“Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead…” — James 2:17(KJV)

There is a name for what happens when people outsource responsibility so completely they stop believing their actions matter. Psychologists call it learned helplessness. In Nigeria, we call it faith.

Faith without works is dead, James says — but the average Nigerian believer has made it a full substitute for civic life.

It is praying to God that thieves have no access to your house while actively leaving the front door ajar. It is praying to God to touch the hearts of corrupt governments while never registering to vote, never showing up, never paying attention until the lights go out and the road swallows someone you love.

It is, in practice, believing that sincerity of feeling is a reasonable replacement for action; that the intensity of your prayer somehow compensates for the emptiness of your hands.

Suggest to one of these believers that a Christian should run for office, and watch the theology shift in real time.Suddenly the game is dirty and no ‘righteous’ man of God should soil his hands in it.

The Christian who dares to show up at a party secretariat becomes suspect; either he has compromised, or he was never truly saved.

The pastor who campaigns is a wolf. The elder who canvasses is a sellout. The believer who runs is no longer one.

This is the hypocrisy that has been ignored for years. The same people who insist the government is wicked are the first to ensure no righteous person can get near it.

They want clean governance delivered to them by a God they have also decided should not work through humans in positions of power.

"The game is dirty," they say, as though dirt is a fixed property of a thing and not the residue of who has been handling it. As though the solution to a dirty game is to stand outside it, hands raised in prayer, and wait for it to clean itself.

God is not coming down to audit the INEC servers. He is not going to restructure the local government system or show up at the National Assembly to vote down a bad bill.

The theology they claim to believe already settled this: He works through people. That is the entire architecture of the faith.

Yet the people most fluent in that theology have collectively decided that those people — the ones He would work through — should stay home, stay pure and stay useless.

This did not happen by accident. Nigerian Christianity has been trained into passivity for decades, trained by a prosperity gospel that reframes suffering as spiritual warfare and reframes action as a lack of trust.

To run for office is to love the world. Entire generations have been taught that the correct response to a failing state is a louder prayer, a longer fast, a bigger offering, and that anything beyond that is faithlessness dressed as ambition.

A 2022 Pew Research survey found that Nigeria is among the most religiously devout nations on earth. It is also, by most governance indices, among the most catastrophically misgoverned. The correlation is not coincidence. It is curriculum.

The church has not only been a refuge from Nigeria's dysfunction. In many ways, it has been its manufacturer.

The result is a nation of people who are, by their own confession, deeply moral, and who have, by their own choices, made that morality entirely private.

A nation whose most convicted citizens have agreed, en masse, to sit out the project of building it. A nation that prays at full volume and governs in total silence.

Faith without works is dead. But a nation that has mistaken its paralysis for piety is something worse than dead. It is dying slowly, with its hands folded, calling it prayer.