Anointing for Sale: Sacred Commerce, Spiritual Populism, and Symbolic Violence in Nigerian Charismatic and Prophetic Churches

This paper examines how spiritual power becomes a marketable resource in contemporary Nigerian charismatic and prophetic churches. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across southwestern Nigeria, I analyze the circulation of anointed commodities such as oil, handkerchiefs, bracelets, and prophetic “insurance” packages as infrastructures of religious authority and economic survival. Rather than dismissing these goods as signs of corruption or excess, I argue that they function as vernacular technologies of risk management in contexts of unemployment, state failure, and everyday precarity. Through pricing, branding, and mediated distribution, pastors transform divine access into purchasable protection, recasting spiritual security as exchangeable value. These objects operate as multi-layered currencies that materialize hope while stratifying belonging along lines of class and gender. By theorizing sacred commerce as political economy rather than decline, the paper shows how markets reorganize charisma, inequality, and religious life. The study offers an African grounded account of religion, capitalism, and moral economy.