The expulsion and defeat of demonic forces is integral to Pentecostal practice. This chapter, Demons and Deliverance: Discourses on Pentecostal Character, uses close readings of fictional performances allied to the Pentecostal movement to lay out Pentecostalism’s history and its preoccupation with power. Understanding Pentecostal performance of power identity entails not just looking at the practices conducted in the church or the structure of their religious activities, but also at theatrical activities and drama productions about demonic encounters staged to boost Pentecostal faith. The mediatized accounts of spiritual warfare narrated by Pentecostal drama ministers are strategic to the reading of the Pentecostal social history and ritual actions. This chapter chronicles the Pentecostal trajectory and their demonstrated desire for power through two television dramas about deliverance from satanic attacks, Agbara Nla (The Ultimate Power) and Abejoye (The Kingmaker). Both were produced by the same Christian film company, the Mount Zion Faith Ministry, across about three decades. The differences in how both dramas capture the performance of exorcism are instructive in understanding how far the Pentecostal faith has traveled as a social practice and how they have achieved their power identity through a drawn-out period of time.

This section provides the main argument of the book, followed by historical background on the development of doctrine and devotion to the Virgin Mary up to the end of the fifth century and the flourishing of the cult from that period onward. This section is followed by one on literary genre, which attempts to justify the structure and argument of the book as a whole. A section on gender, which takes into account recent approaches to this subject in the Byzantine context, develops a methodology for studying the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Introduction finishes by outlining once again the goal of this study: it is to assess early and middle Byzantine texts on the Byzantine Virgin according to the diverse settings and audiences for which these were intended.

This chapter, “God Too Laughs and We Can Laugh Too”: The Ambivalent Power of Comedy Performances in the Church, investigates the trend in Nigerian Pentecostal churches where comedians intersperse various church programs with comedy performances. In this chapter, I look at performance of power beyond acquisition and contestation to how power identity of an authority figure can be affirmed publicly and contested privately. Comedy performance has consistently been treated as a site of resistance by the marginalized subject, but my study of comedy in Pentecostal churches shows some complications in this functionalization of the art form. Using both ethnographic methods in my fieldwork with various interviews with “gospel comedians” (as some refer to themselves), I consider exchanges that constitute power identity whose radicality is not found in the public sites but in the backrooms where negotiations take place between the artist and the producers.

Pentecostalism understands that spiritual and social power without political power is limited in its ability to coerce, and so it contests for power through spiritual warfare and active partisan politics. However, when a “Christian” president lost his re-election bid in 2015, it also pushed some Pentecostals to look beyond their country to the USA and the symbolism of a powerful president associating with Christianity. This chapter thus considers how the Pentecostal power identity takes its desires across the borders of nation-space. Titled, “What Islamic devils?!”: Power Struggles, Race, and Christian Transnationalism, this study provides the historical context to Nigerians’ support for US president Donald Trump by exploring the dynamics of political theology as it crosses the bounds of nationhood. Through an analysis of the nitty-gritty of the politics of the spirituality of Nigerian Pentecostals, the desire to defeat Islam (the other religion that contends power), the local politics of faith as it intermingles with ethnicity identity, this chapter shows how all these various dynamics sustains the power identity that manifests in the adoration of Trump.

In the concluding chapter, Power Must Change Hands: COVID 19, Power, and the Imperative of Knowledge, I note that the COVID 19 pandemic broke while this book was being completed and, therefore, I offer my reflection on the pandemic and Pentecostal power. In my description of how the Pentecostal establishment responded to the pandemic, I argued that what that apocalyptic event revealed was that the forms of power which they have invested in and acquired over the years did not anticipate the world-changing event of COVID-19. As a result, foremost figures showed they had no immediate answer for the situation other than to resort to conspiracy theories and myths of their embattlement that did not quite stand up to the demands of the historical event.

