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

Community

Migration

Politics

16 July 2025

5 min read

Our problem with immigration is not open or closed borders but the decline of Christianity

Christianity doesn’t provide immigration policy, but it could still unite our communities

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron in front of flags.

Starmer and Macron announce their deal.

10 Downing Street.

So Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have done a deal on migrants. One in, one out. The EU might yet block the plan, and it may fail as many have before it. The Conservatives’ Rwanda idea never got off the ground. Will this one? Labour hail it as a breakthrough with the French agreeing to take back some migrants for the first time. The right-wing media complain this is a drop in the ocean and will make precious little difference.

What interests me is the role Christianity plays in this debate, invoked as it is on both sides of the argument.

On the right, the argument runs like this: Britain is (or used to be) a Christian country. It is now in danger of being overrun by people who do not share that faith, or the values that are rooted in Christianity. Therefore, we must put a rapid halt to excessive immigration, especially migrants from conservative Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia or Pakistan. If we don’t, we will see the UK change dramatically and lose its distinct Christian identity.

So, in a speech last year, Reform leader Nigel Farage claimed that “Judeo-Christian values” are at the root of “everything” in Britain. These values, he said, were that “the family matters, the community matters, working with each other matters, the country matters.”

I’m sure they do. Christianity has shaped the character of the UK over centuries. And there is undoubtedly a sense in many places, especially more deprived ones, that communities have changed and are becoming unrecognisable from what they were. The chattering classes in Hampstead and Chipping Norton are hardly likely to feel the pinch, yet Bradford or Burnley can feel very different now than they did 50 years ago.

Yet it’s hard to identify Farage’s values as distinctly Christian. Many Muslims would claim much the same, and it would be difficult to describe his list as an adequate summary of the message of Jesus. ‘Judeo-Christian values’ are often identified on the right as being the same as ‘British values’, which are defined by the UK government as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” It’s hard to imagine anyone getting crucified for preaching that.

Yet Christianity is also used on the left. While he was Labour Leader in 2019, Jeremy Corbyn invoked Jesus in a call to welcome migrants: “The refugee crisis is a moral test. Jesus taught us to respect refugees. He himself said 'welcome the stranger…’ And the Bible says, 'the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born'.

He had done his homework. It’s a better account of the teaching of Jesus. Yet on the left, the welcome of the refugee is often part of a wider and deeper value of ‘diversity’ as a good in itself. Multiculturalism, the kaleidoscope of cultures found on many high streets with Indian, Thai, Italian, Moroccan restaurants, or the image of kids from different countries and religions happily running around a school playground is a beloved trope of secular progressive liberals.

The trouble is that it is not how it feels to many in parts of Luton or Leicester. The residents of Hampstead and Chipping Norton can embrace multiculturalism because it does not fundamentally threaten their way of life.

“The ebbing away of the faith is greeted with barely a fraction of the passion which accompanied Brexit.”

Bijan Omrani

Embracing strangers is easier if you have a settled place to welcome them into. A home where the family gets on well, where the parents are united, the kids are content, is much more likely to be able to welcome in unknown guests with a proper curiosity to learn from them. A family full of tension and bickering is unlikely to welcome the stranger at all, as the newcomer will strain existing tensions even further.

As theologian Oleg Dik writes: “A society which loses a sense of shared broad and strong identity is unable to welcome a stranger…. What makes us different is enriching only as long as we are all aware that we have something uniting us. In the absence of a uniting bond, difference turns out to be threatening.”

The vision of the left – of diversity as an end in itself, held together only by a loose idea of tolerance or secularity which no-one thinks is worth dying for, threatens to erode the ties that bind us, as it gives no clear centrifugal core that can hold us together.

Christianity doesn’t give you an immigration policy. Both left and right can claim some legitimacy in the Christian narrative. However, what Christianity does provide is a community that offers a moral schooling centred on the worship of Jesus, as the one who shows us the true shape of human life, the necessity of self-sacrifice, not self-indulgence as the key to a functioning communal life, and the sacred value of each person - beliefs which, in turn, can welcome the stranger into a secure and confident home.

These things have, over centuries, seeped out from their intense core in the Christian Church into wider society. Arguably today, they are being eroded ironically more by secularism than by Islam.

The real problem of our time is not mass immigration (as the right would have it) or the failure to fully open borders (for the left). It is the widespread erosion of Christian faith.

As historian Bijan Omrani puts it: “Christianity’s disappearance is being accepted with little consideration or debate. The ebbing away of the faith is greeted with barely a fraction of the passion which accompanied Brexit.” Now this may largely be the fault of the church itself, a failure of courage about its own message, and appearing like another social lobbying group for various causes rather than a community centred on the worship of Jesus. But it's also down to the swathes of middle class, educated Britons – like Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn - who like to claim the name of Jesus when it suits, and who live off the cultural heritage of Christianity without investing into its future by going anywhere near a church.

A good immigration policy needs the compassion that welcomes the vulnerable stranger. Yet it also needs a strong united community with a shared set of values, to welcome them into. Left and right may use Christianity in their rhetoric. But both miss something vital - that Christianity has to be practiced not just argued over.

A renewed Christianity might be the saving of both right and left - or at least offer a deeper and richer narrative than either can offer on their own, one that provides a strong core that can holds a society together, yet also welcome the stranger as a gift and not a threat.

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