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Governor of Bayelsa State, Senator Douye Diri, has admonished Christians and privileged individuals to reach out to those who do not have to enable them to celebrate Christmas.
Senator Diri gave the admonition during the state’s 2024 Christmas Carol of Nine Lessons at the DSP Alamieyeseigha Banquet Hall in Yenagoa.
The governor also urged his appointees to share whatever they got from the government with others, noting that if those privileged at this time learn to be their brother’s keeper, majority of Bayelsans and, indeed, Nigerians would have food to eat during the yuletide.
Senator Diri said the most important lesson about Christmas should be selfless love and sacrifice shown towards others.
The Bayelsa helmsman acknowledged the difficult economic times in the country but added that the period would soon be over.
His words: “Christians have reason to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. I also believe that no matter the hardship and hunger in the country, everyone will have something to eat this season if we learn to share even the little we have.
“For those who have, always give to those who do not have. If you are an official of government, please share with those who do not have.
“Everybody cannot reach the governor or the deputy governor. That is why we have over 5,000 appointees and if all of them open their hands, I am sure that 80-90 per cent of Bayelsans will have something to eat.”
The governor also enjoined Bayelsans to use the season to reflect and appreciate what God had done in their lives as individuals and as a state.
The colourful and well-attended event had choristers from the state executive council, legislature, judiciary, civil service and the state mass choir among others.
Niger State Governor, Mohammed Umar Bago, has appealed to Christians in the state to exercise patience regarding the yearly pilgrimage to Israel due to the lack of peace in the Holy Land.
Governor Bago, who made this statement at the 2024 State Christmas Carol organised by the Niger State Government in conjunction with the state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, at the Justice Legbo Kutigi International Conference Hall in Minna, said that allowing pilgrims to travel there would be equivalent to signing their death warrants.
Bago, represented by the Deputy Speaker of the Niger State House of Assembly, Afiniki Dauda, noted that the current challenges in the Middle East, particularly in Israel, pose a significant threat to the safety of pilgrims.
He emphasised that the governor cannot, in good conscience, authorise a trip that would put the lives of Christian pilgrims at risk.
“I am not willing to give tickets that would lead to the death of our Christian brothers and sisters,” he said.
“I urge them to be patient and wait until peace returns to the Middle East. The safety of our citizens is paramount, and we will not compromise on that,” he added.
Earlier, in his message, the chairman of the Niger State chapter of CAN, Most Rev Dr Bulus Dauwa Yohanna, had called on Governor Mohammed Bago to consider Christians for holy pilgrimage in the state.
He stated: “I want to take this opportunity to appeal to Your Excellency to consider pilgrimage to Jordan/Israel, Turkey/Jordan, and Rome or Greece, as there is an opportunity at the Federal level for intending pilgrims.”
The CAN chairman urged Christians in the state to continue to pray for the governor while appealing to them to show love and share with others.
Like other social scientists and scholars, I’ll spend the next weeks and months scouring pre-election data, the exit polls, and the first wave of post-election surveys trying to understand how a majority of American voters chose to return Donald Trump—a twice-impeached convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser who incited a violent insurrection when he lost the last election—to power.
Because elections are won and lost at the margins in a deeply divided nation such as ours, most of that analysis will rightly focus on which subgroups (like Latinos and young men) shifted most significantly away from the Democratic Party’s winning 2020 coalition. But that focus, while strategically important, will obscure the deeper peril facing our nation. Authoritarianism, when it blossoms, emerges from the deeper soil at the center.
With the Republican presidential candidate regularly spewing racist, misogynistic, and even Nazi ideology (such as claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country), the most remarkable thing about this election is not which groups shifted marginally in his direction, but which groups continued to provide him with supermajority support. Namely, we must talk about how thoroughly Christian nationalism has infected mainstream white Christianity.
Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 was made possible because, as noted by the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, 77% of white evangelical Protestant Christians, along with 57% of white non-evangelical Protestants and 64% of white Catholics, lent him moral legitimacy and gave him their votes. Even after watching Trump implement cruel policies such as separating migrant children from their parents and putting them in cages, even after witnessing his impeachment for abusing the power of the presidency to try to get a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election, white Christians continued to support him. White evangelical Protestant support for Trump in the 2020 election ticked up to 84%, while non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics generally held steady (57% each).
As Trump staged his political comeback in 2023 and 2024, white Christians had the benefit of witnessing a second Trump impeachment for inciting a violent insurrection in an attempt to remain in office after losing that election, four criminal indictments and a felony conviction, and the most overtly racist presidential campaign since George Wallace (who also held a fascist-style rally in Madison Square Garden in 1968).
