Article

Comment

Community

Development

27 February 2023

5 min read

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

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

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.

Article

Comment

Politics

Truth and Trust

14 November 2025

5 min read

The ancients had the right words for Trump’s tussle with the BBC

Can the truth be concealed?

Hal St John

Hal is a theologian and writer based in London.

A composite images shows the entrance to the BBC on one side and Donald Trump on the other

BBC.

The recent controversies surrounding the BBC's leadership and the lawsuit brought by Donald Trump may appear, at first glance, to be merely another chapter in the ongoing drama of contemporary politics and media. Yet for those with eyes to see, something far older and more profound lies beneath the surface turbulence—a perennial struggle concerning the very nature of truth itself, one that reaches back to the dawn of Western thought and touches the deepest springs of our common life.

The sequence of events is itself instructive. The disturbances at the Capitol occurred on January 6, 2021. More than three years thereafter, the BBC's Panorama programme broadcast an investigation examining the relationship between Mr Trump's rhetoric—his exhortation to "fight like hell"—and the violence that ensued. The programme did not fabricate a narrative but rather sought to interpret one, attempting to hold words and their consequences together within a coherent moral framework. This work was, in its essence, what the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides termed Aletheia: truth understood as 'unconcealment', the patient labour of bringing into public view that which has been hidden or obscured.

A vocation

When the crisis deepened, the BBC's then Director of News, Deborah Turness, reaffirmed the Corporation's mission as the pursuit of truth "with no agenda". It was a well-intentioned defence, though perhaps insufficiently bold. For the BBC's founding vision was never a pursuit of neutrality as an end in itself, but rather the pursuit of truth in service of the common good—a vision given permanent expression in the inscription carved into the very walls of Broadcasting House:

"This Temple of the Arts and Muses is dedicated to Almighty God... It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest... that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness."

This inscription is no mere ornament. It constitutes a theological statement concerning the vocation of public speech. The call to sow "good seed"—echoing Jesus’ parable of the sower in St Matthew's Gospel—the summons to attend to whatsoever things are "honest and of good report" as St Paul exhorts in his letter to the Philippians, and the call to walk "in wisdom and uprightness" from the book of Proverbs—all these speak to a moral order in which words are meant to bear fruit. Panorama's investigation may be understood as a contemporary attempt to fulfil this sacred charge: an inevitably human and imperfect effort to unconceal the connection between language and its consequences in the world.

The ancient force of oblivion

Mr Trump's response, however, embodies a different and equally ancient force: Lethe—the personification of oblivion and forgetfulness in Greek thought. His lawsuit is not simply a defence against an allegation he finds unwelcome. It represents, rather, a strategic campaign to enforce forgetfulness. What Trump has chosen to bring into the light is not his own intent or action, but rather the BBC's editorial process. By directing all attention toward the matter of editing, he seeks to bury and render forgotten the original and far more consequential question: the demonstrable connection between his words on the sixth of January and the violent response of his supporters. The strategy is to employ a minor unconcealment—the technical matter of the edit—in order to accomplish a major concealment: the causal chain linking rhetoric to riot.

This, then, is the quiet heart of the matter. The lawsuit functions as a modern political instrument deployed within an ancient philosophical conflict. It represents a deliberate choice for Lethe over Aletheia, aiming to dissolve the connection between word and reality, and to immerse the most uncomfortable truths in the waters of oblivion.

For Christians, this struggle occupies familiar ground. To stand for truth is not to claim infallibility—a pretension that belongs to God alone—but rather to participate in the slow, difficult work of revelation: to bring things into the light for the sake of healing and restoration. Whether in journalism, the Church, or the wider public square, truth remains first a vocation before it becomes a verdict.

The crisis at the BBC, therefore, is not merely about institutional governance or corporate reputation. It serves as a reminder that the pursuit of truth is always a contested act of unconcealment, perpetually threatened by the seductive pull of forgetfulness. In an age tempted by distraction and denial, even imperfect truth-telling becomes an act of faith—a wager that reality is trustworthy, that words have weight, that consequences follow causes.

A reason to persevere

This ancient struggle between unconcealment and oblivion offers perspective on our present moment. For those who hold religious faith, it recalls St John's testimony that "the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not"—a conviction that truth ultimately prevails. For those who do not share such faith, the argument stands on its own philosophical ground: that truth-telling, however costly and imperfect, serves something greater than partisan advantage or institutional survival.

The inscription at Broadcasting House speaks to both believer and non-believer alike. Its prayer for "good seed" and "good harvest", its call to attend to things beautiful, honest, and of good report, articulates a civic ideal that transcends particular creeds. It suggests that public institutions bear a responsibility—not to be infallible, but to resist the gravitational pull of forgetfulness, to maintain the connection between words and their consequences, to choose unconcealment over oblivion.

Whether one grounds this commitment in theological conviction or in secular principle, the work remains the same: the slow, difficult labour of bringing uncomfortable truths into the light, trusting that a society capable of facing reality is stronger than one that retreats into comfortable fictions. In an age tempted by distraction and denial, this may be reason enough to persevere.

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