This chapter, Everything Christianity/the Bible Represents is being Attacked on the Internet!”: The Internet and Technologies of Religious Engagement, studies public contestation of power with powerful pastors through a crucial aspect of asserting power: money. This chapter illustrates a revolt against pastors through the critical examination of the aftermath of “The Great Tithe Debate” between online air presenter Ifedayo Olarinde (known as Daddy Freeze), and most of the famous Pentecostal pastors. If the identity of Pentecostals is power, then the rise of modern technology has provided the means for ordinary people on social media to duel with religious authority. Pentecostal pastors’ influence has been frequently studied in Pentecostalism, and one of the focal points of analysis is their ability to build immense financial power through skillful solicitation. With the ubiquity of technology, contenders are rising and threatening pastors’ authority to build financial capital. These contenders stage their own shows demonstrating how they have equally been empowered to tap into the same symbolic instruments that generate power for their leaders. This development troubles not just the Pentecostal pastorate but their followers as well.

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.

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.

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 Introduction lays the theoretical and methodological foundation for this work through seven theses, each of which explores how Pentecostals shape the Nigerian social context through continuous actions of their faith, the instability of the social order and the systems of meaning they seek to inscribe, the social implications of their will to power, and the various understanding of power. Through an engagement with performance studies scholars and Pentecostal studies, this chapter establishes the historical and social contexts that have driven the Pentecostal desire for power.

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.

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.

This Introduction lays the theoretical and methodological foundation for this work through seven theses, each of which explores how Pentecostals shape the Nigerian social context through continuous actions of their faith, the instability of the social order and the systems of meaning they seek to inscribe, the social implications of their will to power, and the various understanding of power. Through an engagement with performance studies scholars and Pentecostal studies, this chapter establishes the historical and social contexts that have driven the Pentecostal desire for power.