Africa is being recolonized today, though this time not with armies or arbitrary borders but through Western governments and humanitarian outfits imposing population control ideology, sexual liberation, and abortion, says Obianuju Ekeocha.

This new form of colonization is rooted in a master-slave mindset, Ekeocha stresses in her book, Target Africa: Ideological Neo-colonialism in the Twenty-First Century, which was released earlier this year and documents the nefarious funding streams and political schemes behind this injustice.

While Africa has undoubtedly struggled ever since the end of colonization with all kinds of socio-economic issues and political dysfunction, rich donors from the West have exploited those problems and have assumed the role of savior and deliverer, offering “solutions” contrary to the values of most African people, she explains in the book.

A vivacious international pro-life advocate, Ekeocha, who is Nigerian by birth and is now based in the U.K., began her investigation into this subject back in 2012 when Melinda Gates emerged with a proposal to raise $5 billion to fund contraception in Africa. Ekeocha was outraged and wrote Gates a letter explaining that she, as a Nigerian Catholic, neither needed nor wanted what she was bringing. What the Africans need is a good health care systems, food programs for young children, and better education opportunities, she says.

“If you have dollars, if you hold the purse-strings, unfortunately you are in the more powerful one in this dynamics of this relationship,” Ekeocha said an interview with The Christian Post.

Much of the thinking stems from an alarmist belief that African demographics portend disaster given climate change and a less stable food supply. Some believe that the answer to those looming threats is fewer people and, therefore, drastic measures should be taken to reduce the population, a view rooted in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. Yet even though Ehrlich’s apocalyptic predictions never materialized, his work continues to underpin much of the approach being carried out in poor nations around the world.

And the solutions these Western entities provide “rely heavily on a single-minded strategy that entails removing or drastically reducing the source of the population growth in Africa — female fertility,” Ekeocha says in the chapter on population control.

“Thus, Western nations, organizations, and foundations wage war against the bodies of African women,” she continues.

While she always understood that Western nations were giving more money for condoms and contraception, she didn’t want to entertain conspiracy theories, and sifted through mounds of data and statistics in the United Nations’ archives where the money is closely tracked.

Ekeocha explains that a key year in all of this is 1994 when at a conference in Cairo, Egypt, Western governments were told that if they give money to African nations it can qualify as aid even if it’s for contraceptives. From 1993 to 2012 such aid increased by 1,930 percent.

“When I did all the math, tracked all the money and put it all in one place, the amount of money going into the world for population programs was about $600 million dollars per year to $12 billion per year,” Ekeocha told CP.

Anyone who makes that percentage of increase in money they are giving you within such a space of time means business, she said, and they have an agenda.

Ekeocha also unpacks how, through complicated schemes, even small organizations like the U.K.-based Population Matters markets a sense of self-righteousness to donors, allowing them to feel virtuous by buying environmental credit of sorts for the electricity and energy they consume. For every child born in Africa they ask their donors to give a certain amount of money based on their CO2 emissions.

Obianuju Ekeocha, author of “Target Africa.”

As she explains in Chapter 6 “Modern-Day Colonial Masters,” Population Matters launched an online initiative in 2009 just days after a climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. The website was called PopOffsets which “enable[d] individuals and organizations to offset their carbon emissions by making online donations for contraception and sterilization in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and other developing countries, even though the carbon emissions per capita in the United Kingdom is more than 135 times higher than that in Ethiopia.”

“Go ahead, commandeer the world’s resource and live self-indulgently, Population Matters seems to be suggesting, so long as you prevent a poor African from being born,” she writes.

Ekeocha told CP: “That scared me, because if a movement like that inasmuch as it’s a small group here, but they still run in millions of pounds and dollars from all their members. … And if someone is saying, ‘I’m trying to make the Earth greener’ so for every plane ride I take, every car ride I take, or every cup of coffee I buy, my use of electricity, I will make up for that by donating money to this group who will go out to Africa and do vasectomies on men.” If such efforts are multiplied it could devastate the whole continent, she said, and the approach is wholly ineffective and wrongheaded.

Ekeocha, who’s a biomedical scientist with a specialization in hematology, founded Culture of Life Africa in 2013 to highlight the toxic connection between the abortion and family planning industries and foreign aid. Her profile has only continued to gain traction ever since; she’s also active on Twitter where she frequently speaks out on pro-life issues and has amassed a following of nearly 43,000.

