This panel offers research and perspectives, which explore the dialectics of Pentecostalism and Christianity in the postcolonial context of Africa. An interdisciplinary panel, and the papers are grounded in different disciplines and employing diverse methods and sources. The panel explores Pentecostalism and postcolonialism in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Zambia, as well as considering notions of postcolonialism and Black diaspora, which both offer synergies and divergences of interpretatoin. Our presenters are grounded in both empirical research and critical and constructive theories into the phenomenon of the postcolony and Pentecostalism in Africa.
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?
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.
Pentecostalism is an articulation of Black diaspora, because it is an enspiriting or enfleshing – a moment of reimagining and reanimating conjuncture as racialized Black bodies are undone and redone through movement – social, religious and political. Because Pentecostalism articulates and enunciates this disfiguring configuration of racialized Black bodies, geographies, epistemologies, and ontologies – new potentialities and possibilities emerge for analysis. There is now a critical mass of Black descended scholars who have drawn upon this motion that I poetically describe, but until quite recently, have not been brought into conversation with one another. From Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, to Ogbu Kalu’s Tembisa, to Nimi Wariboko’s charismatic city, to Robert Beckford’s outernational to Keri Day’s Azusa reimagined, Pentecostalism as Blackness narrates the possibilities of a re-ordering of the world, about the aspirations for the already, but not yet postcolony.
The increasing prominence of born-again Christian politicians in several African countries has sparked discussions about the 'Pentecostalization' of African politics and its impact on secular governance and inter-religious harmony. The case of Ethiopia offers a fresh perspective on these questions. When the Pentecostal Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed assumed power in this predominantly Orthodox Christian and Muslim nation, observers were surprised by his use of religious rhetoric alongside his radical restructuring of Ethiopian politics, which ultimately led to civil war and instability. Ethiopia presents a useful case study to question overgeneralized notions of a postcolonial Pentecostal politics in the post and prompts better analysis rooted in local historiography.
The paper situates the emergence of African Pentecostal women pastors in Catholic Europe as representing a dynamic intersection of faith, gender, and migration, revealing the complexities of identity and embodiment in a multicultural context. These women navigate the spiritual landscape as 'souls in search of bodies,' embodying migrant corporeality that challenges traditional religious structures. Their experiences reflect not only personal spiritual journeys but also broader socio-economic realities, illustrating how faith practices adapt to new environments (Meyer, 2010; Van Klinken, 2015). Through an interdisciplinary approach, combining sociology, theology, and migration studies, we explore how these pastors negotiate their roles within both Pentecostal communities and the broader Catholic milieu, fostering a unique theological perspective that honors their African heritage while engaging with European cultural norms (Butticci, 2016; Burgess, 2018).