The rise of platform technology has considerably changed the media production and consumption patterns. Its impact reverberates through the theatre/performance culture where people eager to elide several demands of production and the steps towards distribution of their output reach an audience directly. The desire to produce “content” for an audience that is now within democratized reach has given birth to a level of creativity whereby Pentecostal performances are re-called from various sources and re-staged, thus subjecting expressions of the sacred to a new level of scrutiny that digitality has made possible. Pentecostalism is a go-to source of creative extraction by experimenters eager to entertain a digitally curated audience while at the same time filling a gap in entertainment production opened up by platformization. Called, “content-making,” these performances diversely prey on religious resources. By subjecting the things of God to profane acts, they also transform social relationships to the faith. Pentecostals leaders are understandably anxious about the media exposure and subsequent demystification. Their reactions have ranged from threatening spiritual retaliation to police arrest.
In this study, I argue that the trend of delegitimizing religion has a longer history in Nigeria. What is different now is that Pentecostalism is, by its nature, a religion of dominionism that hardly brooks criticism. After analyzing a few instances of the ingenuity of Pentecostal critics who remediate their church-performances, I take an in-depth look at what this radicalism portends for the faith. For a society where both the edification and entertainment cultures have always been twangled, what does it mean when religion finds itself on the internet as a source of moral instruction and a disenchanting amusement?
This paper argues the trend of delegitimizing religion has a long history in Nigeria. What is different now is that Pentecostalism is, by its nature, a religion of dominionism that hardly brooks criticism. But rapidly expanding uses of Pentecostalism for “content-making" prey on religious resources. By subjecting the things of God to profane acts, they also transform social relationships to the faith. After analyzing a few instances of the ingenuity of Pentecostal critics who remediate their church-performances, I take an in-depth look at what this radicalism portends for the faith. For a society where both the edification and entertainment cultures have always been entangled, what does it mean when religion finds itself on the internet as a source of moral instruction and a disenchanting amusement?