In 2016, when speaking before the United Nations in New York during a session on best practices for maternal health in Africa at the Commission on the Status of Women, a video showing a portion of her remarks went viral. A Danish representative was provoked that Ekeocha would refer to the humanitarian efforts promoting abortion as “colonization” and argued that the Africans ought to regard this as a positive development, and let Africans make their own choices.

Ekeocha replied that if she tried to translate into the Igbo language what it means for a woman to “choose what to do with her body” and that abortion is somehow a good thing, she could not do it as there is no way of even phrasing such an idea in her tribal tongue.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ6nioMimCc]

“Culturally, most of the African communities actually believe, by tradition, by their cultural standards, that abortion is a direct attack on human life,” she said at the time.

“So for anybody to convince any woman in Africa that abortion is actually a good thing and can be a good thing, you first of all have to tell her that what her parents and what her grandparents and her ancestors taught her was actually wrong. You’re going to have to tell her that they have always been wrong in their thinking, and that is colonization.”

African countries have been put into a position where they’re being forced to take aid money that is destructive and addictive, Ekeocha told CP. The final chapter of Target Africa outlines how she believes the continent needs to be decolonized from certain Western influences and the superiority complexes many groups carry when they come bearing “gifts.”

“We’re kind of at an impasse” Ekeocha said, noting that African nations are frequently told that they are “independent” countries, because while they are not under colonial rule as in ages past, they remain beholden to these outside Western donor groups.

She hopes her book will provide a diagnostic snapshot of the proverbial wounds and infection in this system. Ekeocha reiterated that the continent’s many problems will not be solved by having fewer people, and Westerners, Christians included, have a lot to learn from African believers and its people.

In a region of the world known for some of the worst poverty on the planet, a poverty that touches many in African societies, she explains, Africans know in the core of their being that God is their only hope.

“When you don’t have governments stepping in now and again, and all of the programs that we find here in Europe and America, entitlements and all those things, we don’t have them. And, in a way, it’s a good thing, because that means people get to understand who really is their Provider, their Protector and that their sustenance comes from God,” she told CP.

Ekeocha thought that she would be accustomed to life in the West when she moved to the U.K., having read many Western novels and watched movies, but she was in for a surprise. She told CP that prior to relocated to Europe she had never met more than five atheists in her whole life.

“We don’t have big atheist communities in Africa because people understand you cannot be in a place where you do not have any safety net and not recognize that God is your safety net. Even the wealthy Nigerians still have to cling to God. We cling to God because at any point in time your life, your protection, your sustenance — that even breathing comes from God Almighty.”

“And Africans are not ashamed to hold on to that child-like faith. We are unashamedly dependent on Him.”

Copyright © 2018 Originally published by Brandon Showalter on Christian Post-All rights reserved.

Christian NFL player Benjamin Watson has opened up about his views on abortion and how it factors into race relations in America today.

In an hour-long interview for the San Diego-based Turning Point Pregnancy Resource Center‘s blog interview series, Watson, a devout Christian who often speaks out publicly on a wide range of racial and political issues, answered questions on whether race plays into the abortion debate, whether men should have any say over whether women get an abortion, and why he is pro-life.

Watson, the author of the book Under Our Skin, has frequently discussed the racial divide in America, whether in his book, Facebook posts or in media interviews.

In the second part of the interview, Watson gave great detail on how race factors into the issue of abortion. He pointed out that the abortion agenda seems to be focused primarily on minorities and how the nation’s largest abortion business was founded by Margaret Sanger, who has often been accused of being a racist and a eugenicist.

“I do know that blacks kind of represent a large portion of the abortions, and I do know that honestly the whole idea with Planned Parenthood and Sanger in the past was to exterminate blacks, and it’s kind of ironic that it’s working,”

Watson said. “We [as minorities] support candidates, and overwhelmingly support the idea of having Planned Parenthood and the like, and yet, that is why she created it.”

Watson criticized minorities for buying into the abortion agenda and suggested that black and hispanic pregnant teens are encouraged to get abortions rather than keep their babies.

“We are buying it hook, line, and sinker, like it’s a great thing. It’s just amazing to me and abortion saddens me, period. But it seems to be something that is really pushed on minorities and provided to minorities especially as something that they should do,” Watson asserted.

