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Religion and prosperity: how Nigeria’s diaspora is changing the West

Superlatives may describe Nigeria, but it is vital to understand what drives its people, especially those abroad.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

Market in Lagos Nigeria
Mushin Market in Lagos.
Omoeko Media, via Wikimedia Commons

Superpower superlatives 

Nigeria is the economic and human capital giant of Africa. Nigeria has almost 100 million more people than Ethiopia, the country with the continent’s second largest population. Nigeria’s 2021 GDP of $440bn led the continent for the eighth consecutive year. Helped, no doubt by its oil production, the second biggest in Africa. Since gaining independence in 1960, the Nigerian economy has suffered from incessant fluctuations but its population has experienced consistent growth. As of today, Nigeria’s population of 211 million is about two-thirds the population of the United States’ 332 million. All living on sovereign territory one and a half times the size of Texas.

The oil curse 

Spotlighting these statistics uncovers another side of Nigeria's place in ‘Giant of Africa’ discourses. With over 300 distinctive ethnic groups, it has one of Africa's highest levels of population density. Ethnic competition for control of state economic resources, mainly oil revenues, has evolved into a leading theme influencing Nigeria's postcolonial development. Nigeria first discovered its oil-harvesting potential in 1956. However, the oil curse, and the high-level corruption that characterises it, would not fully commandeer Nigerian governance until the concluding decades of the 20th century. Some have argued that the curse of corruption grew in these decades into a chief impediment preventing national development. Nigeria is equally blessed and cursed, and this curse affects how it behaves internally.   

Transnationalism 

High potential Nigeria is hobbled by a curse that also has significant effects internationally. Thanks to Nigeria's large diaspora, these effects impact the UK. It is therefore important to understand who this diaspora is and what it believes. Many have written about the relationship between corruption, transnationalismm, and capital flight in Nigeria; however, another, less researched case of trans-nationalisation has unfolded in recent Nigerian history that has relevance for global economics. Since the 1980s, many thousands of Nigerian Christians have emigrated abroad to the UK, USA, and beyond, regularly citing economic, political, and religious factors as influences behind their decision to leave.  

This emigration takes with it a practice that has reshaped not only Nigeria but the destination countries. It has led to the dawning reality among people researching global Christianity that Christendom's geographical locus of power, in terms of total number of Christians and theological influence, is shifting away from the West to the Global South. The faith of the immigrants drives their emigration and results in a variety of economic and social impacts in their destination countries. So, it is vital to understand their faith and its practices. More than any other Christian denomination in Nigeria, the confluence of Christian spirituality, migration, and economics heavily informs the religiosity of Pentecostals, whose churches frequently send them out as missionaries in service of a highly ambitious vision to evangelise the entire non-Christian world.  

What drives the diaspora? 

Nigerian Pentecostals relocate to the UK emigrate with two main interests: evangelising Britons and building personal wealth. In recent decades, the prosperity gospel has emerged as the defining doctrine of Nigerian Pentecostalism, the country's most politically and economically dynamic denomination. The prosperity gospel lionizes wealth and its linchpin theological premise argues that God wants Christians to enjoy this-worldly lives characterised by material blessings and holistic success. Believers in the prosperity gospel understand material wealth as an important component of their spiritual inheritance and ardently strive to secure material prosperity for themselves and families.   

The materially intoxicating nature of prosperity gospel sensibilities have spilled over into other denominations in Nigerian Christendom to the extent that many Nigerian Christians today believe that God wants them to enjoy a life marked by wealth and health. Correlations between belief in prosperity theology and increased individual wealth remain difficult to prove indisputably, but the prosperity gospel's way of inculcating in believers the desirability of material wealth certainly makes them more comfortable working to acquire it, whether in the UK or the USA or elsewhere.  

Go global 

With upwards of 1.3bn people of Black and African descent living worldwide, Nigerians account for over one out of every six Black and African individuals globally. The instilling of prosperity gospel-friendly values in the minds of globally mobile Nigerian Christians conditions the latter to contribute to the local economies of their new home countries.  

Go West 

Nigerian-Americans have grown into one of America's wealthiest migrant groups. For decades the typical Nigerian-American child has grown up aspiring to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or businessperson, and today Nigerians can be found in senior positions in America's highest-grossing industries. Increasingly, this dynamic applies to the UK.  

Nigerians in the UK 

Nigeria, once a British colony, enjoys membership in the commonwealth; this geopolitical affiliation makes it easier for Nigerians to relocate to the UK and secure British citizenship. Aware of what they perceive as the ongoing secularisation of the West, many of these Nigerian Christians move to the UK inspired by a vision to re-evangelise the motherland, and this vision has given rise to the emergence of what is sometimes called ‘reverse mission.’ 

