By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu
The argument in brief
Every institution that shapes public life eventually meets a test it cannot refuse. The bank meets its regulator, the firm its market, the government its voters. One kind of institution has learned to decline the test altogether, and it has done so by borrowing the one credential no auditor can examine: the name of God.
This essay is not an argument against faith. It is an inquiry into a transfer of authority, the quiet process by which assemblies of men, with their drafts, votes, patrons and penalties, came to be received as the voice of heaven. It begins by prising apart two errors usually fused into one: the illusion that religious institutions cannot fail, and the deeper delusion that they stand in direct line with the divine. It then returns to Nicaea in 325, where a Roman emperor gathered bishops to settle the nature of God for the sake of imperial peace, and follows how such human settlements, once their origins were forgotten, hardened into revelation.
From there the inquiry comes home. Nigeria, where faith saturates public life and religious bodies have resisted even modest rules of governance, shows what the borrowed halo costs when the state is weak and the faithful do not ask. The essay then confronts the irony at the centre of Constantine’s project: the method designed to secure unity has bred schism for seventeen centuries.
A serious argument as this should owe its opponents their best case, and that case is set out in full before the essay closes with three disciplines for believers who wish to keep their faith while recovering their judgement. What it finally asks of the reader is what the bishops at Nicaea could not do for themselves: to look again at the room in which the sacred was decided.
The domain no auditor enters
Every institution that touches public life submits, at least in principle, to some test. Banks answer to regulators, firms to markets, governments to ballots and courts, however imperfectly. Religious institutions stand apart. They gather wealth, command loyalty, shape conscience and law, and order the lives of millions, yet they claim exemption from the measures every other human enterprise must accept: reason, verifiable results, and answerability for outcomes.
The exemption is no oversight. It rests on a claim rarely stated and everywhere assumed, that these bodies are not merely human. This reflection does not interrogate God. It interrogates the claim that particular human organisations hold God’s voice in trust, and the habit of treating that claim as beyond discussion.
The question is plain. When men build a structure, write its rules, appoint its officers and then declare that the structure speaks for heaven, who checks the declaration?
Two errors, not one
The first error is an illusion: the belief that religious institutions are infallible. An illusion is a misreading of what stands in plain view. Churches have split, councils have contradicted councils, and revered leaders have been exposed as ordinary men with ordinary appetites. The record is public. The illusion survives the record, because questioning it feels like betrayal and the institution rewards those who do not ask.
The second error is deeper, and it is a delusion: the conviction that these man-made bodies connect directly, even exclusively, to the ultimate being. A delusion is held against evidence because the believer cannot imagine the evidence applying. Here the institution and the divine collapse into one. To question the bishop, the imam, the general overseer or the synod becomes indistinguishable from questioning God.
The illusion makes the institution unaccountable. The delusion makes it unanswerable. Together they convert human preference into divine command. A rule on dress, a doctrine on who may lead, a stance on a disputed social question, a demand for a tithe: each passes through the institution and emerges bearing a sanction no human argument can reach.
Nicaea: when an emperor convened a definition
The decisive moment came in 325, not in the third century as is sometimes said. Constantine, an emperor rather than a king, had already granted Christians legal toleration through the arrangement agreed at Milan in 313. Within a decade the faith he protected was quarrelling over one question: was Christ of the same substance as the Father, or a created being, as the Alexandrian priest Arius taught?
Constantine did not treat this as a mystery to contemplate. He treated it as a threat to the cohesion of his empire. He summoned the bishops to Nicaea, carried them at public expense, presided at the opening and pressed for a formula that would end the dispute. The creed that emerged was drafted, argued, amended and agreed. Bishops who refused to sign were exiled. The same assembly fixed the date of Easter.
Nothing in that sequence was hidden. It was a political convening with an imperial patron, a drafting process and penalties for dissent. Believers may hold that the Spirit guided the outcome; that is a claim of faith. What cannot be denied is the human machinery through which the outcome arrived, and the pattern continued long after Constantine.
Year
Event
What a human assembly or ruler settled
313
Agreement at Milan, Constantine and Licinius
Legal toleration of Christianity
325
Council of Nicaea, convened by Constantine
Core creed on Christ’s divinity; date of Easter; disciplinary canons
367 to 397
Easter letter of Athanasius; councils of Hippo and Carthage
Lists of New Testament books received as canon
380
Edict of Thessalonica, Theodosius I
Nicene Christianity made the religion of the empire
381
Council of Constantinople
Creed expanded, chiefly on the Holy Spirit
451
Council of Chalcedon
Definition of Christ’s two natures; churches rejecting it separated
One correction belongs here, because critics often overreach: Nicaea did not choose the books of the Bible. The canon settled gradually over the following century. The argument survives the correction. Creed, canon and imperial religion were each fixed by assemblies of men, often with the state seated in the room.
How agreement becomes revelation
The mechanism repeats across traditions and centuries, and it moves in four steps.
- A dispute arises among believers.
- Leaders, often with political backing, convene to settle it.
- The settlement is written down as creed, canon, ruling or law.
- Over a generation or two, the memory of the meeting fades, and the settlement is remembered as something received rather than something decided.
