Pasuma goes to church

In October 2015, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Lagos Province 20, was in the middle of preparations for a three-day outdoor crusade, and Pastor Toyin Ogundipe, who is also Professor of Botany at the University of Lagos, needed a personality who could be relied on to galvanize the audience. After weighing his options, Pastor Ogundipe decided that popular Fuji musician Alhaji Wasiu Alabi, better known as Pasuma (or Paso for short), was the ideal candidate for the job, and he rang him up. Although a born-again Christian, Pastor Ogundipe, a self-confessed lover of Fuji music, apparently saw nothing wrong in inviting Pasuma, a practising Muslim and one of the most famous faces in the Nigerian entertainment industry, to come and fire up a Christian audience. Pasuma would later confirm as much in an interview,Footnote ⁴ pointing out that, during the telephone conversation with Pastor Ogundipe, the latter had brushed aside his initial rejection of the invitation by reassuring him that all he needed from him, Pasuma, was to ‘come there … so we can get one or two or three people to change their lives. We want to use you to change some people’s hearts.’Footnote ⁵

Although Pasuma and Pastor Ogundipe shook hands on a deal, the crusade would not go ahead as planned, for hardly had the poster (Figure 3) of the event featuring, among other things, a large picture of Pasuma sporting his trademark dark glasses gone into circulation than it ran into a storm of criticism, mostly centring on the propriety of inviting into the ‘sacred space’ of a church ‘crusade’ a ‘Special Guest Artist’ who happened to be a practising Muslim and whose music is notorious for its profanity and ribaldry. As criticism mounted, the RCCG hierarchy intervened quickly by cancelling the planned crusade and suspending the errant pastor.

Figure 3.

Popular Fuji musician Pasuma (left) on the crusade poster.

As it happens, Pastor Ogundipe was not the first pastor of a major Pentecostal church to invite a popular entertainer to, as it were, light up his congregation. In April of the same year, Senior Pastor Bolaji Idowu of Harvesters International Christian Centre, Lekki, Lagos, had drawn flak for inviting singer-songwriter Korede Bello to perform his hit song ‘God win’ to the congregation in celebration of Easter Sunday. Of the many condemnations of Pastor Idowu, the pained statement (Abraham Reference Abraham2015) by US-based Pastor Olusola Fabunmi of the RCCG, City of Faith, Maryland, went furthest in summarizing the concerns of those worried by what they saw as the latest instance of the church’s seemingly inexorable surrender to ‘the world’:

Pastor Fabunmi’s anxiety about the church ‘surrendering to the world’ appears to have been ignored. In the past couple of years, several entertainers and Nollywood stars, including King Wasiu Ayinde Marshal (KWAM 1),Footnote ⁶ Patience Ozokwor, Osita Iheme (Pawpaw, of the Aki and Pawpaw duo), comedian Akpororo (Jephthah Bowoto) musician Iyanya (Iyanya Onoyom Mbuk), actors Ini Edo and Desmond Elliot, and actor-comedian Funke Akindele (aka Jenifa) have honoured invitations by various churches to ‘boost attendance’ at church services and sundry religious events. Such, indeed, has been the regularity of these invitations that Musa Atake, general secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), echoing Pastor Fabunmi’s demurral, was forced to issue a statement condemning them:

He continued:

The strongest condemnation perhaps is the statement by Pastor Mike Bamiloye, who, in an address to ‘Christians – ALL denominations’ posted on his Facebook page, expressed his disgust at the new trend. I reproduce the address in full because it speaks to some of the issues, particularly concerns about desecration, that this article addresses:

