Prime
Pentecostals will confuse any census

Alan Tacca
What you need to know:
- For their baptisms, marriages and funerals, even for solemn prayer, they belong to their ‘serious’ mother church.
For strangers, I am God’s dog. With God still in a state of divine rest, I spend more time monitoring the activities of those who preach His word.
It is a tough job; not because they are slow learners, but because they are obstinate. Like I am obstinate; we tend to cling to something and refuse to budge.
Take this Census 2024 thing, and the numbers Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) produced.In my folly, I thought we had received those numbers like any combination of fact and fiction – with a pinch of salt – and moved on.
Many of us were not counted. But so what? Would the NRM government change its expenditure priorities if we had been counted? However, some of Uganda’s pastors; or, rather some of Kampala’s pastors are still singing their dubiously-sourced version of the truth, that there are now more Pentecostals in Uganda than Catholics and Protestants.
Like political ideologues, religious ideologues deliberately ram into your head a falsehood at every opportunity. By sheer repetition, the falsehood gets imprinted in many brains and begins to pass as a truth.If someone disruptive challenges the fraud, the ideologue will seem to withdraw quietly, but wait for the disruptor to leave or be occupied by other issues.
Then, with startling audacity, the ideologue will resume pumping into the populace exactly the same falsehood that was debunked.
Most disrupters tire and give up. Let daft sheep lie.It takes a dog to doggedly fight for the window of rationality to remain open.So, tell us, dear pastors; apart from the big towns, where the Pentecostal experience has degenerated into one of the options of binge entertainment – like football, like music concerts – where are all these Pentecostals you are talking about?
To get a fairly accurate picture of Uganda’s religious demographics, closely watch the events at many funerals around the country. Our pastors will be humbled.Then there are two contradictions whose resolution our pastors avoid like a plague.
Every clear-headed person knows that dipping a new member in water at baptism is purely symbolic. It does not literally clean the inner self of any dirt, or any sins, or any non-Christian beliefs.This means that if some evolving traditions change this initiation rite from dipping to sprinkling with water, the new form of the rite is just as valid.
But whenever self-righteousness goes to their heads, our Kampala pastors proclaim that the rite of baptism by sprinkling used by Catholics and Anglicans is not just different. They insist that it is not valid.In short, the people in those churches who are masquerading as Christians are not Christian at all.However, most of the people who go to Kampala’s Pentecostal churches have not been dipped, and have no intention of being dipped.
For their baptisms, marriages and funerals, even for solemn prayer, they belong to their ‘serious’ mother church. Question: How many people dancing or swaying their arms in a Pentecostal church should Ubos count and record as Pentecostals?The second contradiction: If you put to task Kampala’s top 20 pastors, 10 of them will tell you that the other pastors are false, and the other 10 will tell you that those in the first group are false.
They regard each other as ‘witchdoctor-like’, ‘extortionists’, theologically ‘misguided missiles’, ‘wiseacres’, and ‘tools’ or ‘puppets’ of the State.
Question: With half or maybe both halves phoney, how many of their followers deserve to be called authentic Pentecostals by today’s laughable Ubos, or the Ubos of a different era?
Mr Tacca is a novelist and socio-political commentator.
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