Upon invitation to participate in an Author meets critic session as part of the Lagos Studies Association conference that took place in June 2023, I elected to review , Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria by Ebenezer Obadare to gain further insights into the salience of Pentecostalism in the lives of my research participants. As discussed in a recent publication, I noticed that Pentecostalism was very much part of most of my participants’ lives during my fieldwork research that examined how low-income women in Ibadan navigate everyday life in increasingly precarious times. For example, one of my research participants, enticed by the possible role of Pentecostalism in changing her socio-economic status, converted to Christianity after four decades of being a Muslim and now attends the Redeemed Church of God. And more recently, during my research on youth, identity and urban change in Ibadan and Lagos, one of my youth informants articulated his refusal to commit himself to one particular church, but rather engages in the continuous search for a church where miracles are constantly happening, so that he could be a beneficiary and finally get his breakthrough. After reading this engaging and well-written book, I now have a deeper understanding of the appeal of Pentecostalism and the workings of the spiritual economy.
I would like to congratulate and commend Obadare on his thought-provoking book, which is grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship and mostly devotes space and care to explain concepts and elaborate upon ideas and themes. I do, think, however, as someone interested in methods, that Obadare needed to devote more time to explaining his methods: for example, what types of interviews were conducted, and what was their purpose? How many interviews were conducted? Who exactly are “the other key players in the Nigerian spiritual industry? (p. 18)
Overall, Obadare makes a compelling argument about how we must closely examine the figure of the pastor, and the power they hold, to fully understand the appeal of Pentecostalism, and the Pentecostal republic in Nigeria. To this end, Obadare begins his book by explaining the conditions that allowed the pastor to exert influence in Nigeria. Prior to military rule (in the 60s and 70s), as advanced by Obadare, academia, as an institution was a strong pillar of civil society; the academy and professors used to be relied upon to help map out the future of Nigeria and decide relevant policies to strengthen its economy, but military politics led to the delegitimization of academia and the loss of social prestige and authority of the professorial class.
Obadare convincingly claims, then, that the decline in the “man of letters” has created a vacuum, which the “man of God” has stepped in to fill. Now, in contemporary Nigeria, academics have been cast aside in favour of Pentecostalism’s “coherent theory of history and futurity, including an explanation of the crisis of the Nigerian state and society” (p. 48) – which also conveniently “absolves political actors of responsibility for their actions” (p. 61). Accordingly, Nigeria has become a clerical state, in which pastors have established an aristocracy of wonderment (p. 7), and this consequent reliance on the “man of God” promotes the rule of prodigy which is the antithesis of accountability and democracy. To Obadare, the pastor is a political entrepreneur, who is very close to the political process, and exercises control, using the instruments of calling, prophecy and prayer to channel authority and build social capital. Obadare also points out that young people are attracted to pastoring because it “promises instant material rewards, a degree of social respect that the ordinary professional can only dream of, and connections to the political and business elites at national and transnational levels” (p. 54). While I do not disagree with this attraction to pastoring, I found it a little incongruent with Obadare’s emphasis on “calling” and the interviews he uses to buttress his point about spiritual conscription. How is spiritual conscription reconciled with choosing to engage in pastoring for social mobility reasons? Are there then two categories of pastors? The “figure of the pastor” that the book focuses on and those “facing the danger of permanent consignment to the social margins?” (p. 53).
Obadare posits that the pastor also exercises power within the erotic sphere, through their location at the center of the Nigerian Pentecostal erotic economy. Obadare highlights that the pastor has erotic power – that is, “access to and seeming control over the bodies and sexual organs of his congregants”, and is also the object of the gaze, through his eroticization (p. 83). Obadare argues that the “eroticization of the pastor is ultimately inalienable from Pentecostalism’s moral project of producing a new kind of male”, one that is effeminized, thus allowing the pastor to emerge as an idealized man, theoretically available to every woman (p. 91). Admittedly, I wasn’t fully convinced by this claim as it required more evidence beyond theorization – do male congregants think they are effeminized for example?
Obadare also points out that “pastors assist in the conduct of conduct through erotic power – a form of phallic subjugation whereby the pastor’s eroticization is leveraged to “sway” the faithful, inducting them to adopt normative ways of seeing and acting, and as such “program” their agential reflexes” (p. 95). This part is a bit unclear to me given the examples provided in the chapter, there is nothing seemingly normative – if we are talking about gender norms and heteronormativity – about the examples – e,g., effeminizing men, rubbing of men’s genitals, and asking women not to wear underwear to church. Also, while reading, I thought this chapter could benefit from a more in-depth engagement with sexuality studies – thus enabling further exploration into sexual citizenship and heteronormativity and allowing the possibility of queering the consumption of the pastor by effeminate men. Further, I couldn’t help but wonder, though Obadare is not interested in the figure of the female pastor, what this Pentecostal erotic economy would look like in a female led church: is it only the “man of God” that is afforded panoptic power (in Obadare’s case, erotic masculine power – which then privileges a particular type of sexual citizenship)? – for example, the circulating stories of a supposed female pastor in Ghana telling a male to suck her breast for healing comes to mind. Finally, I am curious about what it means to not afford agency to the “faithful” in the Pentecostal erotic economy. What I mean is, perhaps the faithful desire to consume the pastor sexually as a way of being closer to God – if indeed he is the “man of God”, and perhaps desire on their own part, to approximate some sort of power through what could be considered a divine act?
Obadare’s final substantive chapter centers on women who rebel and resist pastoral power. I thought that this chapter required more elaboration to strengthen Obadare’s appellation of two of the women as feminists. Obadare writes, “I am willing to go out on a limb and defend Stephanie Otobo as a feminist (an imperfect one to be sure)” (p. 103), and later refers to Kemi Olunloyo as a feminist icon (p. 106). It’s unclear how Obadare defines feminism – and whether there’s such thing as a perfect feminist (and Roxanne Gay’s book, ‘bad feminist’ comes to mind here as well as other scholarship illuminating the diversity of feminism). More so, the supposed defense seems to be missing, or not clearly stated. What makes her a feminist, why did Obadare decide to call her a feminist?
To be sure, and by way of conclusion, what makes Obadare’s book powerful, and relevant, is his concern about the future of Nigeria – which he’s afraid is bleak – because “clerical assurances about future security” (p. 121) and clerical dominance over social life (p. 119) preclude deliberative politics and reason. It seems then, that a restoration of the intelligentsia (which by the way is gendered male – “man of letters” ) will become Nigeria’s saving grace. Although beyond the scope of the book, I am a bit wary of this valorization of reason and the seeming binary of reason/spirituality(faith), which brings to mind colonial projects of modernity and its afterlife in the postcolony.