I was recently on a Christian website which carried the following words: ‘There is a tradition in historical Christianity that claims that Jesus descended into hell during the three days He was in the grave. The Apostles’ Creed says that Jesus was crucified, died, and buried. He descended into hell. The third day, he rose again from the dead.’ According to this tradition, Jesus went to hell to liberate the righteous. However, as he unclenched the hand of love, many of the righteous rejected the Son of God’s overture. He thus ascended with only the righteous who accepted him as the way, the truth and the light. The righteous who chose to stay in hell became the menus for damnation’s eternal barbecues.
Recently, a government functionary reminded me that the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) came from God. ‘That’s true’, I conceded. ‘But so did the devil’. The latter, I added, began his fiery career in Heaven. Based on the devil’s career trajectory, one must agree that hell is only a career move away. This is why politics is a zero-sum game in Uganda. It’s a life and death affair. Opposition members, righteous in every way, believe that to negotiate with the government would be akin to allowing the fox into the henhouse. There would be blood and feathers everywhere, with red flowing into a crimson tide. The NRM, on the other hand, only sees red when they see the Opposition. The two have thus gone eyeball to eyeball, and Uganda continues to blink.
This has turned our country into a hell waiting to catch fire. If Jesus came down and asked the righteous to follow Him and thereby leave their animosities this side of eternity, the righteous NRM and its Opposition would refuse. They would instead choose to reign in hell than serve in heaven. This is where we have reached. Our political appetites, exemplified by greed, have trapped us in hell, and we don’t even know it. We think this is the best we can do. That’s why we choose conflict over conversations, which champion our diversity as the very basis of our potential unity. We get it. It’s thrilling to hate. You get a rush from the release, which comes with blaming everyone but you for what has happened to you.
It doesn’t matter your affiliation or disaffiliation; it feels better to hate because that externalises the self-blame, you’re not strong enough to endure. Yet it must be endured. To endure is to refuse to give up, no matter what. In the 2023 film The Exorcist: Believer, this sentiment of giving up being surrender to the devil is well expressed. It reflects the central theme of the movie that the devil’s ultimate goal is to make humanity despair and lose faith. The devil recognises the power of despair. In the movie, the demon uses psychological attacks to convince people that hope is lost, pushing them toward despair-which characters in the film describe as a form of spiritual defeat.
Also, the devil uses the deception of choice. During the movie climax, the demon presents an impossible choice: one girl must be chosen to live while the other dies. This is revealed as a trick intended to make the parents “give up” their moral ground; when a choice is finally made out of desperation, the demon subverts it to cause maximum suffering. That’s why, no matter where you stand politically, you cannot give up on Uganda. To do so would controvert the very spirit of this season. I wish you a Merry Christmas!