Guests, Not Gods: The Pulpit’s Duty When Power Walks In

THE 592 GUARDIAN

EDITORIAL

Guests, Not Gods: The Pulpit’s Duty When Power Walks In

On the moral cowardice of houses of worship that trade the altar for access — and go silent when the powerful owe the nation an answer

Every sacred place in Guyana must welcome every soul that enters it — dharmic, Islamic, ecclesiastic, Christian, atheist, agnostic, and yes, politician. No one is irredeemable, and no threshold of a temple, mandir, mosque, or church should ever be barred to the vilest trickster who walks through it seeking grace. That is not in dispute, and this news outlet does not dispute it. But there is a canyon of difference between welcoming a politician and crowning him. Between offering a seat and surrendering the pulpit. Between letting a man pray, and letting him perform.

Politicians who enter a sacred space come as guests. They take their place as guests. They pray as guests, if they are up to it. That is the entirety of their entitlement, and it is a generous one. No honest man or woman of faith needs a political operator co-opting his most public moment with God — needs him processed to the front, handed the microphone, permitted to turn worship into stagecraft. 

When a man of manufactured piety proselytises from the altar, that is not communion. That is perversion of the sanctuary, dressed in the borrowed vestments of the sacred.

And yet, across Guyana’s houses of worship, we have watched a different arrangement take hold: preachers who jump and gyrate for whichever politician has grinding, gyrating power over the poor. Ministers who bow before manmade gods dressed as public servants. Men and women who preen behind the cloth while a self-made deity preens beside them at the pulpit rail. 

Which preacher of true moral substance consents to such a display? Which one is so low as to stoop lower still, for a reward, a recognition, an elevation? None who deserve the collar.

That, this publication has already said, immovably and non-negotiably. But there is a second corruption, quieter than the first and just as grave: the silence of the sanctuary when the politician it just finished garlanding owes the country an answer he has not given. We are not accusing the President of misleading the nation. 

We are asking, as any citizen of a republic is entitled to ask, to see the documents. That is the whole of the demand — production, not presumption of guilt. It is the most modest request accountability journalism can make of executive power, and it is the one so many of Guyana’s well-endowed houses of moral instruction have found no cause to echo. Not one word. Not from the pulpits that had a president in their midst weeks earlier, hands raised, blessed and blessing. The same institutions that would summon righteous fury over a private citizen’s minor indiscretion have found, in the face of an unresolved public question involving the nation’s highest office, nothing to say at all.

That silence is not neutrality. Neutrality does not require gyrating to a politician’s music one Sunday and forgetting his name the next, when accountability comes calling. 

This is something else — a free pass extended in advance, purchased with proximity, paid for in access to the microphone, the front pew, the photograph shaking hands beside the altar. 

An insane proliferation of politics and religion has entrenched itself in Guyana, and the morally righteous have proven only too accommodating with the accolades.                            

They have overlooked, conveniently and at length, the untenable position a sitting president has put himself into.

Guyana is a land now blessed with wealth it did not have a decade ago, and still crippled, perpetually, by the burdens of poverty for so many who live in it. That contradiction is precisely the terrain on which the prophetic voice of religion is supposed to stand — grinding gyrating politicians who grind the poor to dust are exactly who the pulpit exists to confront, not court. 

A preacher who will not ask a basic question of the powerful because the powerful filled his stadium last month has already answered, in practice, whose gospel he actually preaches.

Politicians have their place. They must either know it, or be put to it. Welcome, brother — take a seat. Listen and learn about humility, about sincerity, about banishing hypocrisy, about the plight of the poor and how much they hurt in a land so rich. But do not hand him the pulpit. And when he leaves the sanctuary and re-enters public life owing the public an answer, do not pretend the two are unconnected.

Ask for the documents. That is not persecution. That is the last honest thing left for a house of God to do.

— The Board