Sensational Piety: Practices of Mediation in Christ Embassy and NASFAT in Abuja

Abstract

This thesis studies Christ Embassy and NASFAT within a single comparative framework in the city of Abuja. Christ Embassy is one of the major Pentecostal churches that are rapidly growing in Nigerian urban centres. NASFAT was established in Lagos in the mid 1990s as a Muslims response to the domination of the public sphere by Pentecostalism and the consequent attraction of Muslim youths to these churches. The thesis shows how Christ Embassy and NASFAT stand in critique to mainline Christianity and Islam and how they resemble each other in form, (though not so much in content) as well as transformative of ways of being Christian/Muslim in the two groups. Furthermore, the thesis investigates the practices of prayer, preaching and engaging with the new media technology as points for comparison. Three genres of prayers have been compared: prayers of adoration, prayers of aesthetic speech, and prayers of instrumentality. The thesis argues that prayers of adoration and prayers of aesthetic speech in Christ Embassy and NASFAT facilitate the process of mediation by orchestrating bodily experiences of affect, which members recognised as a ‘divine touch’ or ‘the presence of God.’ It also argues that the instrumental prayers in the two groups attempt to establish communication with the divine and achieve the desired goals through the performative power and semiotic systems ascribed to the language of the prayers. The thesis also argues that in both Christ Embassy and NASFAT, preaching is a potent mechanism for producing and moulding religious subjects. Finally, the thesis compared technology mediated religious practices in Christ Embassy and NASFAT, focusing on the mobile phone technology as a new religious medium. The chapter argues that mobile phone technology in Christ Embassy and NASFAT is used as a religious medium that facilitates religious mediation through hosting varieties of religious resources, such as sermons, Qur’anic recitation, religious music, text, online religious performances and images, among members the members of the two groups. The comparison reveals similarities and differences in these practices and mutual borrowing, in a context in which Pentecostals set the tone for a new emergent religiosity that is more individualistic and emotional in nature. The thesis explores dynamics of inter-religious borrowing in a context of co-existence; albeit under unequal conditions since NASFAT borrow more from Pentecostals than vice versa.