a system does not and should not hold weight on your personal beliefs. Like most other things in this world, two truths can exist at the same time. My belief does not make yours, and your righteousness does not fuel my own.