Read More: How Trump Won
Despite all of this, in stark contrast to 2016, there were virtually no major dissenting voices among the leaders of Trump’s most stalwart supporters. Just two weeks before the 2024 election, American evangelical Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, explicitly petitioned God for Trump’s election at a Trump rally in Concord, NC. “There’s a spiritual element that’s at work here. There are dark forces that are arrayed against this man. They’ve tried to put him in prison; they’ve tried to assassinate him twice; he’s attacked every day in the media,” he lamented. “We pray for our nation and, Father, if it be thy will, that President Trump will win this election. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
According to the 2024 National Election Pool exit polls, 8 in 10 (81%) white evangelicals once again declared their allegiance to Trump, as did 60% of white Catholics and similar numbers of white non-evangelical Protestants. (Note: While there are no publicly available exit poll numbers for white non-evangelical Protestants, pre-election polling from PRRI suggests 6 in 10 once again supported Trump).
If we put white Christians’ strong support for Trump into context, we can clearly see their singular contribution to his power. Overall, more than two thirds (68%) of white Christians favored Trump over Harris—a mirror image of the rest of the country, including Christians of color (33%), followers of non-Christian religions (30%), and the religiously unaffiliated (28%). While the proportion of white Christians in the country has been declining over the last three decades, they remain 41% of the population and an even higher percentage of voters. Even a modest decline in the overwhelming level of support for Trump among white Christians would have denied him the Republican nomination or the presidency.
Most disturbingly, this time, white Christians, who once proudly called themselves “values voters,” knew exactly who and what they were voting for. With Trump abandoning the Republican Party’s longstanding support of a national ban on abortion and no Supreme Court justices left to appoint, the fig leaf of abortion fell away, exposing the uglier elements that have always tied white Christians to Trump.
Read More: Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America
PRRI’s surveys have consistently found strong support among white Christians for the racial grievance and xenophobia that is the deeper DNA of the MAGA movement. Majorities of white Christians agree that “today discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities.” And three quarters of white evangelical Protestants, along with 6 in 10 white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics, say they favor even the most extreme parts of Trump’s mass deportation scheme, described in the survey as “rounding up and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, even if it takes setting up encampments guarded by the U.S. military.”
But numerical support for Trump is only one facet of what white Christians have wrought in our nation. Historically, we know that all authoritarian leaders need a mechanism for projecting moral legitimacy, particularly as they accelerate efforts to consolidate power and undermine democratic norms and individual freedoms.
Nearly a century ago, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement coopted the German Evangelical Church. Today we are seeing similar uses of the Orthodox Christian churches in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Catholic Church in Viktor Orbán’s so-called “illiberal democracy” in Hungary—contemporary models both Trump and white evangelical leaders have praised.
Over the last decade, many white Christians have not just selfishly supported a dangerous, narcissistic man who promised to restore their waning influence; they have now willingly blessed the advent of a new American fascism that threatens our democratic future. They are principally responsible for Trump’s rise and return to power—and for everything that is coming for all of us in its wake.
Popular comedian and actor, Bright Okpocha, known as Basketmouth, has sparked a heated conversation about polygamy among the adherents of Christianity by referencing some biblical texts.
On Tuesday evening, Basketmouth took to his Instagram stories to present a cryptic argument about the subject.
In his post, Basketmouth cited several well-known biblical figures, drawing a distinction between those with single wives who “lost their way and betrayed God” and those with multiple wives who “found favour in the eyes of the Lord.”
He listed Ahab, Herod, Ananias, Pontius Pilate,
Jeroboam, Nebuchadnezzar, Haaman, and
Zakayo, each with one wife, noting that they all strayed from God’s path.
Conversely, he mentioned Abraham with three wives, Jacob with four wives, David with four wives, Solomon with 700 wives and 300 concubines, Rehoboam with 18 wives, Abijah with 14 wives, Elkanah with two wives, Lemech with two wives, emphasising that they all found favour with God.
In his characteristic comical way, Basketmouth, therefore, concluded by saying: “Whatever you do with this information is none of my business… However you want to interpret it is your cup of tea but I will be [in the] comment session.”
The controversial post generated significant discussion, with many debating the interpretation and relevance of the biblical references in contemporary society.
Chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Bauchi State, Reverend Abraham Damina Dumus, has called on the Christian community in the state to embrace the government’s good plans regarding the new graveyard acquired in Yelwa, a suburb of Bauchi metropolis.
He disclosed this while speaking with journalists in his office to clarify the new site of the Christian Cemetery, adding that they were agitating to have a new one because the old one had already filled up.
According to him, Governor Bala Mohammed has been up and doing to have a befitting and convenient graveyard for the Christians in the state, but all efforts made proved abortive.
The chairman added that looking at the old one that has filled up, they need to look for another place in a predominantly Christian area. He said they should accept it in good faith as long as those buried there are their brothers and sisters.
Damina called on the people affected to be patient, as the government will do everything possible to ensure that no one is cheated; rather, government will compensate them accordingly to avoid anything that can breach the peace being enjoyed in the state.
The chairman also said plans are underway to fence it and construct houses where the government will employ permanent and pensionable staff to guide people in burying their loved ones in an orderly manner, not indiscriminately.