The Kenya church is at a critical crossroads once again, for the third time in as many decades.

The church goofed big time in the 50s by taking sides with the colonial powers against the Mau Mau struggle for Independence and opposed release of founding President Jomo Kenyatta from colonial detention.

Kenyans professing the Christian faith constitute the largest population bloc, and, inevitably, voting bloc, compared to other officially recognised faith groups.

During the 2009 national population census,  18 million Kenyans identified themselves as Protestant/Evangelical Christians, while 9 million as Catholics according to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS).

At once the church is expected to remain impartial in the Kenyatta ii succession political contest, its leadership expected to uphold integrity in their dealings in the choppy waters of a fragile African experiment with competitive democracy.

The church leadership is on the scales, their sense of balance being tested in the exigencies upholding the doctrine of neutrality against the lure to colour the pulpit with ethnic affinities and pecuniary tints.

Signs of the church caving into ethnic and political pressures are evident if the politically charged, and nerve jarring debate around vilification of church donations is anything to go by.

By taking sides in the debate about who should or should not make donations for church causes, a section of the Catholic church has unwittingly entangled itself in an ugly political controversy likely to blow back on its face depending on who emerges winner in the Kenyatta II succession race.

The Church as an institution has always goofed at critical moments in contemporary Kenya history up to to the last constitutional referendum in 2010, not always reading critical defining moments accurately.

 Often, it sided with the powerful social-economic elite pro-status quo minority against the majority population and always came to grieve.

Every clergyman and woman in Kenya and Africa would be well served to read The Church as the Bulwark Against Authoritarianism (2001), by an Anglican cleric, The Rev Dr Gideon Githiga.

The book graphically paints the picture of how the failure by the church to align its mission and ministry to freedom from colonialism by Africa people in colonial Kenya came to cost it dearly in diminished moral force in society in post Independence era.

This happened because by explicitly taking sides with the colonial powers against the nationalist cause, the church lost the moral ground to criticise the excesses of post-Independence Jomo Kenyatta administration, especially in human rights abuses and corruption.

Evidently, lots of bad things happened when the church was silent, timid and compromised.

For instance, while Kenya did not have a powerful pro-Africanist free media, the church did not protest or petition the colonial government to spare the life of Mau Mau leader, Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi, when he was captured and sentenced to death by hanging in 1957.

By the time of his capture and subsequent hanging, archival records at the Kenya National Archives show Kimathi had assumed the political title of Prime Minister of Kenya, and signed himself as such in correspondences with anti-imperialist British parliamentarians.

As the first black African to assume a political leadership title for Kenya though unelected, it made his hanging an assassination for political reasons.

This dimension should not have been lost from European white missionary led church that was familiar with prisoners of war protection doctrines, the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights responsibilities on British authorities etc but the church kept quiet.

The capture and hanging of Kimathi and the disappearance of the defacto legendary face of the Mau Mau uprising and armed struggle, General Stanley Mathenge Mirugi, would catapult Kenyatta, even in detention, to a near deity status, as the last flicker of hope for redemption for a people yearning to be free.

Dr Githiga writes that silence of the church at a time an entire people were under the crushing heels of a powerful colonial government, would lead to deification of Jomo Kenyatta by his Kikuyu community.

The community bore the brunt of humiliation, intimidation, threats and mass incarcerations in formal detention facilities and military guarded restriction centres called concentration villages for civilian families inside which many perished from starvation, disease and destitution.

Monuments of mass grave sites located next to each colonial concentration villages still dot the Central Kenya region that witnessed the most intense anti-Mau Mau operations by the colonial state.

This was in addition to mention slave labour programmes digging the old JKIA Airport in Embakasi by hands by detainees from Lang�ata detention camp, draining Mwea swamps for rice farming by detainees in Mwea detention camp, and Yatta irrigation canals where many died of disease, injuries and heat exhaustion.

To comfort themselves and cling to hope against hope for some form of divine intervention, even if it came from detention camps in Lodwar, the Kikuyu seized on the Christian hymns and inserted Kenyatta�s name to replace Jesus,Moses, Joshua, Gideon and other heroic Biblical characters.

For the eternal adversary of humanity in the hymns, they obviously inserted �nyakeru�, the white man, to replace the devil, declaring the two groups were not of the same heritage.

The corrupted hymns asserted God Almighty was on the African side.

 Many had already been converted to Christianity by European missionaries in the previous 70 plus years of evangelization in Kenya.

