Preface

Summary

This book attends to Nigerian Pentecostalism both in its homeland and in the United States. It offers an in-depth look at Nigerian Pentecostalism, focusing on the issues of spirituality, community, friendship, identity, theological response to national economic poverty, and political engagement. Drawing on rich interviews and observations, it offers a sophisticated theoretical account of the creativity, diversity, resilience, and vibrancy of Nigerian Pentecostalism in its homeland and in the United States. This lively account shows how neo-Pentecostal and charismatic practices in Nigeria have become acts of religious production of knowledge, and politics and ethics of truth and revelation. In Nigeria today, Pentecostalism is not just a moral or belief system—it is an epistemological quest.

The sense of Nigerian Pentecostal spirituality is the expectation, the belief, the realization that the invisible can manifest itself. This quest is a matter of accessing the underlying character—the so-called noumenal, invisible realm—of events, circumstances, and coincidences in the world. This epistemological quest—what I call the “spell of the invisible”—is the key characteristic of the expression of the Pentecostal faith in Nigeria.

This study brings to the fore how the Pentecostals’ mode of knowing, their epistemological quest, structures their subjectivity, their view of the limits and potentials of the human body, and their participation and articulation of the political. It is a study of Nigerian Pentecostalism under the pressures of the spell of the invisible. It shows how the spell works and permeates all the spheres of Pentecostal life. The analysis and investigations in this book are driven and sustained by questions derived from political philosophy and theory, sociology, psychoanalysis, religion, theology, ethics, and an increasing turn to racial identity in the movement as Nigerian Pentecostals grapple with their belief in Nigeria's high destiny in the face of the relatively poor economic and technological achievements of sub-Saharan African nations. Based on the discernment of some noumenal signs, Nigerian Pentecostals are claiming that their nation has been specially chosen by God to lead the final evangelization of the world before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and to draw the black race into global economic and technological supremacy.