The fourth step does the decisive work. The vote is forgotten; the result is sanctified. A later believer meets the creed not as the outcome of a contested assembly but as the faith once delivered. To question it is no longer to reopen a human debate. It is to defy heaven.
Islam shows the same pattern in its own idiom. A standard text of the Qur’an was fixed under the caliph Uthman, and variant copies were ordered destroyed. The schools of law grew from the reasoning of jurists, and their authority rests partly on ijma, the consensus of scholars, which is itself a human device. The devout hold that God preserved the outcome. The process remained human.
No single tradition is the target. The pattern is: human settlement, then forgetting, then sanctification.
The Nigerian ledger
Nigeria offers the clearest present case of what happens when a borrowed halo meets a weak state. Faith is everywhere: in the morning broadcast, the campaign rally, the boardroom prayer, the crusade banner on the expressway. Religious bodies run schools, hospitals and universities, and carry much of the country’s informal welfare. Few publish audited accounts. Fewer still answer to members in any way members can enforce.
When the state has tried to apply ordinary measures, the response has been instructive. In 2016 the Financial Reporting Council issued a governance code that would have limited how long founders could head not-for-profit bodies, churches included. The backlash was swift; the code was suspended and the council’s head removed in early 2017. In 2020 a provision of the Companies and Allied Matters Act allowing regulators to suspend trustees of associations drew a similar outcry from church leaders. In neither case was the main objection that the rule was badly drafted. It was that the state had no business auditing the things of God.
The cost of that exemption is not abstract. In September 2014 a guesthouse at the Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos collapsed, killing 116 people. A coroner’s inquest found the structure had been built without approval and recommended prosecution. The church pointed instead to a mysterious aircraft and sabotage, and many followers accepted that account.
The same logic runs across the country’s religious divide. Since 1999, twelve northern states have extended Sharia into criminal law, and several enforce standards of public conduct through religious police. Supporters see the faithful governed by God’s law. Critics see particular human interpretations of that law, shaped by jurists and politicians, carrying the force of the state and the authority of heaven at once.
The cohesion that bred fracture
Constantine wanted unity. He reasoned, as rulers do, that one faith under one creed would steady one empire. The irony is that his method, defining belief by assembly and enforcing it by exile, multiplied the divisions it was meant to close.
Arianism did not die at Nicaea. It outlived Constantine, who was baptised at the end of his life by a bishop sympathetic to Arius. Chalcedon divided the churches of Egypt, Syria and Armenia from the imperial church. Rome and Constantinople parted in 1054. The Reformation broke the Western church, and its heirs have kept dividing since. Nigeria today hosts denominations beyond easy counting, each claiming a direct line to the same God.
Every split followed one script. Each party declared its settlement divine and the other’s heretical. Neither could appeal to a court above the claim, because the claim admitted no court. A dispute that would be resolvable if understood as human becomes permanent once both sides believe they are defending God.
Here lies the fault line beneath the whole edifice. The device intended to produce peace, the sanctification of human agreement, is the same device that makes disagreement irreconcilable.
The strongest reply
A fair interrogation as this must face the best answer its subjects can give. That answer has five strands.
- Transmission. Faith cannot cross centuries without institutions. Scripture itself was gathered, copied and guarded by communities; to reject institutions wholesale is to saw off the branch every believer sits on.
- Providence through process. A human process does not exclude divine guidance. Believers hold that God acts through history, councils included, as surely as through prophets.
- Modest formal claims. Many traditions claim less than critics suppose. Catholic teaching confines infallibility to narrow solemn definitions, formally invoked very rarely, and in 2000 Pope John Paul II publicly confessed the sins of the Church’s members.
- Wrong instruments. Profit and efficiency may be the wrong measures for bodies whose purpose is worship, meaning and mercy.
- Visible good. The same institutions run schools, clinics and relief where the state is absent.
These are serious points, and the interrogation is sharper for meeting them. None of them however closes the gap. Granting that God may guide human assemblies, the faithful still need some way to tell guidance from interest, and a claim that cannot be tested cannot supply it. Granting that formal doctrine is modest, the lived authority of the pastor, the overseer and the cleric routinely exceeds anything doctrine permits. The trouble lies less in what institutions teach about themselves than in what they allow followers to believe.
What a critical rethink requires
Nothing here asks anyone to abandon faith. It asks faith to stop lending its halo to structures that have not earned it. Three disciplines follow.
The first is historical honesty. Believers should know how their creeds, canons and codes came to be: who convened, who drafted, who was exiled. Knowing that a doctrine was agreed by vote does not make it false. It makes it human, and therefore open to the questions humans owe one another.
The second is separating the claim of God from the conduct of the institution. A congregation can hold that God is just while requiring its leaders to publish accounts, observe term limits and answer for buildings that fall. Accountability is not irreverence.
The third is refusing divine sanction for human preference. When a rule about money, power, gender or public order arrives wrapped in the name of God, the faithful are entitled to ask the question Constantine’s bishops could not: which part of this came from heaven, and which part came from the room?
The world did not drift into this condition by accident. It was carried here by a long habit of forgetting how its sacred structures were built. The rethink begins with remembering.
About the Author
Charles is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos
