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DOI 12.33234/SSR.12.3
Critiquing the Depiction of Poverty: Piety and Christianity in selected Nigerian Newspapers’ Cartoons
Dr. Victor Taiwo ODEWALE
Department of Religious Studies,
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife
Abstract
Some holiness churches believe that Christianity is synonymous with material poverty. Material poverty in relation to the religion as believed in some quarters is even taken to be a clear ticket needed by the devotees to please and share a paradise with God. This can be so, if the ideology behind the Monks and Nuns in the olden days is anything to go by. From the above statement, it is observed that there was once a nexus between the religion and poverty. The extant literature showed that editorial cartoons have played great roles in the political formation and condemnation of corrupt practices in Nigeria. Therefore, this paper shall examine how Christianity and Poverty are represented in the Editorial Cartoons of some national dailies in Nigeria. This is with a view to investigating whether Christianity as projected in the editorial cartoons of the selected national dailies has a close rank with poverty or both are considered as two parallel lines which have no meeting point. The paper adopted a semiotics content and thematic analyses of the manifest data of the Nigerian Tribune, The Punch, Vanguard and Daily Trust newspapers based on their wide readership. These were analysed from systematically selected editions of the papers. The findings indicated that the editorial cartoons of the selected papers were really used to establish that the religion and poverty have a very close link. The paper concluded that the editorial cartoonists as noted in the selected works have failed to observe the current trend of affluence in the religion, particularly among the Pentecostals.
Key words: Christian values, Poverty, Corruption, Cartoons, Cross in Christianity.