Denunciations by Pastors Fabunmi and Bamiloye and the CAN general secretary are a reminder that approval of this practice is not unconditional, either within Pentecostal churches or in Nigerian Christianity more broadly. That remains true even when some pastors defend such invitations on the grounds that the celebrities in question are Christians, conveniently ignoring the fact that some are in fact self-confessed Muslims. At any rate, the objections signal fundamental tensions and disagreements among Nigerian Pentecostals on how to relate to the world in general and the world of popular culture more specifically. From the standpoint of the community, it makes a difference whether they, i.e. Pentecostals, seek to leave their imprint on a popular culture ‘out there’ – in which case accommodations may be more easily forged – or whether agents ‘from the world’ are invited into the hallowed ground of the church or even the service. These negotiations notwithstanding, the more important issue, as indicated earlier, is that the practice in question is just one aspect of the alliance between Pentecostalism and popular culture. We should also note, parenthetically, the irony of Pastor Bamiloye in decrying the invitation of comedians and entertainers into the church, given that, as dramatist, actor, producer and owner of a television station (Mount Zion Television) – in short, a perfect symbol of the fusion of religion, popular culture and entrepreneurship – Bamiloye, recognized as a pioneer in the Nigerian Christian film industry, played a leading role in introducing Nigerian Pentecostalism to popular culture via audiovisual media.

One other important expression of the coincidence of Nigerian Pentecostalism and popular culture is the figure of what I call the gospel comedian, who, as mentioned earlier, is neither entirely a comedian nor entirely a pastor, but one whose performances speak to an agent immersed in both worlds.Footnote ⁸ I have already mentioned Woli Arole (real name Bayegun Oluwatoyin) and Woli Agba (Ayo Ajewole) as two of the leading names in this emerging comic form. Others, in no particular order, are Akpororo (Jephthah Bowoto), Mazi Prosper, Bishop Chikancy, Buchi (Onyebuchi Ojieh), M. C. Crucsio, DA 13th Disciple (Adefuwa Oluwagbemiga), Gee Jokes (Adejobi Omogbolahan) and Aboki 4 Christ (Olufemi Michael).

If, on the one hand, gospel comedians crystallize the convergence of Pentecostalism and popular culture as hybridized agents, on the other, by extending the list of what is safe for ridicule, thus widening the frontiers of the genre, they add another hue to the palette of Yorùbá eclecticism. For instance, because some of them are self-confessed Christians, and hence speak from within the fold, gospel comedians, unlike ‘regular’ comedians, appear to enjoy greater artistic licence regarding otherwise theologically sensitive material. In fact, such is the desire of some to emphasize (the primacy of) their identities as born-again Christians that a few (Woli Arole, for instance) would typically preface their commencements with the caveat that they are not comedians. They may not be pastors either, but one thing they undoubtedly are is entrepreneurs with an eye for a quick profit. Leveraging the affordances of social media, particularly on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, they have become multipurpose cultural intermediaries, as ready to celebrate the birthday of a leading socialiteFootnote ⁹ as they are to front various products for sponsors across the whole spectrum of corporate Nigeria.Footnote ¹⁰ In the figure of the gospel comedian, Pentecostalism, popular culture and the commercial ethic are synthesized (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Billboard for a performance by gospel musician Big Bolaji, with stand-up comedians such as Woli Arole and Woli Agba, and ‘special presence’ of Pastor Austin Ologbese of the Breakforth Church, Ibadan.

Pentecostal economics: following the money

Starting from Max Weber’s landmark work (Reference Weber1905) on the linkage between Protestantism and capitalism, through R. H. Tawney (Reference Tawney1926), Peter Berger (Reference Berger1963) and, more recently, studies by Iannaccone (Reference Iannaccone1991; Reference Iannaccone1992; Reference Iannaccone1995a; Reference Iannaccone1995b), Emerson and Smith (Reference Emerson and Smith2000), Finke and Stark (Reference Finke and Stark1988), Ekelund etal. (Reference Ekelund, Herbert and Tollison2006), McCleary and Barro (Reference McCleary and Barro2019) and Vatter (Reference Vatter2011), the economic dimensions and implications of religiosity have drawn copious scholarly attention.Footnote ¹¹ Relying extensively on North American/Western religious experience, this literature attempts to explain religious behaviour through a rational choice perspective, showing that the logic of demand and supply is as useful in analysing the actions of human beings as consumers as it is in understanding their spiritual choices. For Ekelund etal., the distinguishing feature of the economics of religion ‘is the belief that religion and religious behavior are rational constructs. In religious activity, as in commercial activity, people respond to costs and benefits in a predictable way, and therefore their actions are amenable to economic analysis (as well as sociological, historical, psychological, and anthropological analysis)’ (Reference Ekelund, Herbert and Tollison2006: 3).

