Postcolonial Covenantal Nationalism: Politics of Impossibility, Symbolic Violence and Pentecostalism in Zambia

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, this paper examines how the constitutionalization of Zambia’s postcolonial covenatal nationalism functions as a nationalized religious ideology of exclusion, symbolic violence and death. This nationalistic  theology, with its deeply entrenched moralistic stance, targets other religions, women, and sexual minorities, using the ideology of a Christian nation as an ideological state apparatus to regulate national morality, suppress dissenting voices, and covertly police alternative religious practices. Thus, Zambian Pentecostalism plays a significant role in undermining democratic values, decolonial emancipation, peaceful coexistence, and human flourishing in the postcolonial world.