Abstract
In this chapter, Afolayan provides an exploratory and conceptual contribution to Pentecostal political philosophy that combines theoretical and empirical understanding of the Pentecostal phenomenon in Africa. Essentially, the chapter interrogates the nature of politics and especially politics in Africa, the nature of Pentecostal theology, and how Pentecostalism modifies and is modified by the nature of the political. Afolayan then argues for the understanding of Pentecostalism as politeia, a mode of reacting to political events and dynamics mediated by the theory of pastoral leadership, which not only implicates Pentecostalism in a theology of complicity and duplicity in its relationship with the rogue state in Africa, but also implies that Pentecostalism will not be able to achieve its objective of an active political regime in the absence of the state.
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- 1.
J. Ayo Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa: A Case Study in Ideology and Social Classes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 13.
- 2.
Sunday Adelaja, “Churches teaching too many wrong values,” Interview with Sunday Oguntola, The Nation, August 9, 2015.
- 3.
Richard Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 49.
- 4.
Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2.
- 5.
Martin Heidegger, “Being-in-the-World as Being-With and Being a Self: The ‘They’,” in Martin Heidegger, Philosophical and Political Writings, edited by Manfred Stassen (New York: Continuum, 2003), 152.
- 6.
Ibid., 155.
- 7.
Adeshina Afolayan, “The Miraculous Seen: The Idea of Culture, Religion, Ethics and Corruption in Nigeria,” in Akin Alao (ed.) Politics, Culture and Development in Nigeria: A Festschrift for Gabriel Olatunde Babawale (Lagos: CBAAC, 2011), 67.
- 8.
Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 9.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Christopher Betts. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 162. However, he makes the other point that, contrary to Warburton, Christianity is not the firmest support of the body. Rather, “the Christian law is at bottom more harmful than useful in strengthening the constitution of the state.”
- 10.
Ibid., 163. Christianity, or what Rousseau calls “the religion of man”, even though is “true, sacred and holy,” has no particular relationship with the body politic. According to him, “it does not add to the strength of the laws, but leaves to them only the strength they derive from themselves; so that one of the greatest bonds of particular society remains ineffectual.”
- 11.
Ibid. Of course, Rousseau is wrong to underestimate the political significance of Christianity, especially in its postcolonial Pentecostal forms. Political spiritualities are far from being just otherworldly.
- 12.
Ibid., 166.
- 13.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated from the French by Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 185.
- 14.
Everett Hamner, “Introduction: The Religious and the Secular,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 7: 2005, 5.
- 15.
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 23.
- 16.
Ibid., 26.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid., 35.
- 19.
Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The acquisition and the transformation of the language of politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1.
- 20.
Ibid., 2.
- 21.
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 25.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Ibid., 32.
- 25.
Ibid., 26.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Ibid., 26–27.
- 28.
Marshall, Political Spiritualities, 92.
- 29.
Ibid., 99.
- 30.
Kalu, African Pentecostalism, 213.
- 31.
Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 5.
- 32.
Ibid., 113.
- 33.
Ibid., 113–114.
- 34.
Ibid., 118.
- 35.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.
- 36.
Ibid., 23.
- 37.
David Miller, Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.
- 38.
Ibid., 4.
- 39.
Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit and Thomas Pogge, “Introduction,” in Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit and Thomas Pogge (eds.) A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, second edition: Vol. 1 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), xvii.
- 40.
St. Augustine, The City of God and Christian Doctrine, edited by Philip Schaff (New York: The Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), Bk. I, 12. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.html.
- 41.
Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism, 3.
- 42.
Ibid., 9.
- 43.
Marshall, Political Spiritualities, 93–94.
- 44.
For a brilliant analysis of the historical evolution of res publica, see Raymond Geuss, Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
- 45.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7.
- 46.
See Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.
- 47.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 55.
- 48.
Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded edition, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9.
- 49.
Marcel Detienne suggests reading politeia not simply as “constitution” but also as “a certain way of reacting in the political domain.” “Public Space and Autonomy in Early Greek Cities,” in Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong (eds.) Public Space and Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2001), 49. Thus, since there is no true constitution in Greece, every city is given the benefit of proposing its own way. Contrary to Arendt, Wariboko rejects love and focuses on friendship as the basis of what he calls altersovereignty. I am prepared to go out on a limb with such a suggestion because seeing Pentecostalism as simply politeia has the advantage of defining Pentecostalism’s political dynamics as they are and as they unfold, rather than with the futuristic bent of Wariboko’s analysis or the outright dismissal, by Marshal, of the possibility of Pentecostalism becoming a political community.
- 50.
Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism, 4–5. See also Chap. 2.
- 51.
Ibid., 154.
- 52.
Ibid., 152.
- 53.
Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14.
- 54.
Ibid., 104.
- 55.
Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism, 155.
- 56.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 350.
- 57.
V. Y. Mudimbe, Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 3.
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Afolayan, A. (2018). Pentecostalism, Political Philosophy, and the Political in Africa. In: Afolayan, A., Yacob-Haliso, O., Falola, T. (eds) Pentecostalism and Politics in Africa. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74911-2_12
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