We built God out of fear.

Not love. Not peace. Not cosmic order.

Fear. Crude, elemental, and deeply human.

We carved Him from lightning and famine, gave Him the voice of thunder, and the wrath of the wilderness. We whispered Him into being beside the dying fires of collapsing tribes, in deserts where men staggered after locusts, in jungles where panthers stalked our ancestors’ prayers. Then we wrapped Him in doctrine and dogma, in temples and temples and temples, until He became less of a spirit and more of a monument. Less breath and more law. And somewhere along that road, we forgot why we started building Him in the first place.

We forgot the blueprint.

This forgetting is not accidental. It is historical, global, and ongoing. You can see it in the way fundamentalist Christians in the American South bless every gun they sell. You can smell it in the burnt flesh of a girl in India whose dowry offended her husband’s gods. You can hear it in Uganda’s parliament when it thunders down laws to jail gay people “in God’s name.” You can see it in Gaza and Rafah, where land has been blood-baptized by generations of men claiming God drew its borders. This is not faith. It’s fossilized fear, institutionalized to the point of tyranny.

As a Zimbabwean who has watched churches flourish even as schools fall, and who has seen prophets drive Benzes past barefoot believers, I’ve long suspected that what we call religion today is not just about the divine. It’s about forgetting. Forgetting the terror that made us cry out to the heavens in the first place. Forgetting that God, however one imagines God, was built to make sense of the storm, not become the storm.

**

Religions were once open source. Before the first stone cathedral, before the first Qur’anic dome, long before the Vatican gilded sin into a financial transaction, humans across continents experienced the divine as a living mystery. Our gods were flawed, strange, beautiful. The Yoruba orishas, the Greek pantheon, the Native American trickster spirits, all were mirrors of ourselves. Capricious, sometimes cruel, yes, but never a bureaucrat. They didn’t require tax-exempt status or corporate branding. They were not interested in owning real estate.

Now? God is trademarked. He has spokespersons and franchise locations. The Catholic Church functions like a multinational. Mega-churches in Nigeria and the U.S. produce sermons with the precision of Netflix content strategies. Islam, hijacked by both Western fear and Eastern orthodoxy, is too often misrepresented as uniform and militant. Even African Traditional Religions, once fluid and local, are being codified into rigid “spiritual business models.” We have gone from gods who danced and wept with us to a God who audits behavior and punishes in bulk.

And the terrifying part? We don’t even remember the original need that gave rise to the divine: vulnerability.

Fear of the dark. Of death. Of disease. Of drought. Of being utterly alone in an unknowable universe.

God was our way of saying: “I don’t understand this, but maybe something out there does.” And that was not a weakness. It was a poetic strength. It made room for humility. It reminded us that knowledge has limits, and those limits require reverence.

But modern religion rarely encourages humility anymore. It demands certainty. Rigid, weaponized certainty. One must be right. And when someone is certain that God agrees with their political party, their moral code, their view on gender, land, war or wealth, then everyone else must be wrong. And if they are wrong long enough, or loud enough, or proud enough, then they must be punished.

This is how we end up with Christian nationalists in America crying for “biblical law” while ignoring the poor. This is how we end up with Saudi monarchs, custodians of Islam’s holiest sites, cutting deals with arms dealers while women still fight for basic agency. This is how we end up with Evangelical missions in Africa converting people with food, not faith, then leaving behind a population that believes AIDS is caused by demons.

We no longer seek the divine to confront fear. We weaponize the divine to spread it.

**

And yet, even in this cynical age, the hunger for meaning has not left us. If anything, it has grown more desperate. Millennials and Gen Z across the globe are leaving organized religion in record numbers, but many are not becoming atheists. They are becoming seekers. From astrology to ancestral veneration, from meditation to mushroom ceremonies, people are reaching again into the unknown. Not to be told what to believe, but to feel something sacred that doesn’t come with a sermon.

This is not regression. It is evolution. Or, perhaps, reversion to something older and more honest.

We are relearning that the divine may not be a king on a throne, but a question mark in the sky. That wonder is more nourishing than doctrine. That awe does not require hierarchy. That fear need not become fanaticism.

But we must be careful.

When old blueprints are lost, people start drawing new ones, and charlatans are always first to pick up the pen. For every genuine spiritual revival, there is a wave of crypto-cults, influencer prophets, and “wellness” gurus selling divinity at a markup. We are in a global moment of spiritual destabilization. That is dangerous. But it is also an opportunity.

It is a chance to unlearn the idea that God needs temples while children sleep in the streets. That holiness and patriarchy are siblings. That piety must punish. That power is proof of righteousness.

It is a chance to remember that we built God not to control one another, but to console ourselves. And that the truest sign of the divine might not be certainty but compassion.

**

In Zimbabwe, the late 90s saw the explosion of prophetic churches as the economy tanked. People lined up for miracles because there were no jobs to queue for. We were told to tithe for blessings, to fast for promotions that never came, to “plant a seed” for marriages we were too broke to sustain. And still, we returned. Because in our deepest fear, we reached for something bigger than our pain. That reaching, that poetic desperation, is not foolish. But those who exploit it are.

And Zimbabwe is not unique.

The same thing is happening in post-COVID America, in war-weary Ukraine, in climate-struck India, in refugee camps and billionaire boardrooms. Where fear flourishes, God is repackaged, sometimes as salvation, sometimes as a sales pitch. But always as something you must obey before you understand.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The blueprint is not gone. It’s just buried, beneath centuries of fear masquerading as faith. If we strip away the golden altars, the angry doctrines, the puritan punishments, what remains is the same human impulse that once looked at a star and whispered, “Who are you?”

We should return to that whisper.

Because maybe God is not a building or a book or a broadcast. Maybe God is the voice that emerges when we admit we’re afraid, and love each other anyway.

And maybe that’s all the holiness we need.