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

Politics

Sport

9 September 2025

5 min read

Bad blood is damaging both football and politics

Are we all in the stands baying for blood?

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A view from a football stand over heads to the pitch.

Steven Collomb-Clerc on Unsplash.

Am I going mad? It definitely feels like I’m going mad. Let me tell you two tales, one about an ugly football match, the other about the early release of a ‘political’ prisoner’. It feels as if society, not just the fans in the stands, are baying for blood. I’m mad about it. Here's why.

There’s been little love lost between my team Liverpool and their recent opponents Newcastle United.

Liverpool’s crime? Wanting to buy Newcastle’s striker, Alexander Isak. How dare they!

If reports are to be believed – and everything should be viewed with raised eyebrows when it comes to football transfers – Isak informed Newcastle of his desire leave at the end of last season and was given assurances he would be able to. Liverpool, with no recognised striker following Diogo Jota’s death placed a bid of around £110 million.

A British transfer record fee. As an opening bid. A fee subsequently described as “disrespectful.” I feel like I’m going mad. If anyone would like to ‘disrespect’ me with £110,000,000, please let me know and I’ll send you my bank details.

The game’s turning point is a tackle by Newcastle’s Anthony Gordon on Virgil Van Dijk, Liverpool’s captain, just before half-time.

Gordon comes flying in, studs up, raking the back of Van Dijk’s leg. It is a deeply unprofessional tackle from Gordon. A cynical attempt to hurt a colleague with no discernible attempt to win the ball. It’s a tackle that’s beneath him, frankly.

By the time Anthony Gordon lunges in, the tone of the match is clear: we’re here to cause harm to anyone in a red shirt. (And the Newcastle fans are still in the stands cheering them on).

At the end of the day, I’m just glad Liverpool won. But I am genuinely baffled and alarmed by the amount of normally level-headed people who became intent on causing harm because of a (potential) transfer. Bad blood is flowing, indeed rushing to the head of many of them.

Most of all, I’m glad Liverpool won because, when I say what I’m about to say, you know it’s not coming from a place of bitterness that my football team lost a match. Because another story this week has left me feeling like I’m going mad: the release of Lucy Connolly from prison.

In July 2024, three young girls were stabbed to death at a dance class in Southport. In the aftermath, amid (false) reports that the killer was an asylum seeker, riots broke out across the country as people targeted mosques, asylum seeker accommodation, and even libraries.

In the midst of this, Lucy Connolly – whose husband was, at the time, a Conservative county councillor – tweeted:

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the [f***ing] hotels full of the [b***ards] for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government & politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”

Having left prison, Connolly told The Telegraph that she was a “political prisoner” and that Keir Starmer “needs to look at what people's human rights are, what freedom of speech means and what the laws are in this country.”

The irony of her saying this in an interview with a national newspaper was apparently lost on her.

Am I going mad? It definitely feels like I’m going mad.

Lucy Connolly encouraged people to burn down hotels with people inside. To spill blood. She pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing ‘threatening or abusive’ written material on X. She literally admitted to doing this in a court of law.

But she is now being hailed in some quarters as a political martyr and champion of free speech. Let’s have it right: you are free to say what you want, but you are not free from the consequences of your speech. Whether you like it or not, migrants and asylum seekers are made in the image of God, as we all are, and are beloved by the creator of the universe. None of us has the right to end their lives. Incitement of violence towards them is rightly a crime.

She deserves to be in prison.

The people who rioted last year are ultimately responsible for their actions. But Lucy Connolly – and everyone else who incited violence in the aftermath of the Southport attacks – is also partly to blame for cultivating a society in which thugs feel as though that is an acceptable course of action. Now she is released from prison, every media outlet, every interviewer, every politician who repeats her reality-defying nonsense without challenge is as culpable as she is for fostering this climate of violence. This is before we even begin to talk about the record numbers of asylum seekers who have already died in our care.

It was ultimately Anthony Gordon’s stupid decision to go in studs-up on Van Dijk. But referee Simon Hooper and the Newcastle fans should reflect on their part in fostering a climate of violence in which Gordon’s felt his decision was reasonable, too.

We are all Simon Hooper. We are all the referee. When we allow rhetoric to become calls for violence, this has real-world consequences. People get hurt and killed. Blood is spilled. We are all responsible for the society in which we live, and the rhetoric of the debate that occurs therein.

It’s not just febrile Newcastle fans that are losing their grip on reality: there seems to be a society-wide willingness simply to bypass the concrete facts of reality to further personal ideologies. The more people like Lucy Connolly are rehabilitated by media whitewashing, the more statements like “set fire to all the [f***ing] hotels full of the [b***ards] … if that makes me racist, so be it” become acceptable, the less safe the most vulnerable in society become and the more likely they are to be killed.

That’s the nub of it. Lucy Connolly should be in prison because what she said leads to people being killed. No-one should have been surprised when Anthony Gordon went in on Van Dijk that night. No-one should feign surprise when migrants and asylum seekers are eventually killed on the basis of rumour and misinformation. Because they will be. And because we will all have been cheering on from the stands.

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