This chapter, “Touch not Mine Anointed”: #MeToo, #ChurchToo, and the Power of “See Finish” analyzes what could happen when the performance of power identity through the production of images is interrupted. Here, I look at how a pastor stages his power identity through visuality, and how in the wake of the global #MeToo movement, his flow of visual signs and symbols to the audience was crucially undercut by the counter-power of women’s stories. The necessity of continuously being visible and performing one’s power means the inscription of their power identity on collective psyche also facilitated a critical reception of their persona. When leaders perform power by regularly thrusting themselves or their virtual images in front of their audience, they become overexposed and that opens them up for the possibility of disposability. What followed #MeToo events also shows how people who have performed power to the point of embodying power will double down on the use of power to sustain their identity.

This chapter, The Spirit Names the Child: Pentecostal Futurity in the Name of Jesus, shows how naming rituals are a source of Pentecostal power and influence, and remain strong for a long time. As power identity has argued that the Pentecostal politics of identity is not primarily construed along the lines of ancestry and familiar markers such as ethnicity, nationality, class, etc., but the object of desire, this chapter also shows that Pentecostals do not entirely dispense with ancestral or familial modes of identification. Instead, they supplant them in creative ways that show their power within social culture. To illustrate how the Pentecostal power is invested in the rhetoric of naming, I study an aspect of Pentecostal identity building: both giving oneself and one’s children names that include “Jesus” (or “Jesu” in Yoruba) to fully embed the social and spiritual atmosphere of the society with their values. The Pentecostal onomastic, I note, is thus a sonic and systematized politics of societal ordering and contestation of spaces. The antiphony of names as a process of “call and response” is the interaction of the many “transcendences” of Africa.

One of the most often repeated facts about ancient associations seems to be that they were imitating the state. Even a cursory reading of scholarly literature reveals a number of concise definitions. Associations were ‘cités en miniature’, ‘mirror-images of the city on an organizational level’, they ‘posed as little republic[s]’ – the list could be continued.1 And the main insight is of course correct. The designations for officials, the delineation of sacred space, the formulae of honorific decrees, voting procedures – all these elements were regularly taken over by associations from the model provided by their respective cities.

The abundance of private and voluntary associations was a key characteristic of the Roman world, in the West and in the East, during the late Republic and the High Empire.1 Most of the time, those communities were called collegia, corpora or sodalicia and their social recruitment was rooted in the urban plebs, the plebeians.2 From a certain point of view, they were very diverse. Indeed, their specific names suggested that their members decided to unite for different reasons: because they had the same occupation, the same geographical origin or the same devotion to a specific god, for instance. Nevertheless, they were usually engaged in very similar activities. All of them were religious associations.

Following the overarching theme of associations’ regulations, the chapters of this book have provided the reader with different insights into a large variety of ancient associations that were embedded in as many local realities, in an attempt on the one hand to highlight similar patterns but on the other hand also to stress the vivacity and diversity of the fenomeno associativo, ‘associational phenomenon’: although common traits certainly emerge, one should in no way expect uniformity. The world of associations was in fact a complex one: this book has mainly explored associations active in the Greek-speaking world, but even in this ‘common cultural sphere’ one sees a great variety of different options at play, which mirror the character of their various societies. The ways in which associations operated were a result of the strategies adopted by them on the basis of the different challenges they encountered and the way in which they appear to us is also linked to the contingent production and preservation of the sources, which varied depending on location and time. It is therefore not surprising that the picture we have gained from late Hellenistic and early Roman Athens is a different one from that of contemporary Mantinea, for instance: in Athens, as we have seen in the discussion by Arnaoutoglou in Chapter 6, associations made full use of the polis’ general directions, trends and mechanisms in the regulation of members’ behaviour so as to enhance their profile and foster their autonomy, room of action or survival, by providing an image that matched the expectations of the public administration.

This chapter proposes to look in some detail at a few evocative cases, primarily from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, where associations or other groups, such as bands of worshippers, were especially concerned with purity or where they published inscribed rules of purity.1 Limited in number partly due to the vicissitudes of epigraphic preservation, partly due to the geographic and chronological specificities of this material – post-Classical Asia Minor and the Aegean – other factors may also explain their scarcity and warrant further investigation.

This chapter investigates the nature of the relations between the rules of professional associations and the shaping of community values in early Roman Egypt.