Orville Taylor | Obeah unto them!

A person kneels before a statue made of concrete or marble. Another enters a booth and confesses her sins to a man of the cloth hidden behind a screen. He listens, declares that her sins are forgiven and she must say several Hail Mary’s.

Another gets an epiphany. Pastor says that unless he repents and immerses in a pool, he shall burn in hellfire. The water is essential; without it, no salvation.

Another takes her child to a holy man. He sprinkles holy water on the infant and portends good things for her. It is a promise and assurance.

Inanimate objects, talismans, relics, including incense and other paraphernalia, are chanted over by persons speaking in strange ‘tongues’ incomprehensible even to themselves.

All of this was going on in 1898, when our Obeah Act was passed, and the Seventh-Day Adventists, our now largest Christian denomination, got its first toehold on the imaginations of the population.

A century later, the televangelists were entrenched. My uncle and his wife, with great faith in the healing abilities of Oral Roberts, clumsily put unhealthy body parts on the Grundig stereo.

Bible-toters with tents, which morphed into permanent edifices and a growing flock of believers, mostly women, who revere them above spouses.

Apart from those who hoodwink them with a message that could not pass through the needle eye, and become filthy-rich gospel predators, a subset of them actually promise cause and effect relationships between their devout activities, including tithing and ‘planting a seed’, and positive physical outcomes.

It is a kind of prosperity ‘doctrine’, although loosely called ‘gospel’; a misnomer because Jesus’ taught against accumulating earthly riches.

A little piece of fabric; a bump of cloth, dirty often, from over handling, is consecrated after money is donated or sent, to avoid God’s wrath.

Some are led to fast in order to obtain some favour from God. Of course, this stupid teaching or belief where God is seen as some spiritual ATM, who delivers one’s requests, is not even Christian.

God is no one’s servant. Pastors who preach a direct causal relationship with one’s wishes, however strong one’s faith, is leading them down a dark alley.

Indeed, given the low correlation between what people pray for and actual results, it could easily be considered to be fraudulent.

Be not mistaken. Anecdotal stories abound regarding individual healing and other experiences. My own father came back from the brink of death after his elders came and prayed. Similarly, the bishop emeritus, already in deep dialogue with his maker and moribund, resurrected against the doctors’ declaration after Elder Taylor placed his hands on him while being charged with the Holy Spirit.

In fact, my own healing from COVID-19 was of God.

However, despite these personal testimonies, it would be totally disingenuous to declare that, using legal or scientific standard of proof, ‘prayer works.’

DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY

Truth is, it doesn’t work that way. For example when both parties get pastors to bless their campaign, what happens?

The point is that most prayers, incantations, laying of hands, and pastoral interventions do not lead to ‘healing’ so as to justify a causal relationship. Dare any pastor sign a legal contract or allow a scientist to carry out an experiment, which guarantees high levels of success?

God does not work like that today. And any religious leader who threatens, coerces, or promises goodies on Earth via their abilities to channel the Holy Spirit, under Jamaican law, could be classified as “a person practising obeah”. Separate from fraud, Section 2 defines such individual as one who … for gain, or for the purpose of frightening any person, uses, or pretends to use any occult means, or pretends to possess any supernatural power or knowledge”. Furthermore, “instrument of obeah” is “anything used, or intended to be used by a person, and pretended … to be possessed of any occult or supernatural power”.

Prayer cloths, holy water?

Surprised? Bet you that the marching religious leaders and followers have never read the act. After all, many Christians and pastors have never bothered to read the entire Bible or even to understand how it came to be the present collection of included and excluded books. Ignorance is bliss but is a horrible teacher.

Not a Christian theocracy, our Parliament is planning to decriminalise Obeah, and why not? Our religious hegemony must make criminals of other beliefs? The Aact, clearly based on prejudice and hysteria, defines Obeah to include Myal - a major travesty. Dare Christians affirm that Jews and Muslims are hell-bound for rejecting Jesus as Lord?

Myal is actually the antithesis of Obeah and developed to counter its evil spells and activities. Myal is about healing, never hurting an enemy. For the record, reading Psalms and asking God to “strike down”, “crush”, and “attack” is anti-Christian because Jesus taught a different lesson than Moses and David. Praying Psalms against an adversary, fits the Obeah definition to a T.

Historically, while perverted versions of Christ’s teachings were being used to justify slavery, and its atrocities, with the Church actually owning enslaved Africans too, it was Myal that led the rebellion long before Sam Sharpe’s Christmas uprising. Check the annals of Christian history and the millions via crusades’ conquest and ‘civilising’ Europeans killed under the cross and in the name of Christ.

And by the way, Obeah is ethnically African and comes from the Akan ‘obeyi’. We are 60 per cent Akan.

Voudou is not the reason for Haiti‘s suffering. After all, with the most churches per capita, and counting, we are still the most homicidal country that reads the King James Version.

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.