Economies of Salvation: The Miracle and Prosperity in Nigerian Pentecostalism

Zachary Levine, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University

“What do you want from God apart from miracle?” I am seated next to my friend, who I will call Grace, in a traffic jam on Lagos’s Third Mainland Bridge. I first met Grace, a supply coordinator for an oil and gas transnational, at a Sunday service of Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries (MFM). She had recognized in my noncommittal prayer style an ambivalence she herself shared to MFM’s flamboyant, furious, insistent, rapturous brand of Pentecostalism. And yet it wasn’t until a few weeks later – here, on this bridge, halfway between Lagos’s slum mainland and its islands of wealth– that I came to understand that ambivalence.

Miracles, Grace explains to me, have “bastardized” Nigeria’s churches. No longer sworn only to the transformation of the soul, Lagos’s ‘Pentecostal’ Christians (a more or less arbitrary aegis including very diverse religious practices) have become, in Grace’s view, distressingly enamored with the workings of deliverance and its sign, the miracle. For Grace, as for others I spoke to in my three-month research stay in Lagos, the integrity of one’s Born Again exercise is reducible to how one replies to a basic orienting principle: “how do you want to get it?” The vacancy of her word choice – in which “it” refers not to a prior utterance of “salvation,” but to a basic spiritual uncertainty – reveals the very anxieties Grace sees in the varied forms of Christian worship in Lagos under the banner of ‘the Pentecostal.’

One answer to this question – how to “get it” – is steeped in a religiosity of miracles, which Grace and other (often middle-class) Nigerians see as a mark of an insincere, partial relationship to God. They seduce through laziness, this reasoning goes, divesting believers of a total, sustainable engagement with the Holy Spirit. Postured against this answer is “prosperity,” which rejects if not the miraculous’ end of wealth-accumulation then certainly its procedure. The prosperity gospel, first engineered by American evangelicals but present in Nigerian Christian doctrine since at least the 1980s, emphasizes the compatibility of capitalist accumulation with the idea of the Christian good, whereby luxury becomes an index of one’s “spiritual” prosperity. Where under the sign of the miracle the devout are to open themselves and their hearts up to the “infilling” of the Holy Spirit, ‘prosperous’ Christians “need to be the Bible people read” (i.e., the laborers from verse), to take seriously their own autonomy as financial and working agents. They must realize the miraculous within themselves, via an ethics of procedure and labor, before God releases His own deliverance. To quote Grace once more, under prosperity, “when you do your part, the miracle will happen.”

My thesis seeks to make two contributions. The first concerns the way in which this dichotomous logic operates in the construction of a ‘divided’ Pentecostal public. I try to conceive of how the work done to oppose the miraculous to prosperity draws upon the legacy of an older Christian theological binary between ‘event’ and ‘process.’ Yet I want to consider how such categories confront the realities of postcolonial urban Africa, where the exceptional and the everyday seem endlessly wrapped up in one another. To this end, I want to write about how the imagined binary between miracles and prosperity obscures the endless ways in which they are implicated in one another. These two modes of “spiritual economy” are blurred in church identification (most ‘deliverance’ churches devote long sermons to prosperity, and even the wealthiest churches will often host a ‘miracle night’ during the week) and in the overlapping repertoires of practice, habit, and prayer that give Lagos’ Pentecostalism an aesthetic and bodily center in spite of this apparent fault line. My research in Lagos took me to roughly twenty churches, which together offered me a window into how an incredible diversity of practices and forms of spiritual self-fashioning squares with a multiplicity of resonances at once practical and doctrinal.

Second, I want to think very deeply about what is involved in the sign of the miracle and in the possibility of experiencing the miraculous. In resisting the contemporary urge by the new Pauline ‘political theology’ to see the messianic and the miraculous in light of Carl Schmitt’s singular, ruptural sovereign event, I wish to explore the cultures of the miracle: modes of thought and practice that give the miracle an interpretive, performative force that exceeds the question of its mere facticity. I have been inspired by the work of Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig and his contemporary interlocutor, Bonnie Honig, who venture to see miracles not through the lens of “ruptural power, imposition, or governance but also receptivity, openness, and a future,” as sign-events that are if anything “underdetermined lest they impinge upon the freedom of [God’s] subjects to decide their meaning.” But lest I do the same, substituting theory for the deep hermeneutics I encountered in conversations and elsewhere in Lagos’ inescapable religious provocations, I want to return to what particularities color the miracle in urban Nigeria. For it is by attending to that analysis, in the landscapes of Lagos’ poorest neighborhoods, that a particular miracle – the miracle of survival – reveals itself in a banality that is also its maximum instantiation, a divine exception that is both of and in the everyday, a need to survive that can never quite overrun the need to imagine.