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

Belief

Church and state

Comment

Nationalism

Politics

3 September 2025

5 min read

Sorry, Danny Kruger, a Christian nation is a bad idea

Quite simply you cannot build a nation-state on the teaching of Jesus

Sam Tomlin

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

An English flag flies on a church tower.

Different Resonance on Unsplash.

Danny Kruger has become one of my favourite politicians in recent months. His contributions in parliamentary debates on assisted suicide and abortion have endeared him to many Christians including myself as he has led the charge (along with other notable parliamentarians and thought leaders) against what has been dubbed the ‘parliament of death,’ exposing the shaky ethical foundations on which they lie.

He entrenched this reputation with many Christians with a recent speech on the ‘Christian foundations’ of England (‘out of which the United Kingdom grew’) and a passionate plea to recover such foundations. This speech went viral in Christian circles as it articulated the aspirations of many to re-establish Christianity as a national force, specifically in the physical representation of power, the House of Commons. The speech ticked all of the ‘Christian nationalist’ boxes: Christianity should be the ‘common creed’ of the country; England was founded ‘uniquely among the nations’ on ‘the basis of the Bible’; it is the ‘oldest Christian country’; ‘the story of England is the story of Christianity operating on a people.’ A remarkable set of claims to make the butterflies flutter in any Christian’s stomach, surely?

This vision of a ‘Christian nation,’ however, typically represented by Kruger is based on an understanding of Christianity which bears little resemblance to its central character: Jesus. There is much talk of ‘nationhood’ and ‘biblical values’ in such thinking, but tellingly little about Jesus himself (Kruger’s speech makes one passing reference to him). The reason is not complicated. Quite simply you cannot build a nation-state on the teaching of Jesus.

Every nation-state (including England, the ‘prototype’ of such a concept, according to Kruger) was formed though violent subjugation of rival tribes and narratives, establishing a monopoly on the means of legitimate violence to centralise power for princes to wage war and protect private property. Jesus’ commands to love one’s enemies, pray for those who persecute you, not resist evildoers and give away possessions are not simply an inconvenience to such a programme, but are profoundly impractical. Like an embarrassing and awkward family member turning up uninvited to a wedding, they stand opposed to a ‘civilisational Christianity’ which seeks to be the ‘chaplain of nations’ as Kruger suggests, resisting any attempt at baptising and polishing a version of what remains Machiavellian statecraft.

These two forms of Christianity are in fact little more than two sides of the same coin and there is a more fundamental distinction to be made.

Like a cricketer putting on extra padding to face a fast bowler, Christian ethics softens the blow of such radical expectations by suggesting that Jesus can’t really have meant what he said, especially for modern, enlightened folk today. Perhaps Jesus expected the Kingdom of God to arrive more quickly than it did and as time progressed, we needed a more practical ethic. Not wanting to abandon Jesus, his teaching is reduced to general ‘values’ like ‘love’ or ‘justice,’ the content of which in fact become the precise opposite of what Jesus taught. ‘Jesus may have said to love enemies, but we will be less safe if we do, so we had better kill them.’ ‘Jesus may have said not to love money, but our economic systems which seem quite good at alleviating poverty rely on this, so greed isn’t so bad.’

It may sound as if I am opposing Kruger’s vison for the alternative option in the culture wars. It is often suggested that there are two ‘Christianities’ at work in the West: one represented by Kruger might be called the ‘Christian right,’ which emphasises family values, patriotism and the importance of place, the other (at which Kruger takes aim in his speech), a left-wing or ‘woke’ Christianity which stresses welcoming the stranger, economic justice and identity politics.

This is a red herring, however. These two forms of Christianity are in fact little more than two sides of the same coin and there is a more fundamental distinction to be made. For while they might disagree on content, the method is remarkably similar. Left-leaning Christians may disagree with Kruger on his definition of a Christian nation but would uphold the desire for the nation-state to be founded on values they consider Christian. The common assumption is that Christianity is a ‘civilisational’ force, ideally enacted by Christians and their narrative taking hold of the levers of power and influence and dominating the ‘public square.’

If Jesus’ teaching is not supposed to be embodied by the nation-state, however, what is its purpose and does this not leave the public square to malevolent forces, as Kruger suggests? Jesus’ teaching is indeed directed at a particular body of people who are supposed to embody it publicly, and that is the community explicitly committed to follow and structure social life around the living presence of Jesus; this is the church. The New Testament even suggests the language of nationhood is appropriate for this body as a new nation is being formed around the person of Jesus who commands the allegiance that modern nation-states claim for themselves.

Kruger’s vision of the Church of England’s parish system is where ‘we are all members, we all belong, even if you never set foot in your church from one year to the next, even if you don’t believe in its teachings, it is your church, and you are its member.’ This is a million miles away from the vision of the New Testament where entry into this newly formed community implies active repentance and a collision with the ways of the world represented by mere ‘values.’ If that makes me part of ‘another eccentric denomination’ according to Kruger, then so be it.

To suggest that this alternative vision cedes the ‘public square’ to malevolent forces also betrays a lack of imagination around the public nature of the church. It is assumed that if Christians retreat from the ambition to explicitly and directly make our nation-state Christian then we relegate our religion to the realm of the ‘private’ and succumb to the worst elements of Enlightenment fears about religion in the public square. The earliest Christians had no explicit desire to ‘transform the Roman empire and make it Christian’ but simply took Jesus at his word on wealth, forgiveness, welcome of the stranger and proclamation of salvation and the life made possible by Jesus’ death and resurrection. This was their public witness and it just so happened that it utterly transformed the communities in which these followers of Jesus were situated at the same time. This vision certainly has a place for Christians engaging in politics as Kruger has in debates on assisted suicide for instance, exposing the shaky foundations of any form of life not founded on the life made possible in Jesus. This is most appropriately done, however, without reaching for language that implied the state has salvific qualities, language Christian teaching rightly reserves only for God himself.

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