“In the public, it seems to be painted that when minorities get pregnant they need to get abortions, especially when it comes to teen pregnancy.

“It’s like when black girls are pregnant, it’s like a statistic, but when white girls get pregnant, they get a TV show,” he added.

Watson explained that his book mentions how many political ideas, such as minorities should get abortions, are “forced into our heads” through “reinforced culture.”

He said it’s difficult for black people to climb the socioeconomic ladder when abortion is so prevalent in the black community.

“We sit here and talk about advancing the black agenda, whatever that means, we talk about our interests, and what’s important to us — like having political power and advancement and all those things — and then we are turning around and we are killing our children,” Watson said. “And we are buying the lie that it’s our personal decision to make.”

“Honestly, I am sympathetic, I am. Because I know it’s a hard decision,” Watson continued. “I don’t know exactly what it’s like to be pregnant and to be a single mom, or even to be a married mom and not want the child. I would never assume people are having abortions flippantly. I know people have them for convenience, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a tough choice for the mothers to make, so I always want to be sympathetic to that.”

Read more at Christian Post

Crystal Cathedral Church interior. Photo Credit: Public Domain

They’re Leaving in Droves?

The question, “Why are people leaving the church?” raises several issues critical to the health and life of the church, especially the church in North America.

Once possessing a “favored place at the community table” along with other community leaders, with portfolio and reputation to boot, the church in North America is now hemorrhaging members at an alarming rate.

Further, the indifference toward the church by non-attenders and unbelievers has been a shock to the often insulated and isolated members of an all too often recalcitrant church. To make matters worse, most people in the church are clueless as to the reasons for this indifference.

Recent studies have recognized the difficulties facing the church in reaching a new generation of unbelievers and unchurched people. In a recent summary of his new book in the Lifeway publication Facts and Trends, The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated, James E. White analyzes the challenge of reaching people who are, at best, indifferent to the church and seemingly unmoved by the message of the Gospel. White notes ten characteristic of the “nones”:

1. he is a he — women tend to be more open to spiritual things, while men are more skeptical, less committal;
2. he is young;
3. he is white, although a growing number of non-white persons are showing interest in religious traditions other than Christianity;
4. he is not necessarily an atheist — God, at best, is a universal spirit, a deist theological position;
5. he is not very religious — choosing not to identify with an organized, religious body, while, at the same time he considers himself spiritual;
6. he’s most likely a Democrat;
7. he thinks abortion and same-gender marriage should be legal — thereby turning traditional definitions of marriage and family upside down and inside out;
8. he considers himself morally liberal to moderate at best;
9. he is not necessarily hostile toward religious institutions — institutions, he might say, too concerned with money and power; these institutions are non-essential; and,
10. he is more than likely a Westerner — someone located west of the Mississippi River.

White’s analysis of the current religious terrain reflects the research by such respected institutions as Barna Research Group, Lifeway Research, and other reputable groups that analyze such data.

In sum, White said people are leaving the church because:

1. the church is too narrow-minded and unbending on moral issues;
2. the church is more interested in propping up the institution of the church rather than fulfilling the mission of the church;
3. the church is legalistic and not gracious and merciful enough;
4. the church has isolated itself from the lives of real people and is, therefore, disconnected from the reality of life;
5. the church is anti-intellectual, rejecting the claims of science and modernity;
6. the church is antiquated in its methodologies, methodologies that were effective at one time but are no longer essential and effective;
7. the church is not very warm and loving, failing to recognize people want intimate and personal settings for relationship building in order to work out their spiritual and personal issues, not systems that are large, cumbersome, and unwieldy — and the list could go on as to why people are leaving the church.

The church in North America is in trouble.

1. But Is That the Whole Story?

While I agree with many of the criticisms that are leveled at the church, I would like to look at the question — “Why are people leaving the church?” — from a different angle.

What troubles me most about this question is that the church is usually the one on trial rather than the motives of the unchurched and unbelieving. Why is the church always on trial? Why is the church always in question? Why are the motives of the church always under the spotlight and never the motives of the unbelieving community? It goes without saying that the church does put itself in the bulls-eye by claiming to have exclusive rights on the truth. Yet, is it fair to always blame the church? I think not.

