Kagame's Crusade

Since 2018, if not earlier, Rwandan President Paul Kagame has been trying to make religious groups (mostly Pentecostal churches) in the country bend the knee. If he appears not to have succeeded thus far, it is not for want of trying. In that year, the Rwandan government had replaced a 2012 law regulating the activities of religious groups with a new one directing all faith-based organizations to “obtain legal status” from the Rwandan Governance Board (RGB).

Any lingering doubts as to the government’s intent were soon dispelled by the conditions for obtaining legal status, which varied between the intrusive, the legally dubious, and the outright ridiculous. For example, an average faith-based organization was required to submit a notarized statement explaining its doctrine(s); a notarized document describing its “annual plan of action and source of funding;” “a letter issued by district authorities agreeing to collaborate with the organization;” and “the address of its head office and the names of its legal representative and his/her deputy, their duties, full address, and criminal records.”

If the legal burden on the organization seeking registration was onerous enough, its leader didn’t have much joy either. As the law stipulated, “preachers with supervisory responsibilities must possess a degree in religious studies from an institution of higher learning or any other degree with a valid certificate in religious studies issued by a recognized institution.” This educational requirement extended to the faith-based organization’s legal representative, who was similarly expected to “hold a degree from an institution of higher learning.”

Perhaps to demonstrate that it was not all bark and no bite, the Rwandan government went ahead and suspended the activities of seven hundred fourteen churches in various parts of Kigali, the capital city, for what it described as “noncompliance with the new legislation.” The Brussels-based Human Rights Without Frontiers International (HRWF) estimates that almost nine thousand places of worship were shuttered during the initial enforcement of the 2018 law, with more than six thousand still closed across the country by the end of last year.

Why did the Rwandan government go to such lengths? One clue is to be found in its insistence that the churches comply with health and safety standards and noise pollution ordinances, a pointer to the deleterious impact that the explosion of the Pentecostal movement in the country, paralleling a continent-wide pattern, has had on both its landscape and soundscape. Similarly, the educational requirement apparently aimed at preventing “unqualified ministers from putting adherents at risk” invokes widespread concern at the range of “unethical and criminal behavior” that many Pentecostal preachers have been accused of.

Taken together, these signal Pentecostals’ creeping domination of the religious scene in the country, resentment of which in part explains a constant level of support for government legislation, particularly among leaders of the Protestant denominations. This domination, and the visibility, sociopolitical influence, and economic clout that tend to follow in its wake, would seem to be the real reason that Mr. Kagame is trying to bring his country’s Pentecostal churches under some semblance of control. The most recent RGB crackdown late last month resulted in the closure of at least five thousand six hundred churches, four hundred twenty-seven of which were reportedly “operating out of caves.”

At any rate, Rwanda is not the only African country where concern at Pentecostal influence (the continent is reportedly home to almost half of the world’s Pentecostals) has prompted a political backlash. In 2013, citing “criminal practices” likely to “threaten the security” of the country, Cameroonian President Paul Biya, who has been in power since 1982, ordered the military to close down nearly one hundred Pentecostal churches in the capital Yaounde and the Northwest Regional capital, Bamenda. In Equatorial Guinea and Tanzania, respectively, legislations supposedly intended to “protect the people” from the “bad practices of cults and religious confessions” and “ensure that religious practices align with the law and contribute positively to social cohesion and public order,” respectively, have been put in place. Following the discovery in March last year of mass graves containing bodies of over four hundred suspected members of the Good News International Church, calls grew for the Kenyan government to create a regulatory commission to curb the supposed excesses of the country’s charismatic churches.

While those excesses may be beyond question—January’s British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) exposé on the late Nigerian preacher, T.B. Joshua, is the latest reminder of the reality of pastoral depravity in the Pentecostal world—it is by no means certain that endeavoring to drive the churches out of business (pun unintended) through the creation of a hostile regulatory environment is the way to rein them in.

For one thing, making religious organizations directly accountable to political authority, even when the theologies and liturgies of such organizations can be called into question, merely increases the danger of political centralization. The last thing that a country like Rwanda needs right now is more power accruing to a central authority which has been molded in the image of one man for the past three decades and counting. For another, making the state the spiritual caretaker of citizens, apart from reducing citizens to wards of the state, implies that the state is a better judge of people’s spiritual needs than they themselves. Furthermore, it distracts attention from the fact that, more often than not, the state is the problem that people are trying to get away from, and that its well-documented fecklessness is one reason why many Africans have continued to seek succor in sundry spiritual sources and establishments. Finally, it ignores the fact that religious organizations, especially Pentecostal churches, wouldn’t be the social force they are in many parts of Africa today without the active connivance of political leaders, many of whom continue to patronize them, either for the spiritual sanction of the “Man of God,” or the political support of his congregation.

For these and other reasons, Kagame’s clampdown on the churches is unlikely to produce the desired results, and if the example of the four hundred twenty-seven churches reportedly operating out of caves across the country shows anything, it is the extent to which members of a community will go in an effort to satisfy their spiritual cravings.

Which leaves us with one final puzzle: given the sociological commonplace about religion being a means of civic distraction and demobilization, why is Kagame (the same question applies, mutatis mutandis, to Biya in Cameroon) not satisfied to leave Rwanda’s churches alone? Why bother with a religious establishment that is, so far as we know, apolitical?

Three related hypotheses may be advanced as follows:

First, for as long as it remains “uncaptured,” the church, no matter how “conservative” or docile it may seem at the moment, can quickly transform into a space of “resistance.” Obviously, this is a risk the dictator cannot afford to run.

Second, places of religious worship like churches are places of spontaneous joy. The dictator does not mind his people being joyous; on condition that he is the trigger for that joy. Hence, it’s not so much the joy as that it is not “approved.” If people can be spontaneously joyous, who is to say what else they can do spontaneously? Revolt?

Third, the Old Testament injunction to Christians that “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” offends the dictator, who fancies himself as the final word and ultimate ground of appeal.

If these hypotheses are valid, we may rightly expect Kagame’s crusade against faith-based organizations to continue for as long as he is Rwanda’s God.

Nathan Schoonover contributed to the research for this article.