Zimbabwe has recently been experiencing some of the most bizarre and outrageous happenings rooted in the people’s deep seated beliefs in either the Christian faith or African Traditional Religion.

From superstitious people reportedly fatally tempering with an anti-tank mine hoping to extract chemicals worth millions of dollars from within the lethal weapon to outrageous miracle claims by boy-faced preachers seemingly failing to outgrow childhood fantasies.

We have also seen the media surprisingly elevating some of these primitive shenanigans to matters of national prominence.

We live in today’s intellectual climate of non-judgmentalism and tolerance, and as such we must be careful what we condemn and how we do so. In the name of adopting secularism we have all of a sudden become a nation of heretics, if some of what is happening in the Christian community is anything to go by.

Apart from the egregious deception and treachery by the people we call politicians, the other real corrosive force of our day is the unbiblical and self-serving influence coming from within the Christian community itself, or is it precisely from within the highly commercialised church movement?

We have prosperity gospel preachers, self-anointed prophets, and self-styled miracle workers, Christological revisionists both in the professoriate and in the media, anodyne spiritualists and other religious charlatans who wrongly appropriate Christianity for self-aggrandisement, or for selfish political ends.

The result of this is a Zimbabwe fast departing from the orthodox Christian search for spiritual transcendence, getting more inclined towards a search for materialistic gratification.

There is an implicit rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ, and we have this generation of accommodationist prosperity gospel preachers who continually empty Christianity of almost anything that has the potential to offend the sensibilities of a sinning world.

Today we have mushrooming churches that are breeding multitudes of believers with a blasé attitude towards sin and wickedness — an abominable lot with a dismissive attitude towards ordinary moral obligations. This is precisely why it is no longer news that a pastor rapes a 15 year old girl, or that a pastor swindles the public of hard-earned cash, and this also explains why divorce rates, single parentage and counselling services are as high in the churches as they are in the outer world, if not higher.

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