A succession of military dictatorships from 1966 to 1999 compelled many Nigerians to flee Nigeria to the UK in search of a better life.  As a result, approximately 250,000 Nigerians live in the UK. Nigerians have evolved into one of the UK's largest and most influential African migrant communities. A disproportionate level of popular and scholarly attention devoted to the presence of Nigerians in the UK focuses on how Nigerian elites continue to buy expensive properties in London and the appreciable number of Nigerian students enrolled at UK universities. However, the landscape of Nigerians living in the UK contains additional dimensions in need of analysis and one of the most under-discussed of these dimensions concerns the influence of Nigerian Christian values on UK economic life. 

Economic influencers  

Based in north London Brent Cross' district, Jesus House is one of the UK's largest and most popular Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Like many other churches in the UK, Jesus House has joined the Warm Welcome Campaign in an effort to provide warm spaces to members of its community suffering from excessive exposure to cold winter temperatures. Yet, long after winter passes, this warmth will continue playing a valuable role by helping thaw the keys opening the ostensibly frozen doors to the next generation of UK prosperity.  

Like in the USA, Nigerians in the UK envision for themselves lives marked by material prosperity. This vision regularly inspires them to pursue lucrative jobs and engage in entrepreneurship. For many UK-based Nigerians, prosperity gospel sensibilities, reverse mission interests, and the aim to build a better life intersect in ways that have constructive, wide-reaching social and economic consequences for the UK.  

Sure, the prosperity gospel has its critics and its problems, but viewed positively, it can provide a source of economic energy for countries like the UK. 

Inspired by Christian devotion and the belief that despite transient seasons of difficulty, prosperity is a sign of divine favour, Nigerian Christians contribute to the UK economy every day in consistent, substantive, and innovative ways. In a time when homes across the UK remain far colder than they should be, the prosperity-friendly piety of the UK's many Nigerian Christians offers a source of Christian warmth that deserves to be recognised more widely than it is.  

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3 min read

Line judges replaced by robots? You cannot be serious!

Wimbledon is about more than efficiency, it’s about humanity.

Matt is a songwriter and musician, currently completing an MA in theology at Trinity College, Bristol.

Tennis line judges stand and lean forward with hands on knees
Line judges, Wimbledon, 2012.
Carine06, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, I’m not talking about Christmas, but Wimbledon, of course. Two weeks of absolute delight. Tennis matches on the TV non-stop. Incredible displays of athleticism and skill. Wimbledon never fails to be an emotional rollercoaster for Brits as we watch our favourites reaching for glory (to various degrees of success). 

But it’s not just the tennis: it’s the entire aura around the Championships. The Pimm’s & Lemonade; the strawberries and cream. The big serves but bigger personalities. The familiar cadence of retired legends in the commentator box. The ball kids, impeccably disciplined as always, run like the clockwork we come to expect at the tournament. The outrageous Englishness of it all, from the refined fashion to ridiculous costumes, to the umpire’s chiding of the raucous crowd, popping champagne bottles at inappropriate moments. Wimbledon is like a faithful friend, who even after a year of being apart, makes a deep connection instantly. 

However, this year something - or rather someone - seems to be missing. I am of course speaking of our old friends, the line judges. 

Those stoic sentinels, guarding watch over the chalky borders of the court, have gone. In their place, a machine: efficient, faultless (apparently), and it doesn’t require a pension. But we still hear the ghost of the line judges haunting the court: their disembodied voices, recorded for posterity, call out from somewhere in the AI aether. 

Gone are the days of the drama of McEnroe’s ‘you cannot be serious’, and even the Hawkeye challenge - an apparently rude interruption to the gameplay - is no longer necessary. Perhaps this was inevitable: the next step on the path of progress, the realisation of a techno-optimist utopia. Fewer human errors, more tennis for us, even fewer shirts for the All England Club to iron. 

Technological advancement has made our old friends, the line judges, obsolete. 

But I’ve got to be honest, I miss them. It’s not that the technology seems to be glitchy at times, nor that I’m an old-fashioned technophobe. 

I recognise we don’t really need those line judges anymore, but I think, deep down, we do want them. 

Wimbledon is about more than efficiency, it’s about humanity. 

It’s about the on-court drama when a player disagrees with a line call. It’s about the risky moments where a line judge narrowly (and somehow quite elegantly) misses a 120mph serve. Computers eliminate risks, but they also diminish these human moments. 

I miss the line judges like I miss the conversations with people at the bus stop. Both made redundant by the people upstairs who benevolently(?) oversee our technological advancement. 

Our world teaches us to value efficiency, but at what cost? Just picture it, in years to come: the ball kids replaced by a super smart lawn mower with a sucker pipe to retrieve wayward balls, or God-forbid, Tim Henman recreated as an AI commentator avatar. 

Perhaps they may decide that’s a step too far. Perhaps our technocratic overlords may seek to consult a moral authority before destroying all human connection. 

Speaking of moral authorities, I believe in a God who created us, not because he needs us, but because he wants us. He could have made perfect robots with far less risk, far less drama, far less pain. But he chose to create human beings that fail, and frustrate our desire for efficiency. While the potential that AI offers is exciting, I am wary that we lose the potential latent in every human being: to connect. Let’s learn to see others not for their efficiency, but their humanity. 

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