Kenyatta and his political cohorts had been arrested at the declaration of State of Emergency on 20 October 1952, and detained indefinitely for alleged association with Mau Mau activities.

This association of Kenyatta with Mau Mau was, however, a contrived pretext to get him out of circulation and stop his political agitation for Uhuru and African majority led government.

�To the natives, Kenyatta was both a religious and political hero, whose release became a rallying call for the nationalist movement,� Dr Githiga writes before indicting the so called  ï¿½mainstream/mainline and institutional� Church�s neglect of its flock:

�The deification of Kenyatta resulted from the Missionary Church�s failure to address freedom issues.

The Biblical Messiah had failed to redeem the Africans from their oppressors. Africans saw Kenyatta both as a political and religious leader as well � they saw Kenyatta in detention as the saviour who would bring freedom upon his release��

This lapse of judgment would haunt the church into the 90�s, and whose legacy partly explains reasons behind divisions and mistrust among Christian church denominations in Kenya todate.

The Rev Dr Gideon Githiga also captures part of this legacy dividing the church down the middle when it finally found its voice to criticise late President Daniel Arap Moi�s state excesses in human rights abuses and corruption.

Moi reacted by to branding the church as motivated by tribal animosity against him, after keeping silent during Kenyatta rule, but loudly voicing faults against him from the pulpit.

The book is an extract of Dr Githiga�s doctoral theses whose overarching theme is the often vexatious question he frames as �The development of the Church-State Relations in Kenya with Particular Reference to the Years after Political Independence 1963-1992�

He writes it was inspired by the late Dr David Gitari, the former head of the Anglican Church in Kenya and a celebrated hero of the second liberation.

It traces, documents and recounts how the church in colonial Kenya goofed by actively undermining the struggle for Independence and lived to regret it to present times.

Leading clergymen from mainstream Christian churches appended their signatures on a memorandum signed on 27 January 1954, denouncing Kenyatta and his compatriots in detention as persons unfit to ever reclaim their liberty to be free citizens.

�Due to your evil actions, the government has justifiably decided that no Mau Mau leader should ever return to Kikuyu country. We have endorsed and recommended the decision� read the chilling statement dated January 27, 1954.

Among signatories were colonial chiefs, leading politicians of the time including James Gichuru, Jeremiah Nyaga, Hurry Thuku and others.

Leading clergymen included the Rev Wanyoike Kamwe and Canon Samuel Nguru (both Anglicans), then head of the Presbyterian Mission in Tumutumu, and later moderator of the PCEA church, the Rev Charles Muhoro Kareri, and the Rev Alijah Gachanja .

It was a tough luck for the church when the nationalist side of the struggle led by Kenyatta assumed power at Independence in 1963.

Up to the time Founding President, Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978, the mainstream church�s voice was muzzled, timid and too terrified to speak up against the excesses of Kenyatta administration.

 These included political assassinations, disappearances, violent and illegal mass oathing in 1969, corruption among others.

The assassinations of nationalist icon of Asian descent, Pio Gama Pinto in 1965, ruling party secretary-general and cabinet minister, Tom Mboya in 1969, and populist Nyandarua North MP and Assistant Minister for Wildlife,JM Kariuki in 1975, were among highlights the church�s voice was most muted, absent and inaudible as would be expected.

 Dr Githiga cites the moral crisis the Church languished in about confronting Kenyatta government over forced tribal oathing following the murder of Tom Mboya in 1969:

�The expatriate church leadership was hesitant to be involved in post-independent political affairs as most had failed to speak against injustices practiced by the colonial government� in the protests against oathing in 1969, the Churches defended the State, and secondly the Christians..�

Dr Githiga writes the church did not speak up because there were laws, policies or directives against speaking up.

However, their anti-African liberation stance before Uhuru made it extremely untenable for white-skinned European missionary Bishops as church leaders to criticise the faults and vices of African majority rule after Independence.

�The close co-operation between the Church leaders of the mainline churches and the Kenyatta�s government portrayed an image of a church that was not awake to see the social evils that affected their flock and citizens� Dr Githiga notes.

Had the church spoken up, perhaps some of the excesses of the Kenyatta I administration would have been averted, scaled down, or would not have been unleashed with such brazen impunity for shamelessly long periods of time like the 1969 oathing did. Fast forward to Post-Kenyatta I reign, and the Christian church movement in Kenya,