The economic approach to religion, while undeniably useful, is not without its critics, many of whom are dubious about the application of the tools, analogies and vocabulary of economic analysis to something as non-rational as religion and religious behaviour (McKinnon Reference McKinnon2011; Sharot Reference Sharot2002; Bruce Reference Bruce1993). Bruce, for instance, insists that ‘rational choices cannot be made in religion because the various religious options cannot be weighed vis-à-vis the transcendental goals of religion, and that, generally speaking, most social environments mitigate against the notion that religious affiliations are the result of personal preferences’ (quoted in Yong Reference Yong2009: 120). Similarly, McCloskey argues that meaning seems to matter in religion ‘in a way that it does not in the consumption of ice cream’, although she is careful to ‘except certain quasi-religious experiences of ice-cream eating, such as a double scoop of amaretto at Sweet’s on Nassau Street in Princeton’ (Reference McCloskey2005: 21).Footnote ¹² Alluding to more or less the same problem, Ekelund etal. contend that ‘existing economic studies of religion share a common weakness: They do not accurately define the subject being studied. As a consequence, religion may, and often does, take on different meanings, some of which are amenable to empirical (or anecdotal) study, and some that are not’ (Reference Ekelund, Herbert and Tollison2006: 7).

These legitimate reservations notwithstanding, an economic understanding of religion or the economics of religion – irreducible, in my view, to rational choice theory – affords critical leverage to understand religious phenomena, not least because of the light it throws on the economic milieu in which certain forms of spirituality emerge, and how that milieu invariably conditions and shapes the agency of adherents. Jean and John Comaroff’s parallels between the murals (and morals) of global capitalism and those of African Charismatic Christianity should be viewed in this context.

Accordingly, an economic approach to Nigerian Pentecostalism generates insights: first, its antecedents. It goes without saying that what Marshall (Reference Marshall2009; cf. Ojo Reference Ojo2006) calls the ‘Pentecostal revolution’ was part and parcel of the broader cultural reaction to the economic dislocation of the 1980s. While, on the one hand, Pentecostal spirituality provided much-needed refuge for those whose lives had been so drastically ‘adjusted’, on the other, it opened up new horizons of economic opportunity to entrepreneurs who had been locked out of a contracted formal labour sector. It is primarily for this reason, I argue, that the history of Nigerian Pentecostalism is ultimately inseparable from a kind of ‘Prosperity Gospel’, Pentecostalism’s emergence being coeval with an economic crisis that put matters of poverty and prosperity front and centre in ordinary people’s lives (Obadare Reference Obadare2017a; cf. Kalu Reference Kalu2000; Haynes Reference Haynes2012; Ukah Reference Ukah2007).

Nigerian Pentecostalism is possessed by the economic spirit in other illuminating ways. Ukah has analysed the array of means whereby ‘[t]he church has managed to accommodate dominant consumer culture and capitalist market practices while not losing its other-worldly foci’ (Reference Ukah and Falola2005: 270). For instance, there is a ‘strong and open rivalry among Pentecostal churches for members and to attract corporate patronage and sponsorship’, to the extent that ‘the churches have become the locus of an aggressive rivalry among global and local business organizations competing for a share of the Pentecostal market for their services and products’ (ibid.). At the same time, many of the churches are run more or less as ‘business empires with the leader-founder acting as the executive director, and his wife (who usually is the second-in-command) acting as treasurer/financial secretary’ (ibid.: 272). The overarching logic, Ukah persuasively argues, is transactional, a ‘reasonable exchange relationship with God’ (ibid.: 263) in which church members ‘reap’ what they have ‘sown’ – a process that is not necessarily understood in metaphoric terms. For example, in 2012, as part of his solicitation for donor ‘Covenant Partners’,Footnote ¹³ Pastor Enoch Adeboye of the RCCG, warming to his métier as pastor-salesman, could not have been clearer that contributions – preferably ‘in Dollars or Pounds’ – were a form of ‘investment’. Such ‘investment’ is recoverable in ‘miracles’, but, more concretely, constitutes a semi-life warranty according to which those ‘in covenant’ for, say, ten years, were assured of being ‘kept alive for ten years’ (Obadare Reference Obadare2012). In a nutshell: you contribute to the church in direct exchange for a guaranteed life term – no more, no less.

