Religion has done enormous damage by convincing suffering people that their suffering is sacred.

Too often, people crushed by greed, exploitation, and injustice are told not to question the forces that keep them down, but to endure quietly, pray harder, and wait for reward in the life to come. Their pain is spiritualized. Their deprivation is moralized. Their chains are renamed obedience. Meanwhile, the system that profits from their silence remains untouched.

That is not faith. That is religion at its most dangerous.

One of the most costly confusions in public life is the failure to distinguish between faith and religion. The two are often treated as though they are identical, as if criticism of religion must necessarily be criticism of God, spirituality, or transcendence itself. That is false. Faith and religion are not the same thing, and much of the harm commonly blamed on faith is, in truth, the work of religion, especially when religion hardens into institution, control, and unquestioned authority.

I write as a person of faith. My quarrel is not with God. It is not with belief, spiritual devotion, or the search for transcendence. My quarrel is with religion in its oppressive and institutionalized form.

I am a person of faith, not of religious machinery. I do not believe I was created merely to conform. I was not made to silence my questions, abandon my reason, or submit to inherited claims without examination. I was made to seek, to discern, to wrestle, and to understand. Even Scripture makes room for that. In Isaiah 1:18, God says, “Come now, and let us reason together.” That is not the language of a tyrant threatened by thought. It is an invitation to moral seriousness. It suggests that the human mind is not a threat to faith but one of its proper instruments.

That is why religion must be confronted when it becomes hostile to reason, agency, and human flourishing.

By religion, I do not mean faith in God. I mean a system of rules and regulations designed to cage human beings and prevent them from attaining their full, God-given potential, all under the guise of aligning them with a higher being. In this sense, religion is not liberation but limitation. It is control dressed up as holiness. It is submission weaponized against the human person.

At its worst, religion asks man to suspend his capacity to think, abandon the labor of responsibility, and distrust the creativity and intelligence with which he has been endowed. It encourages dependence where there should be maturity, obedience where there should be discernment, and silence where there should be courage. It teaches people to outsource conscience, fear questions, and confuse passivity with virtue.

That is why the old claim that religion is the opium of the people still carries force. The issue is not merely that religion comforts. Comfort is not the problem. The problem is that religion can sedate. It can dull pain without confronting its cause. It can persuade oppressed people to spiritualize their suffering instead of interrogating the systems that produce it. It can teach the poor to accept deprivation as destiny and the exploited to call injustice providence.

That is where I dissent, without apology.

I do not believe God endorses greed. As the saying often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi puts it, the world has enough for human need, but not for human greed. I take that to mean that where human need is widespread, human greed is often nearby. In countries such as Nigeria, and across much of the developing world, needless suffering is too often the product of leaders and elites who treat the commonwealth as private property rather than as a public trust.

I do not believe God sanctions economic arrangements that enrich a few while condemning many to needless suffering. I do not believe God authors the misery created by corruption, exploitation, and social indifference. To attribute such suffering to the will of God is not piety. It is moral evasion. It is a way of laundering injustice through the language of faith.

Yet religion has often done exactly that. Instead of standing with the oppressed, it has frequently pacified them. Instead of exposing greed, it has often normalized its consequences. It has told suffering people to wait, to endure, to accept, and to trust that heaven will compensate for what earth has denied them. In such a framework, religion becomes an accomplice to oppression. It does not challenge the conditions that wound human dignity; it sanctifies them.

This is why liberation theology remains compelling to me and sits close to the center of my faith. It refuses to separate God from the concrete realities of poverty, structural injustice, and human suffering. It insists that faith must speak not only to the soul in abstraction, but also to the social, political, and economic conditions in which people actually live. It recognizes that poverty is not always accidental, suffering is not always sacred, and oppression is not a divine lesson to be endured without protest.

Faith should make us more fully human: more thoughtful, more courageous, more morally alert, and more resistant to everything that degrades the image of God in man. It should deepen conscience, not deaden it. It should awaken responsibility, not dissolve it. It should move human beings toward truth and justice, not train them to call oppression sacred.

So let the distinction be made plainly. Faith is not the problem. Religion is, when religion becomes a cage instead of a compass, a sedative instead of a summons, and an instrument of submission instead of a force for human flourishing.

I remain a person of faith. But I reject every form of religion that asks the poor to romanticize suffering, every theology that gives greed a moral disguise, and every spiritual system that demands intellectual surrender as the price of belonging.

A religion that fears reason should not be trusted. A religion that blesses oppression should not be revered. And a religion that teaches the wounded to kneel before the structures that wound them deserves not obedience, but resistance.

As a final admonition, I offer the words of Jesus: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Truth liberates. Truth strips illusion of its sanctimony. Truth exposes the fraud by which oppression dresses itself in sacred language.

This was corroborated, in today’s parlance, by the words of Adebayo Williams at the height of the June 12 struggle, in an article titled “Remembering Rufus,” published in Tempo magazine, a name he gave to a John Doe whose lifeless body was found on a Lagos street after a protest. He wrote: “Thus a properly educated mind will refuse to accept crude tyranny, for to accept tyranny is an act of intellectual self-dispossession; long after the guns have been silenced, the supersonic boom of ideas, the thunderous artillery of thinking will continue to echo.”

That is why I conclude that religion, when it deadens reason, sanctifies oppression, and teaches the wounded to wait for a heaven permanently placed beyond their reach, becomes an opium from hell: a sedative for the poor, a shield for the greedy, and a counterfeit gospel that promises liberation while keeping its victims in chains.

Do have an INSPIRED week ahead with the family.