We at CIHA are delighted to offer the following excerpts from the introduction to Dr. Ebenezer Obadare’s new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018). Professor Obadare has written about Pentecostalism, civil society, and religion on the blog in the past. You can find his previous posts here. As always, we look forward to your comments!
Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria
By: Dr. Ebenezer Obadare, University of Kansas
This book is an account of the interplay of religion and politics in Nigeria since the country’s celebrated return to civil rule in May 1999. It is the first installment of an envisaged dyad (or a trilogy, if I am lucky) on the impact of religion on politics and society in contemporary Nigeria. Two complementary theses are advanced. The first is that the dawn of democratic rule in 1999 coincided with the triumph of Christianity over its historical rival, Islam, as a political force in Nigeria. At the same time – and secondly – the political triumph of Christianity came about just as Pentecostalism was muscling its way to the front of the line as the dominant expression of Christianity in the country and beyond. Hence the title of the book, Pentecostal Republic, which is my way of acknowledging the profound impact of Pentecostalism and Pentecostal forces on politics and the social imaginary in the Nigerian Fourth Republic (from 1999 onwards). In placing the Fourth Republic under the lodestar of Pentecostalism, I am making a categorical assertion: that the Nigerian democratic process since 1999 is ultimately inexplicable without recourse to the emergent power of Pentecostalism, whether as manifested in the rising political influence of Pentecostal pastors, or in a commensurate popular tendency to view socio-political problems in spiritual terms.
Nigerian readers, or scholars and students well acquainted with the contours of Nigeriana, will be familiar with the events and personalities described and analysed here. Yet, its historical and sociological particularities notwithstanding, the account is far from idiosyncratic. On the contrary, the book’s story – of the deep imbrication of politics and spirituality and the contradictions that arise – is contemporaneous and global, and very much so. As such, the master template of continued accommodation and contestation between political and religious actors locked in a perennial struggle for power should resonate with close observers of religio-politics everywhere. I draw two examples from South Korea and the United States respectively as a way of de-exoticising the Nigerian situation.
In late 2016, the attention of the world was captured by events in South Korea, specifically the (ultimately futile) efforts of President Park Geun-hye to hold on to power amid a deepening political scandal. The scandal that consumed President Park (in December 2016, South Korean lawmakers voted to impeach her, a decision later ratified in March 2017 by the country’s Constitutional Court) had an interesting aspect: it concerned the president’s relationship with Choi Soon-sil, daughter of Choi Tae-min, founder of a para-Christian sect called the Church of Eternal Life. Although President Park and Choi Soon-sil were friends before the former ascended to the Korean presidency in 2013, their friendship strengthened once Park took office, as Choi rapidly transformed from close friend to spiritual confidant. Choi reportedly leveraged this ambiguous role to the hilt, using her unfettered access to President Park to curry financial and political favours, including securing unbridled access to confidential state documents.
Reports of what transpired between President Park and her confidant (apparently, these included private seances in the presidential residence, the Blue House) sent shock waves through Korean society, sending thousands of Koreans to the streets in protest. The disclosures dealt two specific blows to the Korean psyche. First, they destroyed public confidence in President Park, whom many had come to respect as an honest leader, the moral antithesis of the very acts contained in the revelations. Second, and directly relevant to my analysis, the fact that a morally ambiguous ‘spiritual adviser’ could so easily wiggle her way into the highest levels of power and insinuate herself into policymaking wounded Koreans’ pride in their country as an emblem of Weberian rationality, raising new questions about who controls the levers of power in the country.
If South Korea’s ‘Shaman Scandal’ offers a model of the mutual embrace of politics and religion in a state notionally predicated on the separation of the two, contemporary United States offers another. Here, a deep liberal commitment to the separation of church and state has historically been at odds with mobilisation by the Christian Right to return the country to its perceived ‘Christian roots’ and the kind of moral regimen presumed to be its logical appurtenance. Over the past three decades, this mobilisation has increasingly intensified, fuelled largely by fears that secularisation and its attendant moral relativism are eroding the ethical foundations of the American republic. Whether such fears are justified or not, they offer one plausible explanation for the flight of American evangelicals towards the Republican Party, and, subsequently, their unflagging support for incumbent president Donald Trump. Contra the Korean model, the American case offers us a set of (Christian conservative) religious agents who: (1) are not content to operate behind the scenes; and, in fact, (2) push a political agenda that seems to suggest that they are not entirely convinced that church and state should continue to remain separate.
The Nigerian scenario as described in this book combines elements from the two models. For one thing, à la South Korea, Nigerian politicians consult freely with a wide range of ‘spiritual advisers’, and this tends not to be seen as a contradiction, nor is there reputational damage, in a society where all political power is assumed to rest on a spiritual warrant of some sort. And while, for many reasons, there is no direct equivalent of the Christian Right in Nigeria (for example, there is no obvious parallel to what is in effect an ideological merger between the bulk of American evangelicals and the Republican Party), a perennial Christian–Muslim struggle rages to claim state power and clothe it in religious symbols and regalia. In fact, and as I argue in this book, Christian determination to undo perceived Muslim ‘colonisation’ of state power was one reason for the establishment of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in 1976. Of the many paradoxes of Nigerian politics, the realisation that, wittingly or not, it is this inter-religious struggle for political supremacy that continues to guarantee the country’s secular status must count among the most confounding.
To return to the broader point: sociological characteristics notwithstanding, the Nigerian case as described and analysed in this book is most fruitfully approached as one example of the different ways in which, in contrast to the certitudes of secularisation, religion and religious factors continue to shape politics globally. Across the global South, and incontrovertibly in most of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, this religious resilience is characterised by – or at least substantially enabled by – the efflorescence of Pentecostalism. Suffice it to say that this flowering has had many witnesses, as evidenced by the plethora of academic writings on Pentecostalism, and, to that extent, this book is a contribution to an ongoing scholarly dialogue.
The chief difference is in my focus, emphasis and overall argumentation. I focus primarily on the politics of the Nigerian Fourth Republic, hatched from elite compromise, headed at inception by a self-proclaimed ‘born again’ president, and ‘claimed’ and christened at birth by Pentecostals. In my telling, while the emergence of a Southern Christian president is arguably the culmination of a process that began with CAN’s founding in 1976, Obasanjo’s emergence was at best a pyrrhic victory for CAN, which ceded ground willy-nilly to the inexorable force of Pentecostalism and its train of politically influential pastors. As such, one of the driving tensions of Christian politics in the Fourth Republic is the disagreement between CAN and Pentecostal/charismatic churches loosely coalesced under the aegis of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN). The basis of their disagreement is mainline Christian denominations’ perfectly admissible charge that Pentecostals are doctrinally reckless, favouring the spectacular (for example, the emphasis on miracles) to the detriment of basic Christian teaching. Further, Pentecostal leaders have been accused of betraying the original mission of political Christianity by, among other things, aggressively cultivating politicians, hence effectively blurring the line between critical engagement and political assimilation.
Because my focus is explicitly political, I pay scant attention to Pentecostalism as a theological project, as is the practice of a section of the literature. Theorist Nimi Wariboko’s oeuvre is an exemplar of this kind of approach. On the contrary, as far as I am interested in any of Pentecostalism’s dogmas, it is to the extent that they can be said to carry a political significance. My temporal remit being the Fourth Republic, my aim is to explicate the struggle for state power among agents mobilising religious reason. With respect to the general political impact of Pentecostalism, I contend, against the laudatory grain, that while it has affected the socio-political order in Nigeria, Pentecostalism, being more apologetic than critical, has largely shied away from challenging it. Does Nigerian Pentecostalism harbour a reactionary gene?