Outside Reading, Week 7, Post A

This week, I found the conflict between Christianity and the religion of the tribe to be intriguing. "'You can stay with us if you like our ways. You can worship your own god. [...] This is the house of God and I will not live to see it desecrated.' [...] We cannot leave the matter in his hands because he does not understand our customs, just was we do not understand his. We say he is foolish because he does not know our ways" (191). In this excerpt, the new pastor at the church, Mr. Smith, tries to protect the church and Enoch, the religious offender who took asylum at the church, from the mob of religious elders, the egwugwu, who are trying to burn it down and kill Enoch. Eventually, they do find Enoch, kill him, and burn down the church, but this is reported to the District Commisioner, who sends out messengers to bring back the criminals. They are brought to the Commisioner, who holds them as prisoners until they can pay a large sum of money. In the meantime, they are whipped and preached to about the righeousness of God.

I found this to be sort of darkly ironic, as the religion of love, as Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown had been saying, was now torturing potential converts instead of trying to correct the situation rationally. This hypocrisy seems to present in most of the missionaries that Okonkwo encounters: they preach on being a good, peaceful Christian, but if someone goes against the church, they call in the militia to destroy the village, as was the case in Agabe. However, the religion of the tribe doesn't seem to be much better. They are equally as backwards and oppressive as the Christian missionaries and are eager to crush any dissenters at a moments notice, as was the case with Enoch. So, it seems that Chinua Achebe could be hinting at this theme that religion is the true evil among men and the only thing that seperates the fraternity.