By BAMIDELE JOHNSON
“Poverty is a sign of ungodliness. To be poor means there is sin in your life. Never trust the holiness of a poor man. I will never follow a poor pastor,” said Korede Komaiya of the Warri-based Master’s Place International Church.
Those words were not a slip of the tongue or the kind excused as heat-of-the-sermon excess. They were theology. They were belief, stated plainly.
The same man once dismissed the Apostles as riff-raff, deploying contempt as a marketing device for the predatory theology that formed him.
What Komaiya articulated openly is what many others practise discreetly. It is the moral delegitimisation of the poor as a spiritual class.
Komaiya did not surprise anyone. He could not have. He is a scion of David Oyedepo, to whom vipers like Biodun Fatoyinbo, David Ibiyeomie and others look up.
In the ecosystem these men inhabit, wealth is proof of divine favour, poverty is evidence of moral failure and compassion is optional.
Those words should have earned Komaiya the label of heretic or false teacher. They did not. The reason is not theological confusion, but fear. Many who call themselves Christians fear Komaiya because they fear Oyedepo. The same dynamic applies to Fatoyinbo, who last year derided Joseph Ayo Babalola, founder of the Christ Apostolic Church. Babalola, he said, was anointed, but his anointing was useless because he did not leave Abacha-scale material wealth for his children.
Sons are covered because fathers are feared. The silence is not uncertainty. It is cowardice. That cowardice thrives because the ecosystem that produces false teachers is already saturated with something deeper than bad doctrine. It is saturated with disbelief.
To call many Nigerian preachers atheists is value-neutral. It is precise. It is forensic. They may believe God exists as an idea, but there is little doubt they believe Him as a business model. They do not believe Him as a moral reality. Their god does not see, judge or remember. Their heaven does not wait. Their hell does not threaten. Never will.
The most damning critique of many Nigerian preachers is not that they sin, everyone does, but that they behave as though they do not believe a word of what they preach. Measured not by slogans, altar calls or microphone theatrics, but by conduct, priorities and moral risk-taking, a significant number of Nigerian pulpits are occupied by functional, bona fide, out-and-out atheists who are raising atheists.
These are men and women who invoke God professionally but live as though there is no eternal reckoning beyond bank statements and visibility. This will predictably be flipped as an attack on Christianity or faith itself, a reflex that is the product of years of conditioning in the ethics-free trade zone called Nigerian Christendom. I am indifferent to how it is flipped. What this is, if one is arsed enough to know, is an argument about real belief and the absence of it.
Anyone who genuinely believes in eternal life, divine judgment and moral accountability would tread carefully with truth, power and human desperation. What we see instead is an industry of calculated deception.
Christianity, stripped of the mushy-headedness introduced by today’s con artists, is uncompromisingly future-oriented. Eternal life, judgment, heaven and hell are not decorative precepts. They are the engine of moral restraint. A man who truly believes he will give account for every word does not casually lie in God’s name. He does not fabricate miracles, confect prophecies or commercialise suffering.
Yet, lying has become routine. Prophecies are reverse-engineered from gossip, social media posts or crude statistical probability. Miracles are theatrically choreographed. Testimonies are coached. Revelations conveniently align with fundraising targets. If eternal judgment were real to these men and women, such brazenness would scare them shitless. Instead, it is normal. That normalcy tells its own story. God is not feared. God is deployed. God is mocked, viciously, or there is a valiant attempt to mock Him.
One of the boldest signs of disbelief is the casual mutilation of sacred texts. Verses are stripped of context, fused with unrelated passages and weaponised against congregants’ fears. Poverty is moralised. Illness is spiritualised. Doubt is criminalised. Every human vulnerability is converted into a revenue stream.
Anyone who genuinely believes in eternal life, divine judgment and moral accountability would tread carefully with truth, power and human desperation. What we see instead is an industry of calculated deception.
This is where the machinery becomes visible. Consider the Covenant Partners programme of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a scheme dissected by Professor Ebenezer Obadare in his analysis of what he aptly called Casino Pentecostalism. The logic is brutally transactional. Spiritual favour is tiered. Access is monetised. Risk is shifted entirely to the believer, while the house, as in any casino, never loses.
