Will Pentecostals, witchdoctors keep growing in 2018?
Four or five years ago, I watched an invasion of young people roaming different parts of the country. They were armed with pens and bundles of paper, staring at powerful gates, in some cases seeking and gaining entry and interviewing the tenants.
In less intimidating neighbourhoods, their work was easier but the flaws also more visible.
The exercise, officially, was called a national census. If I, for one, was counted, the census officials got whatever data they got from rumours in the neighbourhood. Yet I live in very accessible circumstances.
Partly because our census field officials were in some cases filling in forms using creative shortcuts, and because many of our citizens cannot even accurately describe their religious status, the demographics of religious affiliation given in that census (and possibly previous censuses) may be misleading.
Anyhow, with a total of about 60 per cent, almost evenly shared between them, Uganda remains a predominantly Roman Catholic and Anglican/Church of Uganda country, followed by Islam and the variants of charismatic, fundamentalist and evangelical Christian congregations, which (for convenience and administrative practicality) are often lumped together and described as Pentecostal or Born Again faith.
Because Africans have been taught to despise their indigenous beliefs, many Traditional African faith followers describe themselves as something else, and indeed invoke their traditional gods as well as publicly worship under a more ‘respectable’ belief system.
Their numbers in any census may, therefore, be the least reliable, seriously undercutting their true strength.
In contrast, the label ‘Born Again’ or ‘Saved’ suggests an improved person. Many crooks hypocritically buy into the image, regardless of their true status.
Then again, quite a number of semi-literate Anglicans and Roman Catholics innocently describe themselves as Born Again or Pentecostal just because they sometimes worship in the more entertaining showbiz-like Pentecostal churches, and the label ‘Saved’ makes them feel holier than the next bloke. At their funerals, they are returned to their true altars.
The regular reader of this column knows that labels and titles do not sway me any more powerfully than ordinary crap. In many of those jumping, screaming and getting dizzy for Jesus under the ‘Saved’ banner, I see empty heads and fake souls.
If they have been growing in number at the expense of other Christian denominations, it is not necessarily in the interest of Christianity.
Michael Jackson had far more fans than Pavarotti. It is simplistic to think that matters of spiritual or artistic depth are settled by counting the followers, or by measuring the noise they make.
But why are Pentecostal preachers and witchdoctors apparently attracting more followers?
Paradoxically, the preachers have been marketing the witchdoctors as people with supernatural power, albeit evil power.
The spirits that the witchdoctor deals in (in the names of various small gods), and which trouble the natives, are to be conquered by the Holy Spirit that the pastor deals in (in the name of Jesus). Even HIV/Aids and cancer are sometimes attributed to evil spirits and can be cured through the pastor’s antics!
The Pentecostal follower must remain imprisoned in this primitive mindset, or else the pastor will become largely redundant.
The witchdoctor, chief purveyor of that mindset, is thus the most abused ally of the pastor. The latter needs the former as the louse needs the dog.
If, as it is claimed, the Pentecostal pastor and the witchdoctor’s gatherings are increasing in numbers, they must thank each other and pray that the quieter, deeper, more meditative forms of religious worship keep declining in 2018.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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