- Thank you, it's lovely to be here. Thank you for having me and welcome. One of my remits for tonight is to introduce you to the vibrancy of Christianity in Africa. So let me begin with three stories that are quite typical for what you would encounter in the continent. South Africa, 14th of November 2020, a news report emerges that the controversial prophet, Shepherd Bushiri and his wife, Mary, fled the country to their native home of Malawi absconding bail conditions set for an upcoming fraud trial against them in South Africa. The Bushiris and their church, Enlightened Christian Gathering, have risen to notorious fame through a series of controversial prophecy, outlandish miracle, and healing claims, witchcraft accusations, and so on. With an estimated fortune of $150 million, Bushiri is one of the richest Pentecostal prophets on planet and he's well-known for his ostentatious display of wealth, including private jets, luxury cars, watches, and other paraphernalia. This wasn't all raised through donations at the church, rather Bushiri is involved in a number of businesses networks and deals which stood at the heart of the accusations of fraud and money laundering that are part of the upcoming trial against him. When the charges were first raised against him in South Africa, Bushiri he was able to mobilize his following to put pressure on the courts and when he was then given bail conditions this was celebrated as a victory for God. The extradition procedures are now slowly making their ways to the courts in Malawi and the story continues, meanwhile, Bushiris build their church. And the question here is, what makes it possible? Why do African Christians flock to prophets like the Bushiris? What gives them their rise? Different story. Nigeria, Lagos-Ibadan highway, just last December, 2021. It's the Annual Holy Ghost Conferences of the Redeemed Christian Church Of God and their redemption camp on the Lagos-Ibadan highway. The main hall in that redemption camp holds one square kilometer in size and is filled with an overflow audience in the small hall, which is only one kilometer by 500 meters in size. The church General Overseer, Enoch Adeboye, preaches and proclaims that it was Christian faith and prayers that led to the pandemic taking a much lower death toll in Nigeria than in the secular West."They expected us to die like chickens," Adeboye complains. And then continues, "When this coronavirus broke, I cried out to God and daddy answered me. God spoke to me specifically and said,'Son, I have heard your cry. Only those whose time has come will die.'" It is important to note, however, that Adeboye who holds a PhD in Maths, by the way, is not against science or medical progress, quite the opposite. His church runs a hospital, several health centers, and at the campus of Redeemer's University financed and run by the church, works Christian Happi, as here profiled in the Financial Times, one of the world's leading virologists and the first one to sequence coronavirus in Africa. Now this leads me to a different question, what about these churches and their promises of miracles and yet their engagement in social causes, is that a potential or a potential hindrance for development work in Africa? Third story. Addis Ababa, 7th of May, 2020. A Christian music video titled"Maren, Have Mercy on Us" is released and quickly makes the rounds in social media. The lead musician, Zinash Tayachew, is not only a gifted singer, she's also the wife of the Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed. The song is sorrowful in words and tune as Zinash invokes God's grace as the coronavirus pandemic closes in. Halfway through her performance, she kneels before the cross continuing to plead for God's mercy in what looks like an act of intercession for the nation. The next day, her husband would announce a state of emergency postponing the national elections, which would set the country up for a constitutional crisis and accelerated its slide into the presence of a war. Abiy Ahmed is already the second Pentecostal Prime Minister in this traditionally Orthodox, Christian Orthodox and Muslim country. But he's the first, in at least five decades, to bring religion back to the forefront of Ethiopian political rhetoric. Apart from fueling his own ambition and audacious political moves, Abiy's piety has helped him build a nationalist platform of one nation under God. In the eyes of his supporters, Abiy's invocation of God's favor over Ethiopia heralds in a new age of restoration while his political opponents warned him, enemies fear the return of a religiously justified Abyssinian politics which would come to bear on whatever ethnic group find themselves on the periphery. Has Ethiopia then become the latest example of an African country falling to religious politics? Flamboyant profits, influential mega churches, Pentecostal politicians, examples like this are bound in Sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast to Europe, Christianity remains on the rise here and permeates all spheres of life. Its form is predominantly Pentecostal, which is a phenomenon fragmented and diverse type of Christianity that has not only formed countless new, tiny and mega churches but has also influenced many mainline denominations throughout the continent. Pentecostals and charismatics are occupied with the work of the Holy Spirit in the here and now just like it was in the Acts of the Apostles. It is Christianity fueled by Biblicist promises about the power of God's spirit to alleviate both individual and societal woes. It wasn't supposed to be like this. At independence in Africa, Christianity was often cast as the colonizers religion and the expectation was that Africans would gradually shed the foreignness of Christianity while discovering their own religious heritage. Others, even foresaw Africa following Europe's footsteps towards increasing secularity with Christianity fading into humanitarian values at best. The secularizing sentiment, by the way, was shared by Christians and non-Christians alike. Lutherans as well as Anglicans praised Julius Nyerere in Tanzania and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia as Christian humanists and their socialism as the coming secular expression of Christian values. Nyerere himself called on his own denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, to play a leading role in the global social revolution. And even in Ethiopia, leading Protestant clerics initially welcomed the demise of Haile Selassie in 75 and proclaimed the dawn of a new socialist era even offering their developmental assets to the state. By the late 1980s and 1990s, however, it became clear that instead of Afrocentric revivalism or humanitarian secularism, a