What The Nigerians Running The Anti-Gay Episcopal Church Are Like

"God's Country" (Nigeria) by Eliza Griswold. "Using militias and marketing strategies, Christianity and Islam are competing for believers by promising Nigerians prosperity in this world as well as salvation in the next." There are mass conversions, defects, animosities, and massacres in this dire competition between the Muslims of the North and the Christians of the South. Rene Girard's thesis about "the mimetic principle" is in effect: The two sides imitate each other and escalate in both marketing efforts and militial action. The well-document killings by Muslims are truly abhorrent; Christian belligerency, reactive or initiatory, is apocalyptically fierce. Griswold tells, for example, how the Christian Association of Nigeria "militia" attacked a Muslim town, killing 660 Muslims, burning twelve mosques and three hundred homes.
Griswold's father had been primate of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A at the time of the massacre, and a colleague of Archbishop Peter Akinola, who was then the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria. Akinola is now the head of the eighteen-million- member Anglican Church in Nigeria, and the spiritual and ecclesiastical host to many dissident American Anglicans who have accepted him as their bishop. To put it politely, Akinola, stiffing Griswold, launched into an attack linking Islam and liberal Protestantism while defending what Americans call "the prosperity gospel." "I've said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence." Both sides in the Muslim-Christian conflict cite their Scriptures; one pastor legitimated rape by Christians on the basis of Matthew 24:19: "But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days."