From Fringe to Mainstream: Atlantic Missionary Networks in Twentieth-Century Nigeria

This paper looks at the mutually-beneficial nature of affiliations between Nigerian prophets, American evangelists, and British missionaries in twentieth-century Nigeria. It begins in the 1920s with the affiliation between the Lagos-based prayer group known as the Precious Stone Society and Philadelphia's Faith Tabernacle Church. It then examines how this relationship grew in the 1930s and 40s to incorporate Nigeria's prophet-led Aladura ("prayer-healing") revival and the Welsh Apostolic Church and then, in the 1950 and 60s, due to the actions of a renegade British missionary, to include American evangelists and Nigerian university students. This paper argues that, through these networks, evangelists and missionaries who were on the religious fringe in their home countries were embraced in Nigeria because 1) their beliefs, which were considered outlandish if not just plain crazy at home, were accepted as credible by many Nigerians and 2) they brought an international cachet to emerging charismatic groups. These developing relationships were thus mutually beneficial, enabling each marginalized side -- the Africans marginalized politically by their (post)colonial position and the evangelists marginalized culturally by their perceived eccentricities -- to gain status from their new "international" affiliations. These networks were powerful because they enabled all their participants to move away from the fringe and toward the mainstream. They therefore offer compelling evidence that the globalization of Christianity in the twentieth century is not the straightforward process of neocolonial imposition and cultural homogenization which it is often assumed to be, but rather a system which works in the opposite direction as well, bringing out the dynamic nature of local cultural practices.  This paper's main intervention is to show that the standard globalization as Westernization narrative -- the one which highlights the McDonalds-fication of the world -- fails to understand that globalization often ends up empowering the margins over the mainstream.