Article

Comment

Community

Development

27 February 2023

5 min read

Religion and prosperity: how Nigeria’s diaspora is changing the West

Superlatives may describe Nigeria, but it is vital to understand what drives its people, especially those abroad.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

Mushin Market in Lagos.

Omoeko Media, via Wikimedia Commons

Superpower superlatives

Nigeria is the economic and human capital giant of Africa. Nigeria has almost 100 million more people than Ethiopia, the country with the continent’s second largest population. Nigeria’s 2021 GDP of $440bn led the continent for the eighth consecutive year. Helped, no doubt by its oil production, the second biggest in Africa. Since gaining independence in 1960, the Nigerian economy has suffered from incessant fluctuations but its population has experienced consistent growth. As of today, Nigeria’s population of 211 million is about two-thirds the population of the United States’ 332 million. All living on sovereign territory one and a half times the size of Texas.

The oil curse

Spotlighting these statistics uncovers another side of Nigeria's place in ‘Giant of Africa’ discourses. With over 300 distinctive ethnic groups, it has one of Africa's highest levels of population density. Ethnic competition for control of state economic resources, mainly oil revenues, has evolved into a leading theme influencing Nigeria's postcolonial development. Nigeria first discovered its oil-harvesting potential in 1956. However, the oil curse, and the high-level corruption that characterises it, would not fully commandeer Nigerian governance until the concluding decades of the 20th century. Some have argued that the curse of corruption grew in these decades into a chief impediment preventing national development. Nigeria is equally blessed and cursed, and this curse affects how it behaves internally.

Transnationalism

High potential Nigeria is hobbled by a curse that also has significant effects internationally. Thanks to Nigeria's large diaspora, these effects impact the UK. It is therefore important to understand who this diaspora is and what it believes. Many have written about the relationship between corruption, transnationalismm, and capital flight in Nigeria; however, another, less researched case of trans-nationalisation has unfolded in recent Nigerian history that has relevance for global economics. Since the 1980s, many thousands of Nigerian Christians have emigrated abroad to the UK, USA, and beyond, regularly citing economic, political, and religious factors as influences behind their decision to leave.

This emigration takes with it a practice that has reshaped not only Nigeria but the destination countries. It has led to the dawning reality among people researching global Christianity that Christendom's geographical locus of power, in terms of total number of Christians and theological influence, is shifting away from the West to the Global South. The faith of the immigrants drives their emigration and results in a variety of economic and social impacts in their destination countries. So, it is vital to understand their faith and its practices. More than any other Christian denomination in Nigeria, the confluence of Christian spirituality, migration, and economics heavily informs the religiosity of Pentecostals, whose churches frequently send them out as missionaries in service of a highly ambitious vision to evangelise the entire non-Christian world.

What drives the diaspora?

Nigerian Pentecostals relocate to the UK emigrate with two main interests: evangelising Britons and building personal wealth. In recent decades, the prosperity gospel has emerged as the defining doctrine of Nigerian Pentecostalism, the country's most politically and economically dynamic denomination. The prosperity gospel lionizes wealth and its linchpin theological premise argues that God wants Christians to enjoy this-worldly lives characterised by material blessings and holistic success. Believers in the prosperity gospel understand material wealth as an important component of their spiritual inheritance and ardently strive to secure material prosperity for themselves and families.

The materially intoxicating nature of prosperity gospel sensibilities have spilled over into other denominations in Nigerian Christendom to the extent that many Nigerian Christians today believe that God wants them to enjoy a life marked by wealth and health. Correlations between belief in prosperity theology and increased individual wealth remain difficult to prove indisputably, but the prosperity gospel's way of inculcating in believers the desirability of material wealth certainly makes them more comfortable working to acquire it, whether in the UK or the USA or elsewhere.

Go global

With upwards of 1.3bn people of Black and African descent living worldwide, Nigerians account for over one out of every six Black and African individuals globally. The instilling of prosperity gospel-friendly values in the minds of globally mobile Nigerian Christians conditions the latter to contribute to the local economies of their new home countries.

Go West

Nigerian-Americans have grown into one of America's wealthiest migrant groups. For decades the typical Nigerian-American child has grown up aspiring to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or businessperson, and today Nigerians can be found in senior positions in America's highest-grossing industries. Increasingly, this dynamic applies to the UK.

Nigerians in the UK

Nigeria, once a British colony, enjoys membership in the commonwealth; this geopolitical affiliation makes it easier for Nigerians to relocate to the UK and secure British citizenship. Aware of what they perceive as the ongoing secularisation of the West, many of these Nigerian Christians move to the UK inspired by a vision to re-evangelise the motherland, and this vision has given rise to the emergence of what is sometimes called ‘reverse mission.’

A succession of military dictatorships from 1966 to 1999 compelled many Nigerians to flee Nigeria to the UK in search of a better life. As a result, approximately 250,000 Nigerians live in the UK. Nigerians have evolved into one of the UK's largest and most influential African migrant communities. A disproportionate level of popular and scholarly attention devoted to the presence of Nigerians in the UK focuses on how Nigerian elites continue to buy expensive properties in London and the appreciable number of Nigerian students enrolled at UK universities. However, the landscape of Nigerians living in the UK contains additional dimensions in need of analysis and one of the most under-discussed of these dimensions concerns the influence of Nigerian Christian values on UK economic life.

Economic influencers

Based in north London Brent Cross' district, Jesus House is one of the UK's largest and most popular Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Like many other churches in the UK, Jesus House has joined the Warm Welcome Campaign in an effort to provide warm spaces to members of its community suffering from excessive exposure to cold winter temperatures. Yet, long after winter passes, this warmth will continue playing a valuable role by helping thaw the keys opening the ostensibly frozen doors to the next generation of UK prosperity.

