In Religion and Politics in a Mediatized Society, editors Bellarmine A. Ezumah, Charles A. Ebelebe, and Olunifesi A. Suraj curate a stimulating and incisive volume that examines one of the most consequential issues shaping African public life-the intersection of media, religion, and politics in Africa. While the book takes Nigeria as a focal site, its insights resonate across the Global South where media, religion, and politics converge to shape public consciousness and authority. The editors expose how each sphere feeds, shapes, and manipulates the other. What emerges is a striking portrait of a society where faith has become political, politics has become spiritual, and media has become the pulpit through which both powers preach.
Notably, one of the compelling features of the book is its refusal to approach media, religion, and politics as distinct entities. Instead, it advances the concept of “interinfluence” as a conceptual framework that underscores the reciprocal and often parasitic relationships between religious authority, political power, and media. In their view, the media are not simply intermediaries but arenas of moral and political performance. As such, the editors situate religion and politics as practices sustained and increasingly defined by technological mediation.
In the preface, Ezumah presents a rich theoretical framework that explores religion, politics, and media as technologies of persuasion. In other words, they are tools that can emancipate or ensnare. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s (Reference Hall1973) encoding/decoding model and Paul Lazarsfeld’s theory of opinion leadership, she explores how clerics, politicians, and broadcasters act as opinion leaders who construct narratives of salvation and progress. Furthermore, her reconceptualization of McLuhan’s idea-“the medium is the message”-is striking. In Africa, she writes, “the medium has become the miracle.” Media platforms are not mere conduits of religion; they are the new theaters of revelation, shaping how faith and power are imagined and enacted.
While Ezumah foregrounds mediation and persuasion, Charles Ebelebe offers a historical excavation of Africa’s religious landscape in the first chapter. He traced the displacement of African Traditional Religion (ATR) through missionary colonialism. Ebelebe argues that Christianity and Islam did not merely evangelize; they reconfigured Africa’s existing cosmologies to serve colonial interests. He positions ATR not as a relic of the past but as a philosophy of being. Ebelebe implicitly argues for a decolonization of religious consciousness and a desire to re-center indigenous epistemologies as valid systems of knowledge in Africa.
The volume then turns to media institutions in Olunifesi Suraj’s third chapter, “Normative Theoretical Analyses of Religion, Media, and Politics in Nigeria.” His contribution examines the crisis of credibility facing the Nigerian media. Employing the framework of normative press theory, he interrogates how religious and political ownership structures have compromised journalistic independence. Suraj questions whether the Nigerian press can function as the “fourth estate” when it is enmeshed in what he terms “a triad of loyalty” to the market, to political power, and to the pulpit. His argument contributes to broader African media scholarship (Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2005) that highlights the moral economy of news production.
Questions of media and performance are further developed in Ayodele Ayeni’s chapter on digital media. Ayeni introduces the metaphor of the “new Areopagus” -a reference to the Apostle Paul’s sermon in Athens to describe how social media platforms have become modern spaces of spiritual and political debate. “Truth,” he writes, “is no longer what is revealed but what is shared.” Facebook and YouTube are not just channels; they are digital temples. Sermons go viral, prophecies become memes, and miracles are replayed like music videos. Ayeni’s warning is subtle but urgent: when theology becomes content, truth becomes performance.
The closing essays by Chukwuemeka Nwosu and Acheme Ramson advance the book’s most actionable insight: that media literacy is a form of decolonization. Ramson argues that colonialism not only dispossessed Africans materially but also colonized cognition, leaving societies vulnerable to manipulation by charismatic authorities. His empirical study on political and religious illiteracy in Nigeria reinforces the need for civic education that cultivates critical spectatorship-an awareness of how belief and propaganda are produced.
Despite the book’s relevance to the subject matter in the Global South, it tends to occlude methodologically. First, there is a relative absence of sustained-audience research that foregrounds how everyday Nigerians interpret and contest mediated religious and political messages. Second, the book pays limited attention to material and infrastructural dimension of mediation including platform algorithms and factors influencing transnational media ownership.
The editors however conclude by revisiting Habermas’s concept of the public sphere through an African lens. The village square and town hall meeting, they argue, are indigenous forms of deliberation that predate Western liberal models. Today, those spaces persist virtually in WhatsApp groups, online crusades, and political livestreams. Whether these digital commons democratize discourse or deepen polarization depends on the ethical capacity of citizens to interrogate the messages they receive. In this respect, Religion and Politics in a Mediatized Society serves not only as academic analysis but also as civic exhortation. It urges Africans to move from being consumers of media to users-critical participants in meaning-making and accountability.
Religion and Politics in a Mediatized Society is a necessary book. It is theoretically ambitious yet accessible, rooted in African experience, yet globally relevant. The central message is clear: religion, politics, and media will continue to shape one another. What matters is how consciously and critically citizens engage with their power. The editors advocate for a new literacy, not only in reading media texts but in reading the moral and ideological codes that underpin them. It asks: Who is really speaking when someone says “God told me”? And who profits when belief becomes broadcast?
