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

Feminism

Migration

Trauma

10 October 2025

6 min read

“Defending our girls” is less about safety, more about scapegoating

The men who finally care about violence against women — just in time to blame immigrants for it

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A protestor holds a blue smoke canister towards the camera lens.

An asylum hotel protester, Epping.

Something has profoundly shifted in the way we are speaking about male violence against women and girls. Or perhaps I should say, the shift is precisely that we are speaking about male violence against women and girls.

Wait.

Would you allow me to slightly amend that statement once more?

I say ‘we’ are talking about it, what I really mean, if I may be so blunt, is ‘men’. Men are talking about male violence against women and girls.

Therein lies the shift.

Women have been speaking about this epidemic of violence for years, they have been having endless conversations about the complexities of their own sense of sexual safety, relentlessly sounding the alarm. And, all too often, being ignored. It has so commonly felt as though women could scream about this topic at the top of their lungs and be met with an exasperated eyeroll. Perhaps that’s ungenerous of me, maybe the lack of political interest has been more about despondence than disbelief. Either way, it has continually appeared as though male violence against women and girls has sat, slumped and hopeless, at the bottom of the political agenda.

Until now, that is. Now, it is the crux of many campaigns, sitting right at the forefront of multiple political conversations. One conversation, in particular.

Earlier this year, Conservative MP, Robert Jenrick, wrote an article in which he stated that he fears for his daughters’ safety, not wanting them to live near ‘men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally and about whom you know next to nothing’. Political party Reform UK has a concern for women’s safety sitting at the forefront of their campaigns; again, Nigel Farage (leader of Reform UK) has continually suggested that it is the immigrant communities in the UK who are posing the threat. Signs that read ‘defend our girls’ have been ever-present at many of the anti-immigration protests that have happened throughout the summer months, the same phrase was chanted by those taking part in the ‘Unite The Kingdom’ march, organised by far-right activist, Tommy Robinson.

So, we have a direct line being drawn between immigration and the epidemic levels of violence against women and girls. A common enemy is a powerful thing, isn’t it? A uniting thing? An energising thing, even? This line from A to B (‘A’ being the violence and ‘B’ being people who have come to this country from another) is one that I cannot draw myself. I find no biblical nor sociological justification for doing such. In fact, I’m hit with quite the opposite.

I’ll get biblical, but shall we start with the sociological?

Violence against women – be that physical, verbal, sexual, financial, or any other nuanced kind – is a tragic reality here in the UK, as well as globally. We know this and there can be no denying it.

One in three women will experience domestic abuse.

A woman is murdered by a partner/ex-partner every four days.

One in two rapes against women are carried out by a partner/ex-partner.

More than 90 per cent of perpetrators of rape and/or sexual assault are known to their victims.

One in three adult survivors of rape experience it in their own home.

These facts are heartbreaking, stomach-churning, worthy of our indignation and fury. They do not, however, imply that the dominant threat to women are strangers who have come to UK from other countries. Such claims, while being spoken of loudly and continually, are unfounded.

There’s almost an ‘if-only-ness’ about such claims, isn’t there? And so, if I lower my hackles, I can sympathise with wanting such claims to be true, albeit momentarily - if only we could solve male violence against women and girls so easily.

If only it were so neat.

Instead, we have to sit in the utterly overwhelming, and often debilitating, reality that violence is being carried out against women in every age group, every socioeconomic group (although it must be acknowledged that women who can’t access public funds, such as welfare support or housing assistance, are three times more likely to experience violence), every ethnic group, and in every corner of the country. As a woman, if a man is shouting at me while I’m alone – it makes no difference what language he’s shouting at me in, tragically, I’ve learnt to be scared regardless.

The notion that it is an imported problem that can therefore be a deported problem, is wrong. And, dare I say it, undergirded by racism.

It’s perhaps also worth mentioning that there is footage from the recently held ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march, during which the mandate to ‘defend our girls’ was continually chanted, of men chasing female counter-protesters down the street. While a call to defend women was chanted one minute, a call for women to expose themselves was chanted the next. Furthermore, it has been reported that 40 per cent of those arrested during the 2024 anti-immigration protests had previously been reported to the police for domestic abuse. In my home city of Bristol, it was two-thirds of those arrested.

So, while women’s safety seems to be at the forefront of political and social movements right now, I can’t help but be deeply suspicious of the intentions behind it. It seems to me that the same people who have spent the last five-or-so years responding to women’s pleas for help with an irritated ‘not all men’ chant, are now more than happy to point at a marginalised group of people and declare ‘but probably all those men’.

But this isn’t simply sociological, nor is it purely political. For me, there are theological reasons why I can’t help but wince at what is happening.

I simply don’t think the Bible gives us the option of pitting one marginalised group against another; it’s clear on the fact de-humanisation can never be a tool in our societal toolbox. In fact, if we’re going to get biblical with it, vulnerable women and ‘migrants’/’foreigners’/’strangers’/’sojourners’ – they’re always on the same list.

‘He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing’ – that’s the book of Deuteronomy. And this – ‘Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’ – is the book of Zechariah.

I could go on.

We have a shared humanity and, therefore, a sacred responsibility to protect both the women and girls who are facing unspeakable injustice, and those who are being unfairly scapegoated for it. It’s an uncomfortable tension, I can’t deny it. It refutes quick-fixes, it raises its eyebrows at cheap blame, and it absolves any comforting notion that the problem flows from elsewhere - Christianity simply does not offer such a luxury. Compassion cannot be finite, love – as Graham Tomlin has argued – cannot be a limited commodity.

And this is precisely why such things being increasingly carried out in the name of Christianity makes no sense to me. Surely, this cannot be espoused in the name of the Jesus who destabilises the boundaries between ‘Our Sort of People' and 'Those Others Over There?’ (to quote Francis Spufford)

We cannot be fooled, fear and distrust on the basis of someone being different from ourselves is not – I repeat, not - a Christian value. One vulnerable group’s pain being unjustly weaponised against another vulnerable group has no hint of Jesus about it. Plus, doing so knowingly compromises the care we can offer to both groups.

I’m getting a little weary of being told that, as a woman, this hate will ensure my safety. Both sociologically and biblically, I’ve found the grounds to call time on such a claim.

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