Where are our religious leaders?

Apr 10, 2020 Editorial

One of the defining characteristics of any sound society is that when the world of the secular is in shreds, the realm of the spiritual steps forward to offer virtuous wisdom to political men. It is at such times that religious leaders of the multitudes of faithful believers rise to the occasion to stand against haughty political men by standing for right.
Where are our religious leaders today? By their inaudible voices never pressing, by their chronic and telling inactions, they prove themselves more of man than of God. It could be said that they are all of men and nothing about God. The revealing register of the near total absence of those elders of long testing experience seeped in the religious commandments that they intone so powerfully about at worship, like today, but then have little to say to influence the minds of leaders, and energise this society forward.
They cannot say anything because religious leaders of all stripes-have compromised themselves by identifying too closely with the worldly men of politics, they cannot say much for fear of offending political masters. The coalition has an army of its own defenders and, by the same token, the opposition has its own staunch absolutely committed men of scripture.
On both sides of the great national racial divide, there are men of the cloth, who are proud to call themselves faithful servants of those who have hurt us and hijacked our spirit. Having sold themselves, our religious leaders owe their loyalty and their allegiance. They can only sell what is pleasing to the political men.
This is what some-too many-of our religious leaders in their places of worship have identified with and spoken loudly in favour of before their listening audiences, be they comprised of the educated, or the many brigades of the not so bright. Many of them have painted themselves into the deepest corner, they cannot advance, without fearing that they will displease not God, but earthly Guyanese political leaders.
It is not in them, nowhere is to be found that which is needed now, which unassociated and uncompromised and unsparing men and women could discover and speak out against by speaking to truth. Thus, they speak of suspect political truths full-time, subjecting calling to the whims and caprices of arbitrary men. They can stand for nothing that embodies the power, brotherhood, and justice of their respective callings, not any of the things that should differentiate them from the terrible wrongs committed against and heaped upon the flocks of believers.
That is why when our religious leaders should be in the forefront of civil society pleading, or pressuring, or pouring out dissatisfaction and displeasure at what Guyanese political leaders are doing to the people, they are absent and silent. They lack the independence, they are devoid of the neutrality required so desperately at this hour, to lead by example, to lead through the exceptional virtues that lift all listeners to a place other than the gutters, into which our political leaders sentence us.
Our religious leaders need to be outstanding today. But today, they stand for the minimal. When they should be binding, they contribute to the separating, when they should be advancing for what is national, they are retreating into the regular racial.
Our political leaders have taken advantage of citizens for their own selfish divisive purposes, our religious leaders, who should be calling them out and calling at them loud, have only added to the angry fires that rage. When the calming and helping are most urgently needed, the men of God have been more interested in adding to the dividing and the self-defeating. If the men of high teachings are of this way, then not much better could be expected of the men of the political misusing class.
Clearly, our religious men and women have lost their way in their priorities and their prostrations, which render them unable to be the distinguishing presences so much demanded right now. And when they lost their way, they led many down the path taken. Look at us as a society, and we cannot find any footing, but the ones that imperil us. Guyanese religious voices are silent. They silenced themselves.

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