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

Change

Community

Eating

Friendship

18 November 2025

1 min read

It’s in Third Places we can be our most human

Gathering in-person fights against the fragmentation

Alex Noel

Alex Noel is a writer and digital marketer.

A group of friends sit arouns a large table eating together.

Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

In my favourite local cafe, I pause mid-step to take a sip of the coffee I’ve just ordered. Setting it down on a table, I slide into my seat and turn my attention to the music playing over the speakers. It’s always good in here. It’s one of the reasons I like this place; they sell records and coffee here. Music is their ‘thing’, and it’s been my ‘thing’ too, ever since I was a young teenager. I’ll often chat about it with the baristas. And in the time it takes them to make me a flat white, we have exchanged news of recent and upcoming gigs, favourite artists, plus recommendations for new (and old) music we’re listening to. I don’t just enjoy coming here, I somehow feel that I belong.

Today though, the young barista on duty is engaged in a conversation about football with an older customer seated across the counter. The former is in his early 20s, and the latter - I guess - is in his late forties. They animatedly discuss their favourite soccer team. This includes the ins-and-outs of ownership and management, the players’ highs and lows this season, and reliving moments of impressive skill. I tune in and out, much like I do with the music in the background.

And so it is that this West London cafe is a Third Place. Of the three Places in society (identified by urban sociologist, Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place), it is Third Places that hold unique potential for finding connection, and even belonging. Removed from the first and second places of Home and Work; Third Places relieve us of the agendas that come with domestic and professional responsibilities. They separate us - for a while at least - from the concerns of daily life. In local parks, theatres, cafes, gyms, comedy clubs, music venues, book bars, volunteer groups, churches, pubs and more, we can find common ground with one another. A corner of our city or town where we can forge social connections, meet people and have meaningful conversations which cut across generations and other demographies. Here we can often find the connection and belonging that might otherwise elude us.

The internet, and social media, held out this promise too - of being a genuine Third Place. But despite our reliance on it, it hasn’t delivered. A Financial Times report published in early October revealed that social media use peaked in 2022, and has since declined globally by 10%. In an instagram video, Jordan Schwartzenberger, a 27-year-old business influencer and Forbes 30 Under 30, commented that: “it tracks with what we’re all feeling”. He lamented that social media was always meant to be about social connection, but instead it has shifted towards hyper-personalisation and content. We are subject to its algorithms which not only silo us but confine us to our individual feeds. Platforms are now geared to keeping us blinkered and scrolling, as they monetise our attention through advertising. Add to that their ‘enshittification’ thanks to the ubiquity of AI, and you have a recipe which has “nuked the authenticity of the internet”.

Nowhere more has this lack of authenticity been felt than by Generation Z. For those aged 13-28, our digital world is the only world they know, and they’re already tiring of it. As a result, more and more are logging off - craving in-person experiences instead of digital ones. And choosing to swap the dopamine hit of endless scrolling for the oxytocin of real social connection.

The rising cost of living, general retreat into online spaces and COVID closures means that there are fewer Third Places to go. But Gen Z is re-pioneering them. As a result, Third Places are evolving - there’s been a proliferation of in-person experiences as Gen Z head offline to seek out meaningful interactions ‘IRL’. The barrier to entry might not be as low as traditional Third Places, but the principle is the same, to foster socially organic connections in real life.

For example, twenty-somethings in London can take credit for the rebirth of supper clubs as communal dining takes on new meaning, and Sunday mornings are now for curated coffee meet-ups where groups are ‘matched’ according to their interests. Both of these are providing a welcome alternative to dating apps too. Specific offline events favour crafting, book-reading and conversation with attendees putting away their devices for the duration. Meanwhile run-clubs and street-skating groups take to the roads - Third Places in motion. Social media is still used to advertise and bring people together, but the emphasis is on logging off and being present. This search for social connection might explain too, beyond the spiritual enquiry cited by ‘The Quiet Revival’, why so many from Gen Z have been turning up to church. Because we cannot ignore the importance of Place, nor of Presence (whether our own or others’) in creating the meaningful experiences we are seeking. And without this sense of incarnation there is no Christian faith.

The internet, however, is not a place. Something observed by American artist Eleanor Antin, who likened it to “a great void, a black hole”. Since the 1960s, her work has explored history, contemporary culture and identity. Through her multiple ‘selves’ realised in mixed media, she has challenged the idea of having a single, unified ‘self’. For its part - the internet, and especially social media, all too easily enables a fracturing of ‘selfhood’. We are split, divided between our (sometimes multiple) online, and offline selves; both in our attention, and in how we show up. It compromises both our Presence, and the Places we’re in. Who hasn’t sat in a cafe surrounded by people, but been completely absent from it? With fields of vision as narrow as our screens, our loneliness and isolation just increases. This fracturing of self ripples out, into our relationships and society. Our polarisation amplified by what promised to connect us, translating into real world consequences. The death of Charlie Kirk was a case in point. Amongst the diatribe that followed was Utah Governor, Spencer Cox's plea to “log off, turn off, touch grass…”. ‘Touch Grass’ is now, somewhat ironically, an internet meme.

So, if the internet isn’t a place, what is it? Definitions are of a system of interconnected computer networks; endless pathways for the data conjured up and configured onto our screens. But a better definition, existentially at least, is that of being a ‘Non-Place’. French anthropologist Marc Augé invented this idea to explain the systems and conduits which mediate our lives - indivisible from what he termed ‘super-modernity’, part and parcel of our late-stage capitalism. These Non-places - motorways, shopping malls, faceless hotels, force us to conform to their overriding function and purpose. Like products on conveyor belts, we comply. Any interactions we have are mere contractual exchanges. We’re dehumanised. They are everything that Third Places are not.

Third Places, by contrast, are where we can be our most human. Here, we can put our fractured selves back together and be wholly present in them - incarnate - once more. Relating without digital interfaces means we can fully perceive each other and our environments too - using all five of our senses. We were always better at connecting in-person. That is what Gen Z is realising. While Third Places old and new, facilitate this, they really boil down to ‘wherever two or three are gathered’. Any place can become a Third Place if we will be present, turn towards each other, and spark up a conversation. And so it is that our first ever generation of digital natives, might well be the ones to lead us back to places of connection, and belonging, and ultimately back to ourselves.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now