That such a system thrives in a church that claims to preach eternal judgment is itself an argument. No one who truly believes God is watching builds a pay-to-play spirituality. Extra-scriptural teachings, seed-sowing formulas, miracle pricing and spiritual hierarchies of access are introduced not because they are true, but because they sell. When scripture resists monetisation, it is bypassed. When it cooperates, it is amplified beyond recognition. This is not theological disagreement, but theological contempt. You do not freestyle like a reggae dancehall star with a text you believe is divinely authoritative. You do not.
The same disbelief is on display in the testimonial economy of absurd claims. The fast-talking Paul Enenche once claimed that his bag of rice experienced no depletion despite continuous cooking because he tithed. No such thing happened to those who tithed in biblical times. Apparently, he is more pious than the Israelites, to whom the instruction to tithe was exclusively given.
Oyedepo confidently claimed that Job suffered because he did not tithe, a claim so exegetically violent it collapses under the weight of the text itself. These are not slips. They are strategies designed to scare believers into permanent financial compliance and to create a runway for exploitation.
The rapacious Jeremiah Fufeyin has built a thriving ministry around the commercialisation of ritual objects, anointing oils, miracle soaps, sand from Israel and prophetic artefacts, all priced for deliverance as though redemption were a supermarket item. He is practising another religion with Bible verses stapled on top. His god, like those of his colleagues, responds not to repentance or justice, but to payment, like a cashier.
The system has also produced preachers deluded enough to claim responsibility for macro-economic outcomes. A fairly prominent one claimed in 2024 that his prayers were responsible for the temporary recovery of the naira against the dollar. The claim was offered without irony, without fear of blasphemy, without awareness of absurdity. A man who believes in divine judgment does not casually ascribe national economic movements to his personal spirituality. Only someone convinced that God will never call him to account speaks this way.
Contempt for the poor, as Komaiya demonstrated, is embedded in this theology and is sometimes stated openly. David Ibiyeomie teaches that Jesus hates the poor, a claim so grotesque it inverts the moral arc of the gospel. Joshua Selman teaches that giving to the poor attracts no reward, while giving to the anointed does, conveniently to men like himself. This is not error, but ideology. The poor are rendered spiritually irrelevant. The preacher is enthroned as the true object of generosity.
Another revealing sign of disbelief is self-promotion framed as sacred duty. The New Testament is stubbornly unglamorous about its heroes. Humility is not a suggestion. It is a command. Yet many preachers behave as though salvation depends on visibility metrics, followers, convoys, private jets and billboards featuring their faces and their wives in messianic poses.
Fake prophecies elevate the prophet. Spiritual language silences critics. Dissent is framed as rebellion against God. Every scandal is rebranded as persecution. In this ecosystem, God functions less as judge and more as brand asset, useful for reputation management and market dominance.
Perhaps the most revealing evidence of disbelief is cruelty without remorse. Congregants are pressured to give beyond reason. They are stripped of money meant for rent, school fees and hospital bills. Promises are made with no intention of fulfilment. When miracles do not happen, blame is reassigned to insufficient faith or inadequate giving. The preacher remains untouched.
This is not just greed, but metaphysical confidence that nothing follows death. If judgment, hell or divine justice were even remotely believed, exploiting the poor would be suicidal madness.
Instead, these men sleep well, snore, drool and wake refreshed to plan new extortion schemes. The damage is not only spiritual but social. Faith becomes suspect. Cynicism spreads. Genuine belief is mocked because its loudest representatives behave like con artists with excellent memory for Bible verses. Belief is not declared. It is demonstrated. “By their fruits…,” the Bible insists.
When challenged on routinely fake prophecies, the go-to escape clause is: “We see in part; we prophesy in part.” A verse intended as a call to humility is converted into a licence for persistent falsehood. Biblical prophecy feared being wrong. It welcomed accountability. It did not commercialise uncertainty. Using human limitation as a defence for confident, repeated deception is itself evidence of disbelief. A man who fears God does not gamble casually with His name.
If eternal life were real to many Nigerian pulpits, their preaching would sound different. Their lifestyles would shrink. Their fear of truth would grow. Their manipulation of the vulnerable would cease.
Until then, atheism is what masquerades as Christianity, however Bible-totting and verse-quoting it is.
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