Politics & Power Quote by Peter Akinola

Akinola writes like someone watching a fire from across an ocean and refusing to call it an accident. The sentence is engineered to do two things at once: mourn and indict. “Filled with grief” offers the pastoral posture, the tone of reluctant lament. But the grief is quickly weaponized into a diagnosis of cause: not mere “decline,” but a self-inflicted collapse, a church “determined” to do this to itself. That word removes ambiguity and, conveniently, removes the need for sympathetic explanations like demographics, secularization, or institutional mismanagement.

The subtext is geopolitical and theological. As a prominent Anglican leader from Nigeria, Akinola is speaking from the part of global Christianity that has been growing and increasingly confident, looking at North American churches that have been shrinking while liberalizing on sexuality, authority, and doctrine. “Missionary zeal” isn’t nostalgia for hymn-singing; it’s a reminder of the earlier Western church’s export of faith, now flipped into a reversal of moral authority. The once-senders are now, in his telling, the cautionary tale.

“Deadly embrace” is the clincher: intimacy recast as suffocation. He frames cultural accommodation not as dialogue or contextualization but as capitulation to “the spirit of the age,” a phrase that makes modernity itself sound like a demonic atmosphere. It’s polemic dressed as elegy, meant to rally orthodox resistance and legitimize the Global South’s claim to guardianship over Anglican identity, with North America positioned as both wayward child and warning sign.