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

Romance

14 February 2025

5 min read

Getting hitched should benefit more than the advantaged

Marriage’s decline impacts outcomes for all.

Daniel Lilley and Simon Cansdale

Daniel is a researcher at Civitas and Simon is a vicar in Winchester.

A bride dressed colourfully stands next to her groom, dressed similarly, as he sits in a wheelchair.

Ellie Cooper on Unsplash.

Of all the dramatic changes to Britain in the last half century, one of the least discussed is the extraordinary decline in marriage.

The marriage rate has fallen by two-thirds in the last 50 years. It was just above six per cent in 1972 and has now been under two per cent since 2017.

This remarkable decline has corresponded with a rise in a relatively new relation type: cohabitation. Cohabitation was extremely uncommon before the 1960s, and even by 1986 just 10 per cent of new mothers were cohabitants. It is, however, rapidly becoming the mainstream. Now 35 per cent of babies are born to cohabiting mothers, and the total number of UK cohabiting couples increased from 1.5 to 3.7 million between 1996 and 2022.

Much of this is due to couples delaying marriage: 84 per cent of religious and 91 per cent of civil marriages are now between couples that already live together, and the average age when first marrying has climbed by 10 years since the early 1970s. But it is also due to many more couples not marrying at all.

Opinions understandably differ on this social transition away from marriage and towards cohabitation. It is a point of progress worth celebrating that the previous societal shunning of those, especially women, who had children outside of marriage has been left in the past. However, such progress has not been without consequences. Cohabitations are less stable, on average, than marriages. Cohabiting parents are around three times as likely to separate in the first five years of their children’s life as married couples.

This stability is not simply because wealthier, more highly educated people tend to have stable families and also tend to marry. Studies by World Family Maps and the Marriage Foundation have shown marriage to be a larger factor in family stability than either education or income.

Nor does the stability come from couples staying together miserably. Studies undertaken in 2017 and 2024 looked at the outcomes of couples 10 years on from considering their relationships to be ‘on the brink’. In the initial study, while 70 per cent of cohabiting couples had separated in the decade since considering themselves ‘on the brink’, 70 per cent of the married couples had remained together. Perhaps even more crucially, just seven per cent of those married couples that had stayed together were unhappy in their relationship a decade on. The 2024 study found none of the sample of married couples that had stayed together were still unhappy 10 years on. For those that had stayed together, things had improved.

This family instability that the decline of marriage has caused is also unevenly distributed. Affluent couples – often those most likely to criticise the concept of marriage – are much more likely to marry than disadvantaged ones.

Looking at socioeconomic groups, seven in ten mothers from the most advantaged group are married, while just a third of those from the two most disadvantaged groups are. The effect is geographic, too. Institute for Fiscal Studies research has found parents having children are more likely to be married if they are living in better educated areas. For the advantaged, it is compassionately affirmational to suggest that every relationship is equal, even though the advantaged themselves choose the most secure option of marriage: a hypocrisy only tolerated due to the potent fear of seeming judgemental.

The consequence of this is deepening inequality: disadvantaged families are rendered more likely to breakdown, while children from affluent backgrounds are disproportionately likely to enjoy the ‘the two-parent privilege’, the substantial emotional and developmental advantages of growing up in a stable home. Melissa Kearney coined the phrase, and her evidence shows how children grow up, on average, to have better educational outcomes, better emotional and physical wellbeing, and higher incomes if they are raised in two-parent homes.

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families.

So, why are marriage rates so much higher among wealthier couples than poorer ones, and why is this gap growing?

We can isolate three reasons in particular, each more solvable than the last.

Most challenging is the feedback loop effect: people whose parents, role-models, and friends have not married are unlikely to do so themselves. The demographic trend compounds itself.

Second, and easily addressable if only the will was there, is the public messaging effect: politicians – and to some extent celebrities – have consistently told the public that marriage is unimportant. In 2017, Marriage Foundation research found that it had been a decade since a cabinet member had discussed marriage in a speech. This has hardly changed in the years since. In 2024, the only major party whose manifesto even mentioned marriage was Reform; even then the focus in the relevant section seemed to be less on marriage and more on getting ‘people trapped on benefits back into the workplace’.

Third is the cost of weddings. A quick flick through top wedding magazines suggests that the average wedding costs upwards of £20,000. Survey evidence from both Marriage Foundation and the Thriving Center of Psychology have found that most young people view weddings as unrealistically expensive.

This financial problem is solvable: much of the costs relate to venue hire. Unless they are having a religious marriage, a couple will need to find a venue that has gone through the bureaucratic process of becoming an ‘approved premises’. The cheapest of these are register offices which, including all expenses, still cost about £500.

This is eminently mendable. The Law Commission proposal to reorganise wedding law around the officiant, not the venue, opens the door for a future of more affordable weddings by removing the regulatory barrier. It will also bring the law in line with that of other home nations.

This proposal will not work by itself, though, it will need to be supported by creativity in wedding planning.

Wedding costs can be substantially reduced by taking a DIY approach. Food, drinks, and decorations can often be coordinated amongst enthusiastic (and appropriately competent!) guests.

Booze free weddings are a growing phenomenon, and especially good for weddings with children.

Such ‘group-effort’ approaches often have a unique feel thanks to the high participation of guests, and people are more likely to remember events that they feel a sense of ownership of, having helped make them happen.

Alongside this is a recommendation by the Centre for Social Justice. It proposes subsidising the necessary statutory fees for the poorest couples, up to £550 per couple. An inexpensive and hugely beneficial adjustment to improve wedding accessibility for the least fortunate.

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families; perhaps it is time for all of us to make tying the knot easier.

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