Why a dangerous reliance on miracles matters for ethics and policy.
Can God swing an examination in favor of a supplicant, regardless of her level of preparedness? Can an unarmed individual emerge unscathed from assailants wielding AK-47 rifles, having somehow managed to deflect live bullets with nothing but her bare hands? What, in a word--and insofar as such a thing actually exists--are the limits of miraculous intervention?
Recently, as a series of credulity-defying testimonies by members of The Lord's Chosen Charismatic Revival Ministry, a Lagos-based Pentecostal church, have circulated across the Nigerian blogosphere, prompting an avalanche of withering memes, various commenters have weighed in on these questions. (A Chosen spokesperson, perhaps caught off guard by the cascade of ridicule, has tried to suggest that the actions described in the testimonies only happened in the testifiers' dreams.)
Nigerians' interest in miracles and, by implication, testimonies about them, is understandable. The country is inarguably the fountainhead of the contemporary Pentecostal movement in Africa, and, especially since the turn of the century, Pentecostal praxes and norms have helped redefine not only what it means to be a Christian, but, perhaps of greater moment, what it means to be a Muslim in Nigeria. The impact of the movement on politics and the struggle for power, richly documented in the relevant literature, has been profound no less.
In any event, as belief in the reality of miracles has become a cornerstone of the Pentecostal identity, so have testimonies claimed a greater share of Pentecostal worship, stoking and feeding an appetite for the stupendous that is tailor-made for the age of social media. At the same time, the nature of the arms race for attention and visibility in a cutthroat spiritual marketplace has been such that, not only have testimonies become more theatrical and performative, testifiers' claims have become wilder and fantastical.
This is the immediate social context in which the aforementioned testimonies by the Chosen congregants must be understood, and nothing is more instructive about the public debate that ensued in the wake of their circulation than the fact that what the majority of commenters questioned was whether these particular testimonies had gone too far, not the assumption that miracles are indeed real. In other words, the nub of the debate was about the limits, as opposed to the validity, of miracles, which makes perfect sense once you consider that, next to "grace," "favor," in its essential connotation as something that the "favored" has neither earned nor worked for, and perhaps does not even deserve, is among the commonest words in the Nigerian Pentecostal vocabulary. To put it starkly, most Nigerians may regard the idea that, according to the testifier "an old man appeared by my right hand side in white apparel" mildly melodramatic; however, they do not doubt that divine intervention can make an individual who has made no preparation whatsoever for an examination (and, by inference, anyone in a comparable life situation who has not paid their dues in terms of the appropriate investment of time and effort) pass in flying colors.
If faith in (and expectation of) miraculous intervention is one side of this "the last shall be the first, and the first last" spiritual coin, the other is a pervasive belief that wealth and the social advantages accruing to the wealthy are bestowed only on those with special access to uncommon--often dark-- spiritual forces. The persistence of this belief is seen, first, in the incidence of ritual killings motivated by an economy in body parts believed to possess special magical powers, and second, in the campaign against agents-- witches, mostly--believed to possess malevolent powers that can thwart or frustrate one's destiny. It is not unusual for the average individual to blame simple bad luck or adverse circumstances, whether at work or in love, on "spiritual attack," which can only be overcome or repelled by commensurate "spiritual warfare."
Now, from a political standpoint, it is irrelevant whether miracles are true or not; what matters is their serviceability, that is, whether or not an appeal to the marvelous (or sometimes religious belief, period) can be leveraged to, depending on the context, whitewash incompetence or establish legitimacy. When, for instance, former President Muhammadu Buhari, in response to criticism of his administration's failure to secure the country's one-thousand-mile odd northern border with neighboring Republic of Niger, said that "only God can secure Nigeria's borders," he mobilized religious sentiment to both deflect attention from and explain away his government's mediocrity. By the same token, we can safely conclude that, in kicking off 2023 with "an interdenominational prayer seeking God's intervention to make the year accident free," effectively invoking God to preempt questions about official responsibility, the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) perpetrates a similar ruse.
Why does this matter?
It matters partly because a situation in which a substantial portion of a society is increasingly dependent on miracles raises some difficult ethical questions. If, for example, an examinee can count on divine "favor" in the process of sitting for an examination, why bother to prepare? Why study? Putting the "favored" examinee in a social context, how is the resumed bilateral arrangement with God fair to others who went the extra mile to put themselves in a situation to be successful? If God rewards indolence--which is no different from punishing industry--how are social norms regarding application and diligence to be enforced?
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The policy implications follow directly from this. If miracles can cure, say, cancer or HIV, as many a testifier have boldly proclaimed, why should the state mobilize resources to invest in (research towards) a cure for either? If every ailment can be traced to a "spiritual attack," what is the point of epidemiology, and why bother to build hospitals or invest in public health infrastructure?
Further, in this atmosphere of spiritual surplus, a gross distortion slowly creeps into state-citizen relations. Not only is an underperforming political elite let off the hook by being allowed to invoke spiritual incapacitation as excuse for underperformance, paradoxically, it tends to be forgotten that erosion of faith in the state was the original trigger for the collective longing for miracles. Worse still, and as corroborated by numerous examples, egregious behavior that should ordinarily attract legal penalty or moral reproach is too easily written off as the work of the devil.
If any criticism is implied by the foregoing, it is neither of religion nor Christianity per se, but of the category of religious ideas that predominate in contemporary Nigeria, and by the same token in other parts of Africa where Pentecostalism rules. A revolution within African Christianity, whereby the current emphasis on the miraculous makes way for a doctrinal regime that upholds personal agency, individual morality, and accountability, cannot happen soon enough.
