In what must rank as one of the most shocking admissions from a prominent Nigerian Christian figure, Chude Jideonwo revealed that at the height of his depression, he made a deliberate, reasoned decision to become an atheist. His logic was simple and devastating: “If there was a God he would help me. If he’s not helping me it means he doesn’t exist.” For someone who had preached across Nigeria and built a career partly around conversations about faith, this declaration represented a complete theological collapse.
“And so I decided then I decided that okay there was no God,” Chude told Toke Makinwa.
According to Chude, he had done everything right according to the prosperity gospel framework dominant in Nigerian Christianity. He had tithed since age 15. He had participated in multiple intensive deliverance sessions, including the most serious ones involving three-day fasts. He had preached at major venues across the country. He was, by any measure, a faithful servant.
And yet when crisis came—heartbreak so severe he could physically smell his ex months after the breakup, depression so deep he contemplated suicide, financial problems threatening his company—God was silent. Not just quiet, not just subtle, but completely absent from Chude’s experience. Prayers seemed to hit the ceiling and fall back down. Fasting produced no breakthrough. Deliverance sessions delivered nothing.
“I made a reasonable—you know just in your house you are sad—I just said there’s no God because if there was a God he would help me.” Chude’s atheism wasn’t philosophical; it was experiential. He wasn’t convinced by arguments about evolution or the problem of evil in abstract terms. He was convinced by his own life: if God exists and is good and I am faithful, I should be helped. I am not being helped. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
This reasoning actually contained a kind of faith—faith that if God existed, God would be just, would reward faithfulness, would intervene in human suffering. It was the betrayal of that faith, the failure of God to meet those expectations, that led to atheism. In a strange way, Chude’s atheism was born from having too high an opinion of what God should be, not too low.
“If he’s not helping me it means he doesn’t exist,” Chude concluded. The alternative—that God exists but chooses not to help, or exists but is unable to help, or exists but operates according to principles Chude didn’t understand—were somehow more troubling than atheism itself. “So it’s not this non-existent God’s fault. There actually isn’t any.”