Christian renascence of sort was underfoot, in particularly, through the spread of Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Christian spirituality. Socialism had largely failed in its promises and birth brutal dictatorships while structural adjustment programs wreaked havoc in countries aligned with the West, all against the background of a devastating HIV/AIDS crisis and political realignments as cold war politics seized. This led some observers to view this rise of Christianity in Africa as something of a compensatory reaction and understandable, if regrettable, turned to religion in a time of crisis. Others voiced their alarm of what they perceived to be now a westernization, if not Americanization of African Christianity with Pentecostalism, especially the so-called prosperity gospel seen as proliferating individualism, consumer capitalism, instead of the Ubuntu ideals and equitable progress. Now, as I wish to show in my lecture, these are inadequate analyses rooted in mistaken projections of the post-independence era. Contemporary African Christianity deserves a more variegated and nuanced analysis that brings into focus the historical depth of current developments as well as the multiple factors underpinning the attractiveness of Pentecostalism in Africa today. Moreover, the plurality of Pentecostal expression deserves greater attention because we're not simply witnessing the rise of a new Christian denomination but a continued fragmentation of Christianity into a form of religion that is no longer centered in Rome, London, or Geneva. I want to make my case by looking at three main areas. Firstly we will look at, Christian healing and exorcism in Africa, mapping out how the longer history of African engagement with, of Christian engagement, rather, with African spiritual beliefs culminates in the Pentecostal present. Secondly, we'll look at the strong Christian roots of international development and the reasons for its continued failures to integrate religious actors, Christian actors in Africa. And thirdly, we'll return to the question of politics and Christianity aiming for more nuanced understanding of secularity than we often find. As you can see, the aim of the lecture is to put contemporary developments in a historical context and therefore give you the depth, a sense of the depth of the current developments. So, let me begin with the investigation of spirit etiologies and the apparent tendency of African Christians to spiritualize illness and misfortune and flock to healing, prayers, and exorcisms, which may leave some Western observers perplexed. This perplexity is nothing new. Historically, the accusation that Africans are wrongly enchanting the world has accompanied the Christian expansion into Africa from the first Portuguese expeditions onward. When the 15th century Portuguese explorers and slavers commenced their long line of coastal discoveries around Africa and toward India, this came at the heels of the Spanish Reconquista and the subsequent and often violent imposition of Christian orthodoxy on the Iberian Peninsula. This brought with it, a set of anti-witchcraft laws outlawing amulets and other magical objects which in Portuguese were called feiticeiros. The Latin root of this term is (foreign language), so made, handmade and that invokes the prescription of idols in the second commandment,"Thou shalt make the no molten gods" same word. But crucially for us, feiticeiros is also where the term fetish and fetishism comes from. And this is where our history picks up. As Portuguese traders and Catholic missionaries encountered certain objects, they identified them to be functional and ideological equivalents to what they understood as idolatry or fetishes back home. Hence, they demanded their destruction in exchange for Christian objects of veneration; the cross, statue of the Virgin Mary, and the like. For Africans this didn't make sense because these alleged fetishists not only had cultic functions but stood for political allegiance and economic trade networks. So taking on the statue of the Virgin Mary merely expanded this logic to a new contract while the so-called fetishes were often kept in place much to the chagrin of iconoclastic missionaries. Now, this incorporation of African ritual objects into the European discourse of religion subsequently took two main forms. Firstly, theories of fetishism emerged. The first one Charles de Brosses, picture image of his book imaged here on the slide, begins to define as a religion in opposition to Sabeanism, worship of the stars, fetishism, worship of the things. But, now, a whole set of theories revolves around this, what this means and how a European enlightened religion would hold up against this. So, what happens now is Europe projects its ostensibly enlightened and civilized religion against a contrast of dark and benighted Africa, and these theories then took various forms as colonialism progressed. In the enlightenment, Africa tended to be written out of the history all together as you can see in Hegel's writings. Around the scramble for Africa, evolutionary theories are very popular and now African religion is seen as being sort of a, an early step of the progress toward enlightened religion. And then later in the time of colonial dominance, people were interested in the functional expressions and why people did certain things and what that told you about a society. So these theories are always there to inform you about how African religion differs from European enlightened religion. The second form that this comparison took was the missionary one. And this is slightly different because missionaries were involved in a project that Birgit Meyer in her work called, "Translating the Devil". Christian missions is ultimately a project of translation. And in Africa you would then also not just translate the gospel into divine entities; God, angels find equivalents for those words but also the sort of sinister beings of the Greco-Roman underworld; devils, demons. What is that in this culture? And how would we then frame Christian evil in this culture? Now, both these forms are framing African philosophy in ritual practice that has discourses about enlightened religion in contrast to Africa and the missionary translation into evil are somewhat incommensurate with each other. And that tension was often visible in the missionary enterprise. What was one to do with elements of African culture that wouldn't be integrated as preparation of the gospel that the New Testament promised, that dim light anticipating the news of Jesus coming. In the discourse of enlightened religion these were framed as primitive superstitions, benighted but ultimately harmless beliefs to be replaced by rational