stayin alive

i call my faith practice stayin alive.

not therapy. not delusion. not a particularly elaborate exercise in cognitive dissonance, although i suppose the evidence could be made to suggest otherwise.

it’s a framework. structure, story, rhythm. a way of arranging the chaos of being alive into something i can survive.

i see the contradictions clearly.

religion in the hands of fascists is the most perverse weapon of mass destruction. belief, which promises salvation, has been made an instrument of subjugation. women have been brutalized in its name. queer people have been persecuted, dispossessed, and killed. entire communities have been told that their suffering is not only justified but divinely ordained.

from islamist extremism to christian nationalism, the spectacle is familiar. the vocabulary changes. the architecture of domination rarely does.

and yet, i stay.

this is not an argument for the innocence of religion. i am not interested in laundering the historical record for the comfort of believers, least of all myself.

neither am i convinced that the abuses of an institution necessarily exhaust the possibilities of the thing it claims to represent.

my difficulty is that i refuse the premise that faith requires the surrender of my critical faculties. what kind of god could demand such a thing? and what kind of relationship with the divine could be sustained by the deliberate impoverishment of the mind?

i think particularly of young nigerian women, at home and in the diaspora, for whom religion can be inheritance, refuge, community, obligation, and instrument of coercion, sometimes all at once.

we inherit systems that offer consolation while prescribing obedience. we’re encouraged to make peace with contradictions that are often resolved at our expense. suffering is romanticized, endurance is sanctified, and the language of sacrifice becomes remarkably convenient for people who are rarely asked to make any.

there must be room to interrogate the terms of that inheritance.

there must be room to distinguish belief from obedience, reverence from fear, and spiritual practice from the institutions that have appointed themselves its custodians.

i am not interested in a faith that requires me to abandon women, queer people, or the vulnerable in pursuit of some imagined moral purity. nor am i interested in pretending that an absence of faith automatically produces virtue.

human beings have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to turn almost any framework into a justification for cruelty.

so perhaps the question is not whether belief has been corrupted. of course it has. perhaps the question is what remains possible when we refuse to let cruelty have the final word.

i stay because there is something in the practice itself that i have not finished interrogating. something in the repetition, the discipline, the possibility of surrender without intellectual abdication.

i don’t need to pretend certainty where there is none. i don’t need to resolve every contradiction into a tidy moral conclusion.

i need a framework capacious enough to accommodate the truth of what i see and the life i am still trying to live.

so yes, i brainwash myself into belief. it’s not delusion; it’s maintenance.

maybe belief was never purity.

maybe it’s just the technology of staying alive.