Can CAN just shut up? By Bamidele Johnson
That CAN’s knickers are in a twist over the title of Ini Edo’s Dirty Christmas is entirely predictable. Like MURIC, the body has a titanic sense of grievance powered by a perfect 0.00 per cent self-awareness. Its outrage over a movie title is a curious choice of hill on which to die. That hill is bare, cold and historically inconvenient. Of all the forces contorting Christianity in Nigeria today, it is a film title that is triggering fury? One would think the faith were under siege by grammar rather than greed, by adjectives rather than avarice.
It bears repeating that Christmas is not a biblical festival. It is a pagan season deodorised, baptised and repackaged for Christian consumption. Christians adopted it. Once that borrowed origin is acknowledged, the moral high ground over a film title shrinks into a low stool.
CAN has been formidably blind, deaf and dumb to pulpiteers who mangle scripture into prosperity slogans, turn miracles into merchandise and reduce theology to TEDTalk. Verses are stretched beyond reason and doctrines bent into sales pitches, yet the association remains untroubled. A serious religious body should fear the corrosion of faith more than the semantics of cinema. Had CAN shown half this energy policing scriptural abuse, the monetisation of gullibility and the conversion of pulpits into the trading floor of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, the faith might enjoy higher fidelity.
Anger, like faith, needs direction. Spent on a movie title, it becomes performative righteousness: loud, shallow and misplaced. Christmas, dirty or just out of the washing machine, will survive a film. What Christianity cannot survive is silence in the face of its daily desecration by those who claim to speak for God and issue invoices for doing so. As things stand, CAN sounds less like a council of conscience and more like a body conflating decibel with doctrine. Abi na CAN-nabis dey work?