The transactional logic apart, neither innovation (see Nyamnjoh and Carpenter Reference Nyamnjoh and Carpenter2018, for example) nor the growth process within Nigerian Pentecostalism is explicable outside the economic impulse. Regarding growth, not only does Ukah link the demographic expansion of Pentecostal Christianity with its increasing economic power, but, more provocatively, he suggests that schism within church congregations is mostly driven by an economic impulse, ‘caused by the desire to control the economic resources of the congregation’ (Reference Ukah2016: 530). Ultimately, for him, it is:

It is this entrepreneurial logic, unfolding within a context of product saturation, that, I suggest, explains the embrace of popular entertainers by an increasing number of Pentecostal pastors. Product saturation speaks to the pentecostalization of everyday life in Nigeria, which is the reality of: (1) Pentecostal denominational supremacy; and (2) life in every respect bending to the ‘Pentecostal principle’ (Wariboko Reference Wariboko2011). At the same time, the Pentecostal embrace of popular entertainers, while theologically contentious, is consistent with a reconciliation with popular culture that has seen Pentecostal leaders effectively use mass media ‘in the propagation of their ideas’ (Adesokan Reference Adesokan and Olaniyan2017: 194). For such Pentecostal leaders, recruiting popular entertainers, though controversial, becomes understandable when viewed as the logical outcome of the work of salesmanship necessitated by the rigours of keeping and maintaining a congregation – not to mention keeping it entertained. As such, when Pentecostal leaders go out of their way to invite popular entertainers as a way of ‘energizing’ their congregations and augmenting church experience, they are merely extending and deepening a relationship with popular media and popular culture that seems to have been there right from the inception of Pentecostalism as a cultural force in the 1980s. The key idea, therefore, is not to portray popular culture as an invading force within the space of the church, something clearly assumed by the religious leaders who strongly objected to the invitation to popular entertainers, but rather to ponder the various ways in which Pentecostalism and popular culture are mutually entangled, illustrating their mutual transgression.

Conclusion: money, culture, space

I have argued that, legitimate criticisms of its assumptions, techniques and emphases notwithstanding, an economic approach to religious affairs is often fruitful and illuminating and can provide a penetrating framework for understanding the emergence, growth, innovation and other aspects of specific religious denominations. Within this framework, I have suggested that some emergent trends within Nigerian Pentecostalism, particularly the controversial phenomenon of Pentecostal leaders inviting popular entertainers to perform at church services and other religious events, are dictated by an economic logic, central to which is the need by churches to adapt to the changing conditions of an intensely competitive religious marketplace. One effect of the success of Pentecostalism as the dominant form of Christianity in Nigeria and other African countries is its numerical explosion. As Pentecostalism has exploded, so too has its appetite for space, as shown by Pentecostal appropriation of public spaces such as nightclubs, hotels and cinema halls in Nigeria (Adeboye Reference Adeboye2012).

That success, one might argue, has led to a glut in the supply of ‘religious goods’; Pentecostal churches’ cultivation of popular culture, as illustrated by the overture to popular entertainment figures, is thus in part explained by the logic of competition in a saturated religious marketplace. Logically, because the supply of what Ekelund etal. describe as ‘assurances of salvation’ now arguably exceeds demand in the Nigerian religious market, Pentecostal churches are forced to come up with all manner of ‘product differentiation’ innovations in order to either hold onto loyal patrons (existing members of the congregation) or attract new customers. That is why, for instance, the billboard advertisement of the RCCG Lagos Province 20 mentioned earlier not only features an image of Pasuma but also tantalizes prospective attendees with ‘gift items’ including flat-screen televisions, motorcycles, mass transportation tricycles popularly known as ‘Keke Marwa’ or ‘Keke NAPEP’, and electric power generators. Since ‘assurances of salvation’ are no longer enough to draw people in, churches are forced to go out of their way to offer other products (entertainment, commodities, etc.) in addition to their core product.

