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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.

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Monastic life

16 May 2025

5 min read

The Sycamore Gap vandals were chasing the wrong sort of fame

Fifteen minutes of notoriety is nothing - just ask St Cuthbert.

Graham Tomlin

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

A felled decidious tree lies sprawled on the ground. The freshly sawn stump and roots are in the foreground

The stump of the felled sycamore tree.

Wandering wounder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It was Andy Warhol who is said to have uttered the famous statement: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Never mind the fact that the quotation has been attributed to other people as well, whoever came up with it first can hardly have anticipated how quickly it would come true.

In our times, social media has democratised information. We all now have our own individual press office, issuing our considered statements to the world in the form of Instagram or Facebook posts, comments on X, reels and the like. Secretly we all hope one of our gems of wisdom, a joke or a video of something weird will go viral - in a positive way - and we will get our 15 minutes of fame.

I was thinking of all this recently on a walk by Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland in the North-east of England. It so happened that on that very day, the Wall was in the news, as the two men who had cut down the famous tree at Sycamore Gap – the one featured in the Robin Hood film - were convicted of the crime. We looked up at Sycamore Gap, and it was just that - a gap – denuded of its tree, it is now just like any other depression in the escarpment over which Hadrian's Wall runs. Only you couldn't avoid the memory of the distinctive tree silhouetted against the sky which was no longer there, like an awkward smile with a tooth missing.

The story of Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers is a pretty unsavoury one. Two fairly low life characters without a great deal of purpose seem to have thought of this as a clever stunt which would somehow impress people. The video would go viral, they hoped, and they would be famous - maybe for 15 minutes - basking in the global coverage of their daring action. They seem to have totally miscalculated the affection with which the tree was held and the outrage this stupid act generated. They got their notoriety but not in a good way. Today they wait anxiously to see whether this mindless act of vandalism will lead to a prison sentence.

It is perhaps another symptom of our culture’s desperate desire for fame. Social media is full of influencers who are famous for not much more than being famous. Similar stunts, one more outrageous than the other are performed daily, recorded on YouTube and put out there to gain attention. We are addicted to fame.

The hapless pair were desperate for their moment of fame and got it in a particularly nasty form.

On the same Northumberland trip, not very far away, a very different approach to fame caught my eye. Cuthbert, a seventh century hermit was one of those hardy Christian monks and missionaries who spread the faith in these islands in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. He was known for his piety, astonishing miracles and sympathy with nature. His biographer, the Venerable Bede, tells us he would walk into the cold North Sea, standing up to his neck in water to pray, in order to increase his ability to focus on God, the object of his prayers, not the yearnings of his body. On coming out of the water, sea otters would come and warm his feet, sensing that this man was in tune with the heart of the universe and should be cared for and protected.

As his fame grew, Cuthbert tried to find more and more ways to run away from it. He was given permission to leave his monastery in Lindisfarne to go out alone to live on the remote Farne islands, far from prying eyes, giving him the freedom to focus on the one object of his desire - to know God through a deep life of prayer and meditation. People would try to come to see him, fellow monks bringing supplies, or pilgrims looking for a word of wisdom from the holy man, yet his focus was ruthless. Eventually, says Bede, “he shut himself away from sight within the hermitage, rarely talking to visitors even from the inside, and then only through the window… in the end he blocked it up and opened it only to give a blessing or for some definite need”.

The difference between Graham / Carruthers and Cuthbert could hardly be more stark. The hapless pair were desperate for their moment of fame and got it in a particularly nasty form - fame that turns out to be more like shame. Cuthbert fled from fame, longing for the attention not of other people but of his Maker and Redeemer.

Cuthbert’s relentless pursuit of God, and its results in a remarkable life - weird in a different and more nourishing way than the stunts on YouTube - fascinated people. After he died, his bones were transferred to Durham Cathedral where they still lie today. You find the name of St Cuthbert everywhere in the North East – on schools, road signs, coffee shops and fishing boats. It’s a name that will endure after the destroyers of the sycamore tree are long forgotten. We're still talking about Cuthbert 1,400 years later.

Fame is an elusive and dangerous thing. Tom Holland once called it “a beast that you can't control or be prepared for.” If you chase it, it rarely turns out well. More often than not you get the wrong kind of (unwelcome) fame. The best kind comes when you’re not making fame itself the thing you’re looking for. If you ignore it, and seek something more satisfying, something really worth attention – which for Cuthbert was God, the source of all beauty, truth and goodness - you won’t be worried whether you’re famous or not, because your heart will be full of something much more lasting and worthwhile.

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