religion and scientific education. As translations of the devil, however, they represented dark powerful forces to be overcome by a spiritual victory of the gospel. So you see the tension. And this tension between progressive rationalization and a spiritual battle of sorts was never resolved and led to different expressions of missions along a broad Christian spectrum from liberals to evangelicals with different results in various colonial phases. This always included European debates about the proper expression of Christianity as well, what is a modern Christian to believe? Think of debates between modern exegesis and fundamentalists running at the same time. Pentecostalism itself was born in this climate as an amalgamate between different revival movements, holiness movements, healing movement, and faith missions and catalyzed in the African-American spiritual expression of the 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, that roughly 50 years before the civil rights movement embodied racial reconciliation for a few short years before it segregated and spread along established revivalist and missionary networks. In Africa at independence, Pentecostal churches were small and on the fringes, whereas in the mainline churches the rationalists seem to prevail. The watch word of the day was indigenization. Missionaries adapted to surging African nationalism. The ideas and rituals that missionaries had previously vilified, were now framed as cultural resources that needed to be integrated into distinct African theologies and liturgies Liberal Protestantism, the Second Vatican Council, missiologist, and African politicians all aligned in this reappropriation of African traditions as cultural heritage. Even African churches that had broken with their missions and European orthodoxy were largely read as instances of instantiation rather than for what they were, a spiritualizing thrust of bringing the New Testament and the Old Testament to life again in the present. Now, the problem, and this is important for understanding of the rise of Pentecostalism, the problem with such culturalist interpretations was that their folkloristic embrace rendered mute or inefficacious African spiritual forces. This may have dovetailed with rationalizing and secularizing ambitions, but it clashed with how these forces were experienced in vernacular reckoning. Ancestors, spirits, witchcraft, occult rituals, remained efficacious and socially productive in explaining and solving illness and personal misfortune rather than just serving as cultural symbols in a different theological and political project. This is the open flank into which Pentecostalism thrust a double prompt attack. As areas of the pietistic translation of African spirits into demonic forces, Pentecostals on the one hand affirmed African vernaculars of spiritual power. Yes, they're real. They're important. They're not just cultural heritage. And on the other hand, they proclaimed that Christian exorcism and faith healing would get rid of the spirits once and for all. In essence, this amounted to an affirmation of African spiritual beliefs while upholding the modernist promise of a life free from these backward forces. This is a highly effective recipe of Christian contextualization as it takes more serious the local cosmology while offering a Christian re-interpretation with global appeal. Now, we should never confuse doctrine with practice. So, there are important qualifications to be made here. Firstly, far from overcoming and supplanting spiritual beliefs, Pentecostalism has created something of a feedback loop with local witchcraft and spirit discourses in many African countries. Supernatural etiologies are on the rise within and outside Christianity. In large part, fueled by Pentecostal diagnoses of spiritual causation and assertions of miracle healing. A vivid example of this is the Nigerian film industry or Nollywood with a number of well-known companies and film troops, is the third largest film industry on the planet by the way, with a number of well-known troops and media companies offering Christian melodramas centered on witchcraft and spiritual warfare often in a vivid mirage of Western horror tropes, Africa cliches, local tabloid rumors, and typical street scenes. Over long but entertainment and always fun to analyze with students. Secondly, spiritual warfare is not a norm of Pentecostal orthodoxy but one of experimentation. Pentecostals will often combine going to a Pentecostal healer with other approaches, including biomedicine and traditional healers. Even within Pentecostalism, a range of etiologies are on offer, it's very different. If you go to a faith church it tells you, your illnesses is because you're not having yet enough faith to be healed by God. Or church that tells you, this could be a demon that causes this. You need to look. Did you do anything? Is there any inheritance? So it's a broad menu of options that are available that you can experiment with. Thirdly, in this problematic landscape of discernment, this dangerous landscape of discernment, authenticity is a highly debated currency. Suspicion is rife, pastors are known to enrich themselves, and many Pentecostals believe that the devil can fake healing and success with detrimental long-term effects. So you got to watch out. As Pentecostal healers are locked in competition mutual accusations of fraud, infidelity, and witchcraft abound even Nollywood films will sometimes deliver tongue in cheek remarks about certain pastors. In this precarious world of spiritual discernment, loyalty can take the form of collusion and it's usually temporary as people move in and out of churches in an increasingly fragmenting church landscape. It can be a nightmare if you're trying to count Pentecostals often leading to vivid exaggerations of actual numbers. But the point is, there's a huge vibrancy and experimental field that people are traveling and this is not a place where everybody believes the same thing. We must be careful not to turn up the contrast too much. However, it's the flamboyant and outlandish which often grabs attention in local media and international research rather than the middle of the road Pentecostal pastor who will pray for healing but promise and demand nothing. Still what remains constant even in the more muted forms of African Pentecostal Christianity is that daily affairs tend to be defined by Christian spirituality from health, to careers, finances, and relationship issues. There is no purely secular realm. In doing so, however, Pentecostal etiologies don't simply re-enchant the world, that's not the point. They also offer a robust discourse for addressing larger social, political, and historical forces that shape