CIVIL SOCIETY AND CIVIL OBEDIENCE.

  

“I pledge to Nigeria my country, to be faithful, loyal and honest…” The opening words of the Nigerian national pledge, is one that seems to ‘subtlety and freely’ demand obedience from its people. The citizen, out of freedom, pledges to obey. Stemming from Socrates, Aristotle, down to all social contract theorists, the concept of civil-obedience, is something that is required as a payback which the government gets in return of its protection of life and property of the people. Society, has come to stay as a result of search for order in human chaotic nature hence, it is a creation of man. Civility, equality, respect, common good, criticism, all ought to be the features of a civil society, thus it should be conceived as a sphere of solidarity and subsidiarity, in which a certain kind of universalizing community comes gradually to be defined and to a certain degree, enforced. It ought to thrive on public opinion, possessing its own cultural codes, in a democratic idiom. Patterned by a set of peculiar institutions. 

In 1Peter 2 :13, the apostle urges: “submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake, to every human authority.” This quote from the scriptures, has become the greatest tool used by political leaders and thugs alike, to command obedience from the people. In their misconception of civil obedience, they grind the face of the poor against the wall and expect them to keep quiet. They make laws and pass bills methodically calculated to ruin the society and keep they themselves immune from prosecution, of which same laws inhumanely destroy the same people they are meant to protect on unwarranted grounds, all in the name of civil obedience. Quite convincingly, we cannot speak of civil obedience, unless there is an objective hermeneutic of rights and duties. Obedience in civil parlance, is a phenomenon which commands respect from the people towards a law that respects their interests. And a law which qualifies as such, must be rational, just and fair, propagated for the common good. In which case, any law devoid of these features and raped by sentiments, ought not to be obeyed at all, even if supported by religious leaders. As a matter of fact, it is in this parlance, that religion should come in to protect the civil interest of law. At the locus where religion seeks to tame civil law, the picture which emerges is termed civil religion.

CIVIL RELIGION.

The opening words of the Nigerian 1999 constitution states: “We the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria having firmly and solemnly resolve, to live in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God, dedicated to the promotion of inter-African solidarity…”. Given this, John Anderson asks: does God matter and if so, whose God?  I suppose that, that query, adequately fits into the hemisphere of our present corridors of power.

As a term, civil religion was invented by Bellah Robert; for him, it is the undue importation of God into the political equation. It is the view that the foundation of a society and the events that mark its progress are a part of a divine scheme of things, that the political structure flows out of a structure with God as its basis. Politics, ought to be based on manifestoes, rational sensitive performance of leaders. Hardly in any political milieu, ranging from ministers, through governors to Presidents, would one not hear statements like: my dear people of God, Allah bless our nation, and so on. All these are play to the gallery, and it is highly fallacious, because, instead of facing the crux of the matter and addressing it, they sacrifice service which they owe to the nation, at the altar of God and Allah.

National commemorations such as Independence Day, democracy day, amalgamation day, the days in which civil wars are brought to a close, so on, all provide vehicles for civil religion . On these occasions, the president comes out in address of the nation and speaks: let us remember we are one people, under one God, who is concerned with our nation, hence, no violence… Statements like these are a real perversion of the true democracy. A phenomenal question here is: which God is appealed to?  Given that he seemingly matters in our politico-religious life. The God of these guys cannot be the monotheistic God of Christianity and Islam.

A nation where rapid urbanization has fostered great disparities within its regions. Is there no God? A nation where the socio-economic gap between rural and urban citizens is unspeakable, is there no God? A nation where many live at the edge of starvation, even when their region is flooded with natural resources, is there no God? The endless massacre of a whole people, methodically calculated, is there no God? The endless attempt of the Buhari- led government to move the seat of Islamic leaders from the Sokoto caliphate, through Borno empire, to the west, the Atlantic coast of Lagos, covering the east , and consequently, the whole of the nation, in a fashion to Islamize the whole country, in which millions have died, is there no God? It’s quite bitter, for in our nation, God has lost his identity. He might have as well abandoned this corner of the globe.

By Friar Emmanuel IGBOEKWULUSI, OFM Cap. 

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