Like in the USA, Nigerians in the UK envision for themselves lives marked by material prosperity. This vision regularly inspires them to pursue lucrative jobs and engage in entrepreneurship. For many UK-based Nigerians, prosperity gospel sensibilities, reverse mission interests, and the aim to build a better life intersect in ways that have constructive, wide-reaching social and economic consequences for the UK.

Sure, the prosperity gospel has its critics and its problems, but viewed positively, it can provide a source of economic energy for countries like the UK.

Inspired by Christian devotion and the belief that despite transient seasons of difficulty, prosperity is a sign of divine favour, Nigerian Christians contribute to the UK economy every day in consistent, substantive, and innovative ways. In a time when homes across the UK remain far colder than they should be, the prosperity-friendly piety of the UK's many Nigerian Christians offers a source of Christian warmth that deserves to be recognised more widely than it is.

Article

Belief

Community

Creed

Sport

10 April 2025

5 min read

Is Goodison Park a place of worship?

Delve beyond the identity and the inspiration.

Henry Corbett

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.

Football fans wearing blue stand and watch a match in a stadium.

Everton fans hope.

Everton F.C.

In some places football is considered a religion. No more so than in Liverpool. Its citizens revere not just one team but two - the Blues and the Reds.

It's a divided city. Some wear the blue of Everton FC, others the red of Liverpool FC. A mere mile separates the stadia where supporters pay homage to their heroes.

As the chaplain to Everton, I often contemplate this devotion. Is Everton’s stadium Goodison Park a place of worship? And is football really a religion?

The quick answer is “Yes” and “No”. Goodison Park is surely a place of worship, and football is not a religion, though that second answer may need a bit of a defence.

That football grounds are places of worship is instanced at every game played: chants of praise are sung and worth is given to the players, the team, the history, the manager, maybe even the owner.

Goodison Park has hosted games since 1892. The attendance at the ground’s opening was 12,000, the cost £3,000, and the point of it all? Everton Football Club had begun in 1878 as St Domingo’s, founded by a Methodist minister. The Rev Ben Swift Chambers wanted to keep his St Domingo’s Church cricket team fit during the winter, and the cricket team was to help young men stay away from less worthy pursuits. Similarly, Manchester City was founded by Anna Connell, the vicar’s daughter, to keep young men on the streets of East Manchester away from trouble.

St Domingo’s then became Everton FC and later came the move to the new stadium on Goodison Road. The crowds brought gate receipts, the players and staff needed wages, and football clearly becomes a business as well as an activity to help young men avoid trouble.

Then and now the game is entertaining, the outcome is unpredictable, and the players can show outstanding skills, athleticism, courage, resilience, teamwork.

That’s where the worship naturally comes in. Awe and wonder are important human attributes, and Evertonians have delighted in the skills and character of players down the club’s 147-year history. At every football ground there will be chants for players that celebrate their skill, character, achievements, giving worth to their ability. And yes, there may also be chants doing the opposite of worship to the opponents and to the unlucky referee just trying to do their job. The team is celebrated and worshipped, sometimes in language that is hard to believe: “We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen” can feel like undeserved worship when Everton are struggling to avoid relegation. Such optimistic sentiment may reflect Evertonians’ awareness of the importance of history and the bigger picture! Another chant begins “And if you know your history...”.

Outside Goodison Park is a statue of Dixie Dean: he scored 60 league goals in the 1927-28 season and his ability and achievement is worshipped, given great worth, by many before and after a game. The other statue outside the ground is of the “Holy Trinity”, Howard Kendall, Alan Ball and Colin Harvey, the midfield three that helped bring the League title to Everton in 1970. Many such players in the history of the club have received and still receive worship. Goodison Park is a place of hope, frustration, joy, anguish, and, yes, of worship.

But is football a religion? Goodison Park is called by some a cathedral, the club has fans, it conveys an identity, the game offers principles for living such as teamwork and the valuing of different gifts.

Yes, football is like a religion, and understandably religious language and gesture are often used around the game. “Salvation!” says the commentator as Graham Stuart scores the winning goal in the 3-2 win over Wimbledon to keep Everton in the Premier League. Television cameras can home in on a supporter clasping their hands in prayer at some decisive moment.

And yes, football can play a part in someone’s life that is very like the part a religion can play: it can become the most important thing, it can shape mood, behaviour, it can provide long-lasting rituals.

But it is one thing for football to be like a religion in some respects, it is another for it genuinely to qualify as a religion.

This of course begs the question “how are you defining religion?” I am going for the stronger definition. So, I’m not agreeing with a statement such as “shopping is your religion”. I would rather say “shopping is one of your passions, interests, maybe overriding interests, but no, not a religion”. Some of the stronger dictionary definitions include “A system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence”, and “the way people deal with ultimate concerns about their life” and “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe”.

Does football meet those definitions, does football answer the deepest questions of life?

Who am I? An Evertonian, but deeper than that, who am I?

What is the purpose of my life beyond hoping Everton win football matches?

What happens after death?

Football does not address those ultimate concerns. It is like a religion in offering identity, inspiring worship, having a gathering point like Goodison Park for communal activity, but it is not a religion as it does not address those ultimate questions.

I will be going to worship the skills and characters of players, coaches, staff and manager at Goodison Park before the season ends, but I don’t see my love of football as a religion. The Christian faith is my religion: it addresses the deepest questions, the ultimate concerns, just as other religions seek to do.

There is more to life than football. As an Everton manager, a practising Catholic, Carlo Ancelotti once said: “Football is the most important of the less important things”.

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