individual trajectories. Their spiritual vernacular might be unsettling for some observers, but arguably it allows for more realistic philosophy of the entangled self than Western hyperindividualism and its notion of the free subject. Things are not always what they look like. And this assumption arguably rings true when one is on the underside of an extractive global economy or must learn to navigate unstable and corrupt bureaucracies. In this world, the Pentecostal promise of health and prosperity harbors and gives expression to the aspirations of millions of Africans to participate in the world that their cell phones betray but never deliver. And of course, this dynamic isn't unique to Africa. Perhaps it's easier to see for some here. Now, this ability of African Christianity to harbor the aspirations of millions, mobilize their hopes and resources brings me to my second point, the question of whether this can be a good partner in development given the current development mantra of sustainability which seeks to root development ideals in local cultures including religion, this seems a particularly important question. In recent years, even a small field of study has emerged in the intersection of religious studies and development studies that looks at religion and development and tries to understand what it would take to harness religious actors more in the global development project. In this literature, development sometimes is cast as originally secular project which then heightens this rediscovery of religion. However, this portrays a fundamental historical misunderstanding that we briefly need to look at before we can see why development efforts are often disconnected from Christian charity on the ground. Development of course didn't fall out of the sky with Truman's Point Four speech in 1948. But it has an important predecessor in the anti-slavery movements and the European push into the African interior. By the late 1830s it had become clear that the abolition of the slave trade from 1807 had not led to a reduction of the transatlantic trafficking of people despite different efforts to outlaw the practice elsewhere and British Navy sailing up and down the coast of Africa. Now, a second generation of abolitionists led by the MP Thomas Fowell Buxton began drumming up support for a different project altogether which was to eradicate slavery at its root. Remarkably, they located this route not on the side of demand for enforced labor but on the side of supply. And so, their eyes turned to the interior of Africa."It was high time," they argued,"to install a different economy on the African continent. One centered on legitimate trade instead of trafficking people." And this was to be achieved by forging political alliances with chiefs of the hinterland, putting in place infrastructure, improving agricultural methods, increasing people's health, raising literacy and education. This is the modern development project at its core. In the absence of the power to change inequitable global systems, attention turns to those most effected by its injustices in the hopes that by installing a different economy there, global imbalances can be redressed. Importantly, Buxton understood this as a pious project and he says this of Christianity,"This mighty lever when properly applied can alone overturn the iniquitous system which prevails throughout the continent. Let missionaries and school masters, the plow and the spade go together and agriculture will flourish, the avenues to legitimate commerce will be opened, confidence between man and man will be inspired, and civilization will advance as a natural effect and Christianity operate as the proximate 'cause of this happy change." The famous Niger expedition of 1841 thrusting traders, missionary, soldiers, geographers, linguists into the interior of Africa with disastrous results was the first template of many more such incursions and more successful incursions from then on all the way to the scramble of Africa in the 1890s. Missionaries remained essential to this endeavor with Livingston's travels and his clarion call for commerce and Christianity serving as the most prominent example. And even in the heyday of colonial rule, the missionary input was decisive. Though they didn't always align with the 'causes of the expanding empires, the colonial endeavor would have been completely unsustainable without the missionary investment in schools, hospitals, linguistics, and the mobilization of European publics behind the colonial endeavor. So when Truman ushered in the era of post-war development, he drew on this legacy despite his high modernist pronunciations about scientific and technological progress. When you study the speech, it is framed by the Sermon on the Mount and leads to an invocation of the Almighty God as motivator for this American investment in the world. And even beneath the increasing secular high modernist expression of development in the following decades, one easily finds that in the ethical framing people will often come back to Christian values especially when asked to contrast the Western development project with that of communism. By the early 2000s then there was a sudden rediscovery of religious actress in development policy long before the academics saw the trend. And this too was rooted in Western, this time American debates about Christianity. The American Welfare Reform Act of 1996 had introduced a charitable choice provision which allowed government entities for the first time to work through religious communities in distributing welfare. This was inserted by the Pentecostal Senator, John Ashcroft, he later became famous for the torture memos, as part of a neoliberal push to shrink government and erode the wall of separation between church and state. This is where idea of faith-based organizations comes from which under George W. Bush was then introduced into the world of development and then was picked up by academics subsequently. So the point is this, throughout this history the various turns in the Western discussion of the role of Christianity in developing the world overseas were rather disconnected and remained rather disconnected from the realities in Africa, both ideologically and institutionally. While donor nations went through a phase of secularizing development and channeling aid primarily through state actors, in many African countries Christian missions and their successor organizations remain crucial to bringing aid. Depending on the demands of the day they would mute or re-emphasize their religious profile, but this changed little in that practical work or the kinds of constituents they were working with. So this disconnect between development aid and the charity sector was then further amplified by the rise of non-governmental organizations. In this environment, African Pentecostal schools, hospitals, universities, or food programs do not present a whole new problem of religion and development but they are rather the latest instantiation of Christian charity and compliance and tension with global political and economic orders. It remains imperative, therefore, to find suitable avenues of bilateral collaboration with Pentecostal Christian actors rather than seeking to discipline them into whatever the latest turn of development might require. Now, there are a number of things to consider here, however. Government development planning and reporting remains woefully disconnected from the religious sector. The latest UN process of the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs for short has changed little in this regard despite all the extensive emphasis on grassroots approaches and sustainability. As Emma Tomberlin and I have shown in a recent study of the SDG implementation in Ethiopia, India, and UK, there has been minimal participation by religious charities, Christian or otherwise. Many of our interlocutors have not even heard of the SDGs and queried the usefulness of yet another multi-lateral framework to define what they were doing anyway. Others did see some potential in the SDG commitments for holding their own governments to account. However, the process isn't set up to deliver this because it relies on government actors for reporting and implementation cutting out the grassroots in the way it's run. So, in the absence of a true grassroots approach the institutional disconnect is likely to continue. And here's an example on the slide that I find especially instructive. Again, this is from the Redeemed Christian Church Of God which, as I said, runs hospitals, schools, food programs, HIV/AIDS programs, et cetera, et cetera. And recently they launched an initiative called the Christian Social Responsibility Initiative in which they sought to rebrand and streamline all these efforts under one common buckets, neatly divided into eight key targets. As you can see, the approach and the optics of this effort are extremely reminiscent of the sustainable development goals, but there's absolutely no connection between the two as a PhD student of mine has recently found out. Second point to consider in here in working with Pentecostal actors and development is that the self-interest of Christian charities does need to be taken into account. Pentecostal mega churches like the RCCG operate from a position of relative strength and will tailor their initiatives according to the needs of their constituents and to the benefit of their image. Their charities are assets in a competitive religious market underscoring the success of that particular gospel brand and signaling that they take care of their own. In its social engagement, Pentecostal Christianity in Africa has long since ceased to be other worldly and arguably that's what makes it attractive. Joining a Pentecostal church doesn't just offer you a new spiritual identity but also affords new career opportunities, welfare provisions, business contacts, marriage partners. Moreover, Pentecostal support networks extend around the globe through diaspora churches which help migrants and send substantial remittances back home. And we know that remittances are now larger than development aid actually. Of course, these enclosed self-catering communities are far cry from the systemic and equitable change that state led programs envision, but they remain more accessible to many people after decades of state failure. They form community-based structures of governance and accountability, with democratic deficits I hasten to add, they mobilize resources more efficiently because their promises and provisions are more immediate and achievable. Even the wealth of the most extractive pastors will often be celebrated as a communal achievement by their followers as long as their glamor reflects back onto church members."Look at me, my pastor has three jets." This is important to appreciate as a dimension of the often midline prosperity gospel because in many cases to Christians involved in it it's more than a fraudulent enterprise, it's a harbor of their aspiration to be seen, to be noticed, to bask in the glamor of consumption. Thirdly, of course, alongside all these celebrated successes fraud, abuse... Sorry, alongside all these celebrating successes fraud, abuse, and corruption do exist. Weak accountable accountability structures can make these churches very unattractive partners in development alongside some of their theological positions in particular with regard to sexual ethics. But this is where the factitious and extremely plural nature of Pentecostalism provides some sort of corrective. Anyone seeking to work with these churches in development efforts is well advised to gain basic literacy in the plethora of institutions and theological arguments because chances are that if one runs into an unresolvable dispute with one church there's another one up the road that couldn't agree with one more. There are even some unexpected outliers like Pentecostal homosexual activists that Adriaan van Klinken and Leeds has been studying. At the end of the day, Pentecostals tend to be pragmatists and they may subscribe to a plethora of views and opinions during their own spiritual journey, as long as they draw on recognizable biblical and spiritual tropes. So with the right partners and a vernacular approach collaboration is often possible. One is also well-advised not to simply juxtapose, buy a medicine with spiritual healing when in the Pentecostal universe they're folded into one. Successful medical procedures are simultaneously acknowledged as a scientific achievement and as divine intervention into individual life. Pentecostal exorcist may refer a client to a mental health clinic if a suspected demon fails to manifest. Ideological differences, therefore, don't need to be a hindrance to work with Pentecostals Africa as long as one can find the right partners or facilitators to work with them. Now, all these leads me to my third and final question of whether the rise of the self contained Pentecostal communities are good for the larger political process in particular, when politicians begin to mobilize them for a particular purpose. Are we not seeing the emergence of a theocratic thread to secular politics in Africa, or are these Pentecostal politics perhaps even a reminder that statehood is fundamentally different in Africa, there's never a secular continent. I think the both ways of framing these questions are wrong because the rely on a narrow and somewhat distorted concept of secularity as merely the absence of religion. Secularization is then understood as a progressive withdrawal of religion from the realm of politics and public order into the private sphere or best into oblivion with diehard classical secularization theories envisioning this as a universal process of progressively dawning modernity. Pentecostal politicians can only appear as a disturbance in this epistemic frame because they seem to erase hard won gains in modernizing Africa or they are an indication that Africa just isn't ready for proper secular governance. You can see the problem of these kinds of views. And the mistake here, I think, is to take a particular form of the European secular as a normative and then write Africa out of its history. When in reality, Africa has been part and parcel of the secular history all along. I could give you numerous examples here from the first secular school of the German Empire not being in Berlin but in German East Africa, to various versions of the Ethiopian constitutions, or to the different instantiations of socialism in Africa. The point is that secular demands are not somehow new or secondary in Africa, rather one must look at the multifaceted ways in which religious institutions have reacted to them or conformed with them in both Europe and Africa. In this vein, the influential anthropologist, Talal Asad has argued that the secular should not be understood in terms of presence or absence of religion but as a particular regime of practices regulating religious affairs regardless of their prevalence. In his book, "Formations of the Secular" he wrote and I quote,"A secondary state is not one characterized by religious indifference or rational ethics or political toleration. It is a complex arrangement of legal reasoning, moral practice, and political authority. This arrangement is not simply the outcome of the struggle, is not the simple outcome of struggle of secular reason against the despotism of religious authority." Assad's point is that a secular state persists wherever political regime seek to discipline religious institutions into a form that is compatible with a religiously plural public realm, a sovereign state authority, and a legal relegation of religion to the private sphere. This is regardless of whether these political regimes reject or co-opt religious reasoning for their purposes, thus moving the analysis away from a binary judgment about the presence or absence of religion and toward a more complex understanding of secular formations allows us to see more clearly the intricate relationship religion and politics forms with different contexts. Now, let me return to Pentecostals in Ethiopia to illustrate this point. Almost as soon an Independent Pentecostal Movement, Ethiopia had emerged in the 1960s, it endured political repression. First under Haile Selassie's government, then under the Derg. Different political forms of mobilizing were tested. These were the first, these were students, they were the first ones to actually invoke the new laws allowing the registration of religions but they weren't granted this. So they then went to the courts. Then they approached the international press, as you can see on the newspaper article, this is from Newsweek of 1973. They even called up the World Council of Churches to see if they could get help. All of this led to nothing. And what these youth learned is that an underground defiant of the state, a spiritualized underground defiant, meeting in secret meetings is what grew their church both under Haile Selassie and even more so under the Derg. So when robust system of religious freedom arrived in 1991, Pentecostals continued to draw on this experience of persecution and refrained from organized politics. Even as they then grew from a marginal sect into a religious community encompassing over a quarter of the Ethiopian population within the last 30 years. If anything, the Pentecostal mission remained to bring about a spiritual transformation of the country through conversions which indirectly would lead to better politics through born again politicians. Now this political ideology, however, left Pentecost somewhat vulnerable to the idea of a Pentecostal political savior, but that person would also have to look the part. Hailemariam Desalegn, the first Pentecostal PM in Ethiopia came to power in 2012, did not. He had risen through the party ranks. He drew a sharp distinction between his intense private faith and official politics. And it also didn't help that he belonged to a widely ostracized Pentecostal sect that denies the teaching of the Trinity and demands of rebaptism in Jesus' name only. Pentecostals welcomed him but only with the lukewarm embrace. With Abiy Ahmed, when he rose to power in 2018, this was different from the start. He was a Trinitarian Pentecostal and stood for a younger generation of Pentecostals who no longer recalled the days of persecution but wanted some political influence. Moreover, Abiy's rise to power came swiftly and unexpected carrying the hallmarks of a political miracle. Nobody saw him coming especially as he then embarked on an audacious democratic reform that initially impressed most political observers and culminated as Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. But there's another much deeper, a non-Pentecostal reason for why religious rhetoric became essential to Abiy's political project and helped him to build and sustain a platform, political platform, through out this war even. Abiy had inherited a political system that was called ethnic federalism in which Ethiopia was defined as a state of multiple nations and nationalities ruled by a coalition of ethnically defined parties. This was a robust constitutional idea but in practice, Ethiopia was governed by a small ethnic group that monopolized political power and economic assets since 1991. By 2018, the system had run its course brought to its knees by years of protest from the largest ethnic group, Abiy's own Oromo. As Abiy swiftly moved to dislodge the old power elites, he opted for radical change in political philosophy now emphasizing Ethiopian unity over ethnic diversity. Now, there was a template for this and that was the Ethiopian emperors of the 19th century did the same thing. And they relied on an old Ethiopian Orthodox myth of Ethiopian emperors running from a long line, of emperors run all the way back to King Solomon and Ethiopian a select country blessed by God, even holding the original tablets of the Ark of the Covenant. It's little wonder then that frequent references to God God's special favor and Ethiopia became essential for Abiy's radical nation building project. This doesn't discount the possibility and actually likelihood that Abiy's politics are indeed driven by his strong Pentecostal faith or his own sense of calling, but the main question for understanding the contemporary dynamics in Ethiopian must be why this religious rhetoric could gather steam beyond Abiy's own Pentecostal constituents. Indeed, Abiy's spent many of his first months courting Orthodox believers and Muslims with notable success through his pious rhetoric. Also using vocabulary like creator, rather than a God which is actually a charged term in Ethiopia, a Christian charged terminate Ethiopia. And thus, built a political project on a broad multi-religious project platform. As a result his religious tone was not perceived as a Pentecostal idiosyncrasy and the Ethiopian political conflict now runs through all religious communities rather than between them. This is just one of many cases I could have brought to show that the so-called Pentecostal politics are rarely fully understood if they are framed so narrowly. Rather one must always consider the historical depth and multifaceted role of religious significations within a particular context in order to understand what gives weight and currency to Pentecostal or any other articulation. Good political analysis and policy making requires more than a denunciation of perceived theocratic aspirations but a deep dive into historical, socio-economic, political, and theological factors that intersect in the invocation of a religious polity. Such a deep dive is what this lecture has attempted to invite you into. Hopefully, with some success. In introducing this vibrant form of Christianity, it has been my proposition that European observers need to move beyond the exoticization and spectacularization of African Pentecostals that is all too easily found in media reports, ad hoc commentary, and expressions of ideological and ease. Such reactions and tacit assumptions of European superiority that they also seem to convey are themselves the product of a long shared history between Africa and Europe in the globalization of Christianity. A proper understanding of African Pentecostalism by contrast requires to appreciate the depths of this shared Christian history, an attentive eye to how Christianity has come to embody the fragmentations of our contemporary world in its spiritual vernacular, its charitable work, and its political rhetoric. It is important to map out properly the manifold causes and motivations behind this movement and the plurality of its expressions. Let me end this lecture on African Pentecostal Christianity with another vignette closer to home. London, 20th of April, 2012. It is the Redeemed Christian Church of God's Annual Festival of Life. And as usual they have packed out the ExCeL Center. The hall is full of mostly Nigerian Christians from the UK, Europe, and overseas. The church General Overseer, Enoch Adeboye, has flown in himself to grace festival with his presence. A special guest is announced and in walks, to much cheer, the London mayor, Boris Johnson. In a brief stump speech about upcoming Olympics in London and beautiful venues rising into the sky, Johnson is beginning to lose the audience. But then, he shifts gears. He tells the crowd that the Olympic visitors will also see, and I quote, "The communities of the greatest city on earth going through spiritual regeneration and a spiritual rebirth." The hall erupts with cheers as Johnson goes on to thank the RCCG for its work and predicts that in front of him are future counselors, members of parliament, high judges, heads of the FTSE 100 companies, and yes, quite possibly even his own successor as mayor of London. He now has captured the aspirations of the crowd. It's a political success. Yet after he finishes, the tables are turned on him and now he becomes a projection screen for African Pentecostal ideas about spiritual and worldly success. He's invited to remain standing for a prayer by Enoch Adeboye himself. The mayor looks a bit uncomfortable as Adeboye holds and by the elbow and prays to loud amens that God may bless Johnson, give him wisdom, and abilities, and grant him the desires of his heart. 10 years on, we know that Johnson's jovial predictions about revival and his successor did not come to pass. But after he had become PM the RCCG re-released this video with a sly comment that this shows what powerful things can happen when the General Overseer prays for you.(audience laughing) So you see this isn't really a story about Johnson, it isn't even a story about politics'cause many other politicians; Cameron, Theresa May and even Jeremy Corbyn have visited Nigerian Pentecostal megachurches. No, in fact, this is a story about the historical and contemporary entanglement of Africa and Europe in the ongoing globalization of Christianity. Thank you for your attention.(audience clapping)- This question is,"Is the rise of Pentecostalism always and everywhere to the detriment of traditional Christian affiliations, are these on decline as they are in Europe?"- That's an excellent question. I don't think one can universalize that at all. In a number of countries that seems to be the case. In other countries, you could see actually the rise of what we would call mainline churches is due to the rise of Pentecostalism when they began to infuse and actually help these churches compete in the religious market. Again, I draw back into my own research in Ethiopia, the Lutheran Church there wouldn't be recognizable to their own German missionaries, but it's grown substantially through charismatic forums. The Orthodox Church in Ethiopia has also grown by actually alienating charismatic forms from their midst. And there's been a new Orthodox movement launched in reaction to this. So, with Pentecostalism is a simple mantra that I always tell my students, there's no one story, there's always multiple. And the local really matters because this is a network of ideas, not a Roman Catholic Church institution as it were that sort of is homogenous. So you'll always have to look at the local.- Well, thank you very much for a fascinating and nicely presented talk. My question is partly related to the question that Dr. Thurley actually here posed to you. I worked in Germany for a time. Well, in fact, I'd met in England, just so happened. I got acquainted with somebody who did actually belong to one of the Pentecostal movements. And in the end, she started working in the offices and she was shocked by the tax federals. The fact that the, was it Rudolf Steiner? I can't remember his name exactly in Germany. But his son's education, which was actually at a theological college in America that was paid by the organization and not out of his own pocket. And then one heard later, in fact, a criminal activities and of leaders caught (mutters) and all the rest of it. And one started to wonder, at least I was wondering, in fact, whether it attracts a sort of psychopathic personality to the organization. Particularly, you know, when you've got some... I could almost imagine Boris Johnson in fact heading some movement. (chuckles)- I couldn't possibly comment on the last... It's a very entrepreneurial world with a number of new churches that don't have any oversights and a number of older churches that have the stringency of oversight that sometimes exceeds your average Baptist or something like that. So again, diversity is key. And yes, you will find examples of fraud in some newer churches. You will find fantastic riches, as I've mentioned at the outset of the lecture. But, again, I would warn to set this representative for the movement as a whole. Yes, it exists. But it is the flamboyant that catches the attention and that's not really the norm. So it's critical... It's difficult to sort of scale up from individual cases to this. There have been plenty psychological studies on Pentecostals, including their practice of glossolalia. And they all come up with pretty boring results. You have a broad spectrum of all personality types, there isn't a Pentecostal persona out there. It's just a Christian spirituality that draws on a shared Christian past of dealing with spiritual entities in the New Testament that tries to bring these stories to life. So I think that's where a lot of this draws from rather than modern phenomenon of religion.- [Man 2] Thank you. It is an apocryphal story which is always told about Christianity in Africa. And that is that, when the Christian missionary arrived in Africa he got together a few Africans and he said, "Let us pray together." And then he said, "Now you should sleep on it." And when they got up next morning, they found that they became Christians but the missionaries got the land. Now, is there some truth in that?(audience laughs)- Yeah, I mean, this is not a lecture on the story of Christian missions and of course there's lots one could say here. I will say this, I think what has helped Pentecostal Christianity grow like it did, was often a break with missionaries. This is the story in Ethiopia and elsewhere. And the model that succeeded the missionary enterprise was that of the visiting evangelist. The Billy, well, Billy Graham only went once. He didn't like Africa. There's some really strange stuff that comes up in his memoirs about Africa. But his son goes there quite a lot. But Pentecostal missionaries copy of this template of the big stadium. Reinhard Bonnke, from own country of Germany was one of the most well-known one in Africa. Now the attraction to this model is that person comes in, they bring a big show, but they leave you the Christians on the land. All they want from you is that stage, that event so they can fundraise at home. So it's almost like a power-sharing thing that happens. So African churches will then often combine their efforts bring a big evangelist in, fighting among themselves who gets the converts, raise money and then, you know, and some of it has already paid for. And that is really something that has helped Pentecostalism grow. It's these networking structures that don't demand the same thing because they dwell on attention rather than on the sort of colonial physical presence that missionaries used to have.- [Woman] I remember reading somewhere that there is a north-south divide Islamists at the north, Christians whatever in the south. How rigid is the divide?- Another interesting question. Yes, I mean, the map of Africa if you were to picture is mainly sort of Islamic countries in the north, Christian countries to the south. And the line runs through countries that you hear about in Christian-Muslim conflict; Sudan, well now, South Sudan, Sudan Nigeria, Ethiopia. So that's the picture. Christianity doesn't tend to grow at the expense of Islam anywhere in Africa. There's some interesting movements, there's some interesting borrowing as well. In Nigeria there are some Muslims who borrowing Pentecostal forms. There's some Christians who are trying to contextualize Christianity into Islam. So there's some, a little bit of that going on. But what has generally been the story that the kind of spread of Islam with colonial networks in East Africa, for example, set the boundaries that are still there today. And what Christianity did replace is affiliation with traditional religions. If you measure people's affiliation in Sub-Saharan Africa if they become Christian, you can see the decline of traditional religion. Which doesn't mean the ideas no longer exist but they're now articulated in a different vernacular and people identify differently.- One final question now, online, which I think sounds very interesting"Is Christian development more likely to prove popular and fruitful with Africans than the Chinese investment in infrastructure programs?" Which presumably the questioner is characterizing as secular.- Right, right, right, right. I mean, Chinese development is everywhere in Africa and it's actually quite loved because the understandings is that comes with no strings attached and it's Chinese workers working there. I mean the economic model behind that is not necessarily good for Africa, but it is on the rise and people like it. I remember seeing Addis Ababa, the biggest banking tower going up there has signs in Amharic and Chinese, no English. So that's a coming world. I don't think there's a one size fits all model for development for anything. And I think development itself when it operates in these larger narrative, this is good, this has worked over here let's try it over there because it's the answer, it goes astray. You need to find the partners you need to cooperate with. And here, I think, there's more work to be done to work with Pentecostal churches. Recognize bilateral pathways. Recognize their own interest. And understanding their own ideas about what it's like to build a country especially when you then look at how they build it almost in the image of a city. Redemption Camp that I've mentioned with the RCCG is a mega city. There's playgrounds, there's ATM's, there's hospitals, there's everything. It's like a self contained city. And that affords a kind of state within the state that seems realistic and attainable. And that's what makes it attractive. So you have to work with local activists but not only Christians, secular activists, Muslim activists. And I think the more of that, that can be done the better it will be. But it's not that I would advocate that Pentecostal charities are the answer because I don't think they are. I think they are part of the answer.- Dr. Haustein, thank you very much for an excellent evening. Thank you.(audience clapping)