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

Books

Comment

Film & TV

Morality

27 August 2025

6 min read

Murder we wrote: how cosy crime and psycho-thrillers carve our minds

Our reactions have changed from heart-wringing cries to merely puzzle-solving

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

Elderly amateur sleuth stand by their pinboard.

The Thursday Murder Club convenes.

Netflix.

We love murder.

That seems to be the only reasonable conclusion when you look at the sales figures of Richard Osman’s record-busting murder mystery series, which opened with The Thursday Murder Club back in 2020. In UK sales alone, it sold over a million copies within the same year as its release, something no other book has ever done.

This was more than a bestselling debut novel, this was a cultural event in UK publishing. And no doubt Netflix are hoping for something equally seismic when their film adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club goes live.

The combination of light humour, a clutch of charismatic octogenarians, tea and cake, and the odd violent death or two to keep them entertained, seems to have struck the motherlode of British cultural appeal. I can only imagine the stellar cast they have assembled for the film adaptation, led by Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, will take the series’ success to new heights.

As an author currently puzzling my way through my own contemporary murder mystery, I can only look on at the phenomenon in wonder and sigh for what may yet be.

But murder has always been a tricky one for me as a) an author, and b) a Christian. Do those two facts mean I have to be a “Christian author”? And if so, what kind of limits does that put around what I should be writing about? It may not sound like much of a conundrum to you, but honestly I have wrestled with this question for a long time. There is darkness in the world: how much darkness should I explore in my books? (So far, if you ever read any of my historical novels, you’ll see the answer is: quite a lot.)

Maybe I’m taking it all too seriously and murder is mere light entertainment now. Death is to be enjoyed with a nice cup of tea; evil, with slice of Victoria sponge cake.

But somehow, I don’t think so.

Recently, I was helped in my moral quandary by another crime author, Andrew Klavan. In his book, The Kingdom of Cain, published last month, Klavan explores the question of evil and specifically murder in what he terms a ‘literature of darkness’. It is a fascinating, if unusual, book. His approach is to take three murders that actually happened, and demonstrate how each has influenced a long succession of murder novels (and movies) up to the present day.

Through this exposition, we witness the changing attitudes to murder over the last century and a half and in particular how those changes seem strongly linked to the ebbing tide of Christian faith in the West.

For example, Dostoyevsky’s great novel, Crime and Punishment, was published in 1866. The double-murder, central to the plot, is carried out by a young student named Raskolnikov. He is an intellectual who is seeking to prove that the moral boundary beyond which murder lies is nothing more than a mere concoction, a social construct (or worse, a religious one) which he, being of superior intelligence, can transcend and therefore ignore. The entire novel is the story of how his conscience will not allow him to get away with this. Near the end, he confesses his crime to the young prostitute, Sonya, who responds to his confession in fearful horror:

“What have you done? What have you done to yourself?”

The second question is key.

Dostoyevsky based the plot of his novel on a real axe-murderer, a Frenchman called Pierre François Lacenaire, who went to the guillotine in 1836. Lacenaire became an international sensation when, in court, he aired many of his own pseudo-intellectual justifications for his actions – that the murders he committed were a strike against the injustice of the elites and the iniquitous power structures of the day. Rather than what they appeared to be: a grubby little double murder for the sake of a few francs. Lacenaire set the tune which many still whistle today, I’m sorry to say.

But Dostoyevsky was prophetic. He foresaw long before Nietzsche and others who would follow, that the tide of Christian faith was going out in Western civilization. And so it continued to do through the back end of the twentieth century and into this one.

Before that, the notion that murder is wrong because every human being is made in the image of God was a long-held axiom, going back arguably to the first chapters of Genesis. And in killing the image of God, any image of God, this may therefore be the closest we can come to killing God himself. Seen in that light, murder is sacrilege on an appalling scale.

But there’s the rub. That light has dimmed. The secular philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have turned down the dimmer-switch, so that it is no longer axiomatic that humans possess an inherent sacred value. Instead, in varying guises and to varying degrees, the conclusion has been that humans are nothing but self-conscious lumps of meat. We (the state, the law) may ascribe them some value. “We are all equal,” yes - but as George Orwell anticipated, “some are more equal than others.” (Is intersectionality, for example, anything but the manifestation of that prediction?)

Maybe this explains how the horror of murder has diminished from Sonya’s heart-wringing cry, into something more akin to a crossword puzzle. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Agatha Christie. But her murder mysteries don’t waste much time on the philosophical implications of, say, the local doctor bumping off the parish priest.

And from there, the genre of the murder mystery has split into two strains. On the one hand, we get the psycho-thriller, in which the horror of the act of murder is of less interest than the dark psychological state of mind of the killer themselves. But if that’s too dark, don’t worry. We can do light, too! And so on to cosy crime blockbusters, in which, if a murder was committed, it was because the victim had it coming – so let’s all calm down and have another slice of cake.

There is no space here in which to explore how, as a culture, our collective historical experience may have helped to steer us in this direction, as well as our changing philosophy. But there is no doubt where we have ended up. We see death cults all around us. We see legislation being passed in our Parliament which would have been unthinkable until very recently. We see social justice where before we saw crimes.

Think about how often the arch-crimes of history have been perpetrated on the ground of viewing the “other” as less than human, and certainly less than sacred. Then ask yourself, why should we see any human as more than a lump of meat? At what point does the rubber hit the road? - as surely it will.

What have we done? What have we done to ourselves?

I do wonder where all this goes. And yet, if the spiritual bellwethers are to be believed, perhaps we have reached low tide at long last – certainly it has revealed some pretty ugly creatures lurking at the bottom of the rock pool. Many, myself included, must hope that the tide of faith is truly on the turn. Let’s see. Certainly, if this proves to be the case, it seems to follow that our attitude to murder will change with that on-rushing tide. And so with it, the literature of darkness.

Beyond The Thursday Murder Club, there may yet be other great stories told of murder; they, like Crime & Punishment, will be far truer, and in a paradoxical sense, far more beautiful. After all, at the heart of the gospel, there lies a murder. If God himself can take such a dark event and turn it into light, then, at a far inferior level perhaps, as His image-bearers, so might we.

Which reminds me… back to my draft.

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