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

To be Zambian today is, in many ways, to be Christian. Zambia is a Christian nation both by covenantal declaration and demography, with approximately 95 per cent of the population identifying as Christian. In this context, there is no sharp distinction between natural and symbolic orders; rather, the symbolic world of religion forms the theoretical foundation through which social, political, relational, and ecological life is understood and engaged. This study will employ Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to examine 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 (in the sense of Louis Althusser) to regulate national morality, suppress dissenting voices, and covertly police alternative religious practices. The study ultimately argues that religions of power, such as Zambian Pentecostalism, play a significant role in undermining democratic values, decolonial emancipation, peaceful coexistence, and human flourishing in the postcolonial world.