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ABSTRACT
This article examines Pentecostal embodiment through a study of the way prayer is spoken of and performed in a prominent Nigerian Deliverance church. It argues that the Deliverance churches’ exaggerated emphasis on the demonic serves to re-purpose prayer as an embodied violent performance that is often as much directed to the devil as it is to God. This article thus reveals the ways in which the entanglement of divine and demonic beings in the Pentecostal body results in the production of a subject that does not just act upon itself, but in fact seeks to defeat and hence deliver itself. Moreover, in offering a detailed account of how the movement’s theology of the body is made manifest in performances of prayer, the article argues for scholarly attention to the role that theological doctrines play in the constitution of embodied experience in the study of religions more generally.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and 37 semi-structured interviews, were carried out between 2015 and 2018 at MFM branches in Nigeria, Oxford, and California. The General Overseer, Dr Daniel Olukoya has made many of his sermons available online (see https://www.sermoncentral.com/contributors/daniel-olukoya-sermons-57287, accessed 20 September 2020) and the church publishes and broadcasts extensively on the internet. Names have been changed to protect informants’ identities.
2. Nancy Caciola and Moshe Sluhovsky document the preoccupation with the discernment of spirits during the European Middle Ages and the early modern period. They note that, in the medieval period, “the external etiologies of the two syndromes—divine and demonic possessions or seizures—were represented in such similar terms as to be indistinguishable” and were most likely experienced by women “who entered into immobile and insensible trance states” (Caciola and Sluhovsky Citation2012, 6).
3. James Collins’s work traces the particularity of the Deliverance strand of Pentecostalism, observing that some early Pentecostal characters like the exorcist John Dowie (1847–1907) already differentiated themselves from the mainstream by virtue of Dowie’s insistence that the demonic could possess the life of even the Spirit-filled Christian, contra the claims of many of his Pentecostal peers at the time. This view was particularly revived in the work of Derek Prince (1915–2003) who, after undergoing an experience of deliverance from the demon of heaviness, felt compelled to leave the Pentecostal ministry of which he was a member, on the grounds of their refusal to entertain the possibility of demonic possession for a born-again and Spirit-filled Christian (Collins Citation2009, 43–47).
4. Scholars have long documented the preponderance of women who undergo spirit possession worldwide. Csordas suggests that, while “the preponderance of women appears to be the rule in devotional religions”, the frequency of being slain is comparable across the genders (Csordas Citation1997, 31–33). This does not, however, accord with my own observations among Nigerian Pentecostals, where women underwent spirit possession far more frequently than men.
5. Interestingly, the General Overseer of MFM calls the church a ‘Do-It-Yourself ministry’.
6. The turn away from the gnosis of the mind to a kind of embodied and experiential knowledge can, for Pentecostals, be traced at least as far back as the German Pietist movements of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, which in turn took inspiration from Catholic mystics (see Anderson Citation2004, 25).
7. For example, the prayer point “Let the stamping of my feet defeat the camp of the enemy” becomes “Let the stamping/Of my feet/defeat the camp of the enemy” where each phrase is issued by the leader and then repeated by the congregation.
8. Meditation practices have, of course, roots in South Asian yogic traditions.
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Naomi Richman
Naomi Richman is a Postdoctoral Researcher for the Wellcome Trust-funded research project “Hidden Persuaders”, based at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford on the Deliverance movement in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora.