Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal revolution in Nigeria

Abstract

Ruth Marshall's study of Pentecostalism in Nigeria is part of a growing body of literature about the significant rise of West African Pentecostalism, and yet it is a unique contribution to the field, for Marshall offers nothing less than a reconceptualization of religion and politics. Arguing that religion is best understood as an irreducible practice, she shows that functionalist assumptions, modernist teleologies, the secularist dichotomy between faith and reason, and nativist representations of religious contextualization are altogether unsuitable social scientific concepts for understanding the success of the Pentecostal movement, or the relationship between religion and politics as a whole. The first chapter accordingly begins with what the introduction laid out as the task of clearing ‘an analytical space’ (p. 3) for understanding religious practices. Marshall deconstructs scholarly conceptualizations of Pentecostalism as signification of something else – be it as a restoration of African identity or the appropriation of neo-liberal capitalism – and proposes that religious change is neither a sign nor an effect of other developments, but ‘in and of itself a mode of historical and political transformation’ (p. 34). With a Foucauldian approach, the Born Again movement (as Marshall also calls Pentecostalism) need not be analysed in terms of its function or the truth of its beliefs, but can be understood as a specific set of practices aimed at subjectivation and governmentality, and constituted in a specific historical constellation. Yet, drawing from Foucault's rediscovery of a ‘political spirituality’ in the Iranian revolution, Marshall also seeks to identify an irreducible element to religion which is related to desire and the original capacity to act: to redeem the past and to begin again. This double understanding of religion as a political practice, but of a unique type, guides Marshall's detailed analyses for the remainder of the book.