Chase them from the temple

I could have told you, to a moral certainty, that what happened was going to pass. A particularly voluble member of the National Assembly, and his counterpart in the national Executive, had primed the pump with alleged midnight meetings and not-so-subtle public fulminations against their bitter rivals. What has become boringly predictable is the way that the ministers of religion, majority of whom preach a particularly virulent strain of Christian evangelism, roused themselves and decided to share their two bits of wisdom on how to address the political crisis.

I have had it told that they are no longer ministers of religion; they wear the accoutrements of religious piety while in actual fact they are like lice and ticks, sucking the blood of innocents and infecting them with debilitating diseases. When the new regime took office, the minsters of religion tripped over themselves, abasing themselves in front of the new potentate, in the hopes that their earthly desires Ould be satiated: land, money and political power. No less a personage than the provost of the All Saints Cathedral has laid bare the threadbareness of their piety, accusing them of abandoning their flocks and endangering the congregants' immortal souls.

No one seriously thinks that the Christian church in Kenya has any sort of moral authority anymore. It doesn't matter whether it is the Church of Rome, Church of England or the various strains of evangelism, all are now tarred with the same brush. Ministers of religion have abandoned the teachings of the gospel, only suing the gospel as a cudgel to browbeat Kenyans into toeing some imaginary line that may or may not have anything to do wit faith and salvation.

Instead, the Christian church has become a home where sinners don't go to have their sins washed away, but celebrated and valorised for massive backhander. You average minister of religion nowadays swans around in a Range Rover or Mercedes-Benz, lives in a palatial mansion, opens "branches" in the USA and UK, and sponsors his children to holidays in Paris and Milan, all out of the Sunday offertory and annual tithe he extorts from his flock. And with that wealth, the minister of religion now seeks political power, not to perform the Lord's work, but to expand his empire of vice and avarice.

Jesus once took a whip and chased the moneylenders out of the temple. It may now take a rebellion from among the faithful to strip the wolf of his sheep's clothing and install a true man of God to lead them in worship. If the minsters of religion had truly cared about the fate and welfare of their flock, they would not have allowed them to be used and abused by the political classes. Instead, they would have cursed the ministers of politics and cast their demonic souls out of the church. As it is, the ministers of religion and the politicians they have abased themselves before are the devils our mothers warned us about when we were children.