As mentioned earlier, this coincidence of the notionally sacred and the profane puts us in touch with one of the critical issues with which Mbembe engages, first in ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ (Reference Mbembe1992) and later in On the Postcolony (Reference Mbembe2001). Specifically, the apparent erasure of the border delineating the pietistic from the farcical (the theologico-theatrical, as I advance) is important for understanding the transformation of both the official and non-official cultures tackled by Mbembe, invoking Mikhail Bakhtin. Further, while Mbembe theorizes the postcolony as ‘characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and a lack of proportion’ (Reference Mbembe1992: 3), the performative bricolage that is the essence of the theologico-theatrical proves that the ethic of improvisation is not contained within the political field. On the contrary – and bowing, as I have claimed, to pressure in a competitive religious marketplace – religious leaders enact devotional strategies (improvisations) that open up the church to the world of ‘obscenity’. Sacred space, we are thus reminded, ‘is not placid; it often exists at the heart of tumultuous controversies’ (Kilde Reference Kilde2008: 9). Second, ‘social power – evident in hierarchies and in relations among different groups – informs religious spaces’ (ibid.).

Nonetheless, while, as I have pursued, an economic explanation for this trend sounds plausible, it is by no means exhaustive, gaining further validation when placed within the matrix of Yorùbá metaphysical permissiveness, believed by scholars (Peel Reference Peel2016) to have originated in the dynamic copresence of three religious traditions (Islam, Christianity and indigenous Orisa) in the Yorùbá space and imagination. The point is that, given the power and widespread acceptance of this metaphysics, the invitation of popular entertainers into churches is not the problem of visceral contamination it would most certainly be in a different cultural context. But what about the fact, also noted earlier, that some of the entertainers in question are not even (nominal) Christians? Elsewhere (Obadare Reference Obadare2016b), inspired by the scholarly tradition discussed above, I have argued that a culturally mandated amity among otherwise competitive religious traditions explains Muslim adoption of Pentecostal devotional and evangelistic repertoires in western Nigeria. Therefore, the presence within the church of an entertainer who also happens to be a Muslim may not be the singular act of transgression it would appear to be at first glance, but something perhaps to be expected from a cultural economy in which accommodation (both within and between faiths) is the first and last rule. Nor, to revisit that example, is there necessarily a contradiction in a ‘born-again’ Christian such as Pastor Ogundipe being partial to Fuji music, as many Yorùbás, Muslim and Christian, in fact are. Indeed, not only has the Fuji scene always been the best place to judge the vitality or otherwise of popular culture as conducted in Yorùbá, the music itself has played an outsize role in the liberalization of the Yorùbá public sphere.

We might then conclude that, in extending an invitation to Pasuma, the Fuji exponent, Pastor Ogundipe was unwittingly validating two facts, one cultural, the other sociological. The cultural fact is that, although both the pastor and the entertainer profess allegiance to two different faiths, they remain, culturally speaking, sons of the same mother. In sociological terms, Pastor Ogundipe was underlining Fuji’s undoubted eminence as the most innovative form of popular music in contemporary western Nigeria. While a full development of this observation falls outside the remit of this article, I note in parenthesis that, over time, and in part through a process of steady appropriation that is classic Yorùbá, Fuji music has transcended its religious origins in urban working-class Muslim Ramadan ritual to become a transnational, class-neutral, crossover secular genre. And as a crossover genre, not only has it internalized the Yorùbá idea of Jesus as a cultural figure for multipurpose social invocation, which means that Christian songs of appeasement for heavenly intervention have been assumed into its repertoire; it has also taken full advantage of Jùjú’s apparent decline as a Yorùbá musical form.Footnote ¹⁴ Pasuma, a quintessential crossover artiste, is the very embodiment of this transition, Hence the appeal – his and Fuji’s – to Pastor Ogundipe.

These patterns, observed and analysed from a Nigerian standpoint, would seem to hold true for other African countries. Birgit Meyer, surveying Ghanaian Pentecostalism, writes:

In his work on Malawi, Van Dijk shows how Pentecostal ideology unwittingly created ‘the space to experience witchcraft in terms of mockery, laughter and amusement’ (Reference Van Dijk, Moore and Sanders2001: 99). In both countries, as in Nigeria, identified trends in the convergence of Pentecostalism and popular culture result in the further blurring of the boundaries between secular and religious entertainment. In the omnipresent shadow of commerce, the mutual interpenetration of Pentecostalism and popular culture in Nigeria steadily unfolds.