I want to offer an alternative list of answers to the question — “Why are people leaving the church?” — that may explain the indifference many have to the church itself and the gospel she preaches.

1. People leave the church because the gospel way is truly narrow. “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt. 7:13-14). Why are we surprised when people decide not to enter the narrow way of salvation that leads to eternal life? To enter the narrow way means that we have to drop everything to follow Christ.
2. People leave the church because the gospel requires repentance and faith; the gospel is about turning away from sin/self and turning by faith to the Savior, a repentance and faith that is not about self-fulfillment or self-actualization. “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death” (2 Cor. 7:10). Repentance requires self-denial, the very thing most sinners dislike. Faced with the call to repent, it is easy for the sinner to accuse the church of being narrow-minded and unloving when, in actuality, it is simply being true to the gospel message.
3. People leave the church because of the demands of holy living. While holiness can morph into legalism, it is also true that holiness is the by-product of the Spirit’s work in the life of the believer. We are called to be holy (1 Pt. 1:16), to reflect the character of Jesus Christ as a by-product of the Spirit’s work (Gal. 5:22ff.). The label of legalism is too easy of an accusation to be used against the church, especially when that charge is motivated by unholy people for unholy purposes. To be holy is critical to the Christian life. “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” (Heb. 12:14) Holiness doesn’t mean isolation. Holiness means to be set apart for a special or specific purpose; it means to reflect the very character of God. One can be holy and be connected to real life at the same time. If holiness means isolation from the world then it has misunderstood the meaning of holiness.
4. People leave the church because they are not truly rooted and grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. While many people give the appearance of “being saved” for a season; time and truth have a way of exposing the true nature of a person’s profession of faith, a faith commitment that may be disingenuous and inauthentic, where the person “has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately falls away” (Mt. 13:21).
5. People leave the church because a “gospel-less commitment” is eventually overcome by “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfaithful” (Mt. 13:22). They have no appetite for the things of God because their appetites for the world have not been curtailed or assuaged.
6. People leave the church because their understanding of the gospel does not comprehend the nature of gospel commitment, consecration, and endurance. As a result, many ‘try out’ Christianity to see if it works for them, without truly understanding the gospel, soon departing when they realize that the gospel is not all about “me” but about the Lordship of Jesus Christ: “Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us” (1 Jn. 2:18-19).
7. People leave the church because they love the world and their own lives more than they love Jesus Christ. They fail to understand that Christianity is not about self-fulfillment, self-actualization, or a some grandiose social project; instead, the gospel is not about making bad men good or good men better – Christianity is about making dead men live, about life transformation (Eph. 2:1-10; Rom. 12:1-2). Many people are O.K. with being God-centered so long a God is man-centered or me-centered. It is a hard thing to be radically God-centered. It is a shocking truth for many to discover that while God’s gracious work for us and in us through Jesus Christ brings with it many benefits, in the end, all things are for God’s glory, a glory he will not share with anyone (Isa. 48:11).
8. People leave the church because the church resists the desire for the individual to build a smorgasbord belief system, picking and choosing those things they like about Christianity and rejecting those truths about Christianity that may be less-desirable, on their way to constructing a personal theology that is more individualistic than biblical. This could be what the Apostle Paul was getting at when he wrote these penetrating words to Timothy: “For the time will come when people will not endure sound teaching (doctrine), but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Tim. 4:3-4). While there is great latitude for individual self-expression and giftedness, we are not allowed to make up our own theological or belief system or to separate out the things we like about Christianity from the things we don’t like. Some people leave when they realize that there is a “faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), a faith that is the sum and substance of the Gospel itself and that cannot be substituted by a diminished or degraded Gospel.
9. Finally, people leave the church because they are unconverted. They need to be saved. Genuine salvation presupposes many of the aforementioned points.

In Summary

While the church is not innocent when it comes to accounting for the many reasons people leave the church, it should also be said that those who leave the church carry with them a great degree of duplicity and guilt in this matter.

The church is not solely to blame. In fact, we should not be surprised when people leave, especially those whose hearts have not been truly transformed by a well-articulated, well-understood Gospel that aims at redirecting the self from sin to the Savior, a turning that produces a level of commitment and consecration that can endure the challenges of living a holy life in an unholy world and the often ugly nature of a church that is all too imperfect.

Source: Christian Post via Watchman Research Media