Christians have been set ablaze and burnt alive in this country for no other reason than the simple fact that they are Christians. Christians have been shot in their places of worship and in their homes. Priests have been abducted from the sacred altar in the house of worship and murdered in cold blood by those living with the conceited assumption that they love God more than everyone else. Christian women and girls have been raped in their bedrooms and in the streets. Christians have had their places of commerce and businesses bombed and razed down to rubble. From available records, over 13,350 Christians were slaughtered in the eight-year regime of former President Muhammadu Buhari.

Those who manipulate and weaponize religious doctrine for nothing other than political gain know that what they are doing is sinful before God and man. Unfortunately, they are incapable of restraining or redeeming themselves. This is why they are called such names as fanatics, extremists, fundamentalists and even terrorists. They take pride in kidnapping and murdering Christians and bombing churches. Yet, this does not erase the fact that all these people and indeed all mankind were created in the image of God. In their parochial thinking, and their intolerance and hate, they end up demeaning their own humanity to the bestial level of lower creatures. They have lost all the redeeming qualities of the human species. The great work that the Creator did on the sixth day of creation had been lost on them. But good men in both the Moslem and Christian world would still be here on Mother Earth and there is nothing anybody can do about it until the Creator himself decides otherwise.

Some people in positions of authority resort to the use of innuendoes and subtle bigotry to undermine the Christian faith under the warped notion that their own religion is superior to that of others. If it were a Christian cleric or even a church-goer that made similar insinuations against their own faith, such bigots and their followers in that faith would immediately place a bounty on the heads of the Christians. Yet, they claim to be children of God. They should not claim to know God because contrary to their self-righteousness, God does not know them at all. As preposterous as it sounds, some of the atrocities perpetrated against Christians were often based on trumped-up charges of blasphemy against other faiths. Does this mean that Jesus Christ and his followers are cowards or that these other faiths have monopoly of violence? Of course not. The Christian doctrine of turning the other cheek is not about cowardice. Rather, it is a divine call to mankind to exercise restraint and show humility and compassion towards one another in a world ruled by Satan. The doctrine speaks to the imperatives of tolerance and mutual respect, not just amongst various religious sects but in all human endeavour. So, Christians should not be taken for granted on the basis of that doctrine. All mankind must live in peace and harmony or else everybody will perish even before the Creator decides to bring an end to the present perverse world order.

The persecution of Christians did not start today. But the end has always been catastrophic for the persecutors. As far back as 64 AD, Emperor Nero, one of Rome’s most notorious rulers, was alleged to have fastened the crime of the conflagration that razed down a greater part of Rome on Christians and ordered them executed by nailing them on the cross in the same manner as Christ himself was crucified. And how did Nero end up? He was reported to have killed his own mother, murdered two of his wives and later killed himself. That was in the past. Coming back to the present, the persecution of Christians has not stopped the Christians from living in peace with their neighbours. Far from it.

Many Southerners voted for former President Buhari, a Muslim. Were all the Southern voters Muslims? Of course not. They did not vote for him because he is a Muslim. They voted for him because they believed in his ability to move the country forward even if some of them are now regretting it. The religious colouration given to the last presidential election regarding the issue of Muslim-Muslim ticket is a clear indication of the contemptuous tendency of a part of the Nigerian society towards Christendom as a whole. Despite that, some Christian voters trooped out in their numbers to vote for a candidate and his running mate both of whom are Muslims. After that singular act of patriotism, the same Christians are now being maligned by some persons who ideally ought to show gratitude to God and to the Christian community for their selflessness and magnanimity even in the face of persecution. Shortly before elections, Christians would suddenly become important even to non-Christians, but as soon as election is over the beneficiaries of Christian magnanimity would start to cast aspersions on the same Christians that made them what they are. Ironically, there is no other place on earth where people gather almost on a daily basis to pray for their political leaders more than they do in the church, and that prayer includes those offered even for bad political leaders! For Christ’s sake, Christians deserve respect in this country.

A leader might emerge and project himself as though his name was written in the stars but at the end you discover he was not as divine as you thought. For example, most Germans especially those of Jewish extraction believed in Adolph Hitler when circumstances at the time threw him up as the political leader of the so-called National Socialist freedom movement of the German nation but he ended up slaughtering over 6 million Jews in his gas chambers during the infamous holocaust of the forties. Unknown to the world at the time, while Hitler publicly preached cultural preservation of the German blood, he secretly orchestrated the extermination of other races and cultures which he considered as pollutants and inferior to the German blood race. This was clearly a recipe for tyranny and oppression of which he eventually became an embodiment. In Hitler’s Secret Book translated by Salvator Attanasio, Hitler himself wrote: “Once a people installs the majority as the rulers of its life, that is to say, once it introduces present-day democracy in the Western conception, it will not only damage the importance of the concept of personality, but block the effectiveness of the personality value.” That is typical Hitler, the stone-cold autocratic Fuhrer!

In a society in which anti-democratic forces and the relics of Hitler’s incarnates are still very much alive, it is easy for the leadership, even with or without good intentions, to give assurances that Christians would be treated fairly and equitably in relation to their counterparts in other faiths. But the reality on ground often turns out to betray those assurances. In a nutshell, the point being made here is that it is not sufficient for Christians to simply accept assurances of fair treatment by the political leadership or by their counterparts in other faiths. Before taking up any position or leaning towards any political ideology within the framework of the country’s political matrix, each spirit should be put to test by the church to ascertain whether it is of good or of evil, not only in the interest of the Christian community alone but in the larger interest of the country as a whole. The era of taking Christians for granted or persecuting them on account of their faith and beliefs is over.

*Anthony-Spinks is of the Delta State Public Procurement Commission. He writes from Asaba.