By Richard Dablah
Freiburg, on a Sunday morning, is calm—almost too calm. The bells toll gently over the old town roofs, and inside the vaulted cathedral, the priest begins his homily. He speaks of grace, forgiveness, and stewardship. There is no invocation of the adversary. No “evil spirit” lurking in the sermon’s margins. No dramatic crescendo towards demonic confrontation. For the African immigrant seated quietly in the pew—accustomed to a Sunday liturgy woven with warnings of generational curses and ancestral sabotage—the silence is deafening.
It’s not just a liturgical omission. It’s a dislocation.
In many African religious contexts, particularly within Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, spirituality is narratively structured around confrontation with misfortune, with malign ancestral forces, with the devil himself. A theology of war animates the air: sermons unfold as battlegrounds, testimonies as war reports, and deliverance services as military campaigns. Evil is rarely abstract. It is named, dramatized, and often embodied in a neighbor, a bloodline, or a dream.
In Freiburg, that war has gone missing.
This absence forces the immigrant believer into an unexpected theological limbo. It’s not that European Christianity denies evil—rather, it compartmentalizes it. Sin here is internalized: greed, pride, indifference. Evil becomes an ethical lapse, not a metaphysical ambush. The devil does not speak in tongues or hide in a mother-in-law’s envy. He fades into metaphor.
For many in the diaspora, this feels like spiritual dereliction. They call it “cold,” or worse, “boring.” But what they mourn is not the style of delivery. It’s the collapse of a cosmology—a way of mapping pain, misfortune, and hope.
So they reach back. They stream sermons from Accra, Abuja, Kinshasa. They fly pastors in for revival conferences in Hamburg and Milan. They sponsor deliverance retreats. These figures—often controversial, always theatrical—are treated as emissaries from a spiritual world still intact. Their credentials are paradoxically validated not by piety alone, but by an intimate familiarity with evil. They are the ones who can name the demon, stage the battle, and pronounce the victory in tongues that resonate across borders.
But there is a cost.
As the exorcist becomes central, accountability recedes. The theology of spiritual warfare externalizes guilt and reconfigures suffering. A failing marriage is not due to emotional neglect—it is a spiritual attack. A stolen public fund is not the result of corrupt choices—it is a generational curse. A young girl’s depression is not mental illness—it is the whisper of witchcraft. In such a framework, moral agency becomes the first casualty. And once that falls, so does civic responsibility.
This is not merely a theological debate. It is a question of where a society locates power—and, by extension, where it places blame.
What happens when every social ill is reduced to spiritual sabotage? The political becomes paranormal. The ethical becomes spectral. The deeply human work of introspection, of building equitable systems, of reforming institutions—gets traded for the illusion of spiritual hygiene. A nation becomes a congregation in a constant state of exorcism. The devil is always at the door, and so the mirror is never consulted.
There’s something seductive about this framework. It explains suffering without implicating the sufferer. It gives structure to chaos and a villain to every misfortune. But it also stunts maturity, both spiritual and civic. The devil becomes a scapegoat with a thousand faces, while the slow, painful work of justice and accountability goes neglected.
Take my own family. A cousin left school, drifted into drugs and small-time theft. Almost immediately, the explanation assembled itself—spiritual attack, a cursed bloodline, witches from the village. Few paused to ask about the father who disappeared into drink, the blows that marked childhood, or the absence of mental health care. The narrative hardened quickly: he’d been taken by a demon. His pain, and our part in it, slipped out of view.
This is the trap: when evil is always “out there,” we are relieved from the responsibility of recognizing it “in here.” And in that relief, the devil—ironically—wins.
Europe may have gone too far in the other direction, over-sanitizing the spiritual, flattening the terrain of mystery and metaphysical language. But Africa, in its overexposure to the adversary, risks building a theology that looks less like worship and more like warfare for its own sake. A faith so obsessed with the devil eventually forgets to become good.
Perhaps what’s needed is not a new sermon, but a recalibration: to recognize the spiritual without losing grip of the social; to fight evil without forgetting our own hands may be complicit; to acknowledge the unseen while still holding the visible to account.
The devil is real, yes—but so are we.
—Nihil humanum a me alienum puto.
