Written by Abimbola Adelakun of The Punch Newspapers (aadelakun@punchng.com), Read her piece below:
In the past few days, I have watched several videos of my former pastor, Chris Oyakhilome,
rehashing conspiracy theories that linked 5G technology with COVID-19.
It has been a deeply embarrassing experience for me, watching him talk
so confidently about what he has not even tried to understand.
Oyakhilome’s church, Christ Embassy, has many upwardly mobile young
people. Some of them work in the tech industry and could have put their
pastor straight with some quick education on the different natures of
technology and disease. How did they allow him to go on the pulpit and
be asking people to pray against vaccines? How did it happen that he
could pull up poorly designed charts on a large screen in the church and
even share several videos that, although confirmed his paranoia, proved
nothing substantial about the danger of 5G technology?
Pastor Chris is (or used to be) a
modernist. I attended his church at some point partly because he was a
skilled preacher of the Word with dazzling stagecraft, and partly
because of their taste for tech stuff especially as it concerns modern
gadgets. Part of Christ Embassy’s niche has been an unapologetic
deployment of the aesthetic of the novel, their perspicacity to employ
newer technologies before their counterparts. I do not think there is
any church in Nigeria that has as many digital apps as Christ Embassy
currently does. They invest in projects that concern using technology to
further church experience on-ground and online. They also host frequent
workshops where they brainstorm on how to advance churching with modern
technology. Watching him now, I cannot reconcile Christ Embassy’s
adaptive attitude to technological advancement with his newfound
Luddism.
The advent of groundbreaking technology
frequently gives rise to concerns and debates about how far humans
should go in the bid to transcend existing limitations, but most of
Pastor Chris’ assertions about 5G have been so atrocious that I
facepalmed in shock. To think that there was a time that I took his
sermons to be the very Word of God, and patterned my life based on his
prophetic vision. If he could be so bold about what is clearly out of
his range of competence, only God knows how much of what he taught us,
his flock, were based on similarly poorly informed ideas.
There is no point repeating Pastor
Chris’ paranoia to offer a rebuttal. Trying to deploy facts to sway
people who are already taken by conspiracy theories is usually
counter-productive. I have not come across a single conspiracy theorist
that can be convinced by facts. They will not only chalk down all your
arguments to part of the conspiracy, but you will also end up
strengthening their resolve. If Pastor Chris and his followers remain
sceptical by the counterarguments offered by the Senior Pastor of
Kingsway International Christian Centre, London, Matthew Ashimolowo,
there is nothing else anyone can say that will move their needle. We
cannot do anything about their beliefs, but we can put some ideas out
there for the benefit of those who are not sure of what and how to
believe.
Of course, Pastor Chris’ cant against 5G
technology neatly folds into the history of human reactions against new
technology. People have always been threatened by technological changes
that change their relationship to time and space because, like it or
not, it propels a new way of experiencing the self and the structures of
existing relations. The invention of new things from writing to
printing, bound books, photography, cars, the telephone, streetlights,
the radio, cinema, film, and the Internet has been met with paranoia and
moral panic. In the 19th Century, when Alexander Graham Bell invented
the telephone, people thought it would destroy privacy and social
relations. According to one writer, because of telephone communication,
“we will soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other.”
Today, people say pretty much the same thing about mobile phones and
social media. We now look back nostalgically at the time when the
telephone, the same device they said would ruin social relationships,
was a far less-threatening means of technologically-mediated
communication.
In 1825, when the Stockton-Darlington
Railway opened in North-east England, people expressed fears as Pastor
Chris and his followers are doing today. They said the railway was
unsafe, that people would fall out of the contraption because of the
speed at which trains could travel. Some thought the human body would
melt if people travelled as fast as they could do through the railway.
Some concerned individuals forewarned that women’s uteruses would fly
out of their bodies if trains reached a speed level of 50 miles per
hour. Today, we know better than traffic in such ideas anymore. Again,
when electricity was being introduced into homes in the USA, people also
protested. They warned that if private homes were to be lit, women and
children would be unsafe because they would be visible to potential
assaulters.
Some of the moral panic that seizes
people who fear modern technology also happens because inventions make
people see the world differently, and that affects how they relate to
religious authority. Religious leaders particularly fear scientific
advancement because it changes how people understand the Divine Will. We
cannot narrate the history of the Protestant Reformation that changed
the history of Europe without talking about the significant role that
the invention of print technology played in that event. When Galileo
started promoting his heliocentric theories in the 17th Century, the
Church opposed the range of his vision because his radical claims
challenged religious leaders’ interpretation of the Bible. They did not
exactly put their anxieties in the apocalyptic language of the
“anti-Christ,” as Pastor Chris is doing, but it was a similar threat of
the restructuring of their familiar world. I concede that not every
technology has been good for mankind, but one would expect someone of
Pastor Chris’ calibre to at least do his homework before spewing 5G
truthism and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
This 5G conspiracy theory and the link
with COVID-19 will not be the end of the moral panic that will seize
people. Every day, as science and technology advance its scope of
possibilities, people will push back for fear of how it will take the
bottom out of their world. They are not alone. There are bioethicists
who also make important ethical arguments about human invention, and
they challenge inventors to put a moral brake on their enthusiasm as
they invent. They urge scientists to be responsible with their vision,
and yes, we can be reassured they have our backs. What they do not do,
is to ask people to pray against vaccines. That will be illiterate.
Finally, of this one thing I am now
convinced: sometime in the future, when the COVID-19 vaccine has been
developed and humans have overcome the disease; when the human race-
including members of the future Christ Embassy who will inherit Pastor
Chris’ church-are doing wonders with 10G technology, they will look back
at this time in history and laugh at their founder in the same way we
laugh at the wisdom of those who said if God wanted man to fly he would
have given man wings. They will be amused at his claims the same way we
are when we read historical accounts that tell us that people were once
opposed to inventions like the eyeglasses because they thought
disabilities were the will of God, and they were not meant to be
corrected.
I do not know when that day will be and
who will be around to witness it, but I do know that Pastor Chris will
be remembered for being the face of 21st Century Luddism in this part of
the world. He will be less remembered for the megachurch he built, the
scores of young people like me that he nurtured, and even the various
healing miracles that he performed. This crass display of ignorance is
what will define his legacy. He will go down in history as a prophet,
true, but one with a limited vision.
This piece was Written by Abimbola Adelakun of The Punch Newspapers Email: aadelakun@punchng.com