Christianity and Public Culture in Africa

7: Going and Making Public: Pentecostalism as Public Religion in Ghana

149 S E v E N Going and Making Public Pentecostalism as Public Religion in Ghana b i r g i t m e Y e r R E l I g I O N I N the public sphere and public religion have recently become much-debated issues and research foci in the study of religion, identity, and politics in Africa. there are good empirical reasons to evoke these and related terms so as to further our understanding of the place and role of religion in society, as i have also experienced in my own research in ghana over the past twenty years. between 1988 and 1992, over several stints of fieldwork, i conducted research on the African appropriations of Christianity and the appeal of Pentecostalism .1 during that period, the country was governed by the Provisional national defense Council (PndC) of J. J. rawlings, who had come to power through a coup and wielded full control over the media in the context of a one-party system. remarkably, while limiting Christian churches’ appearance in the media, the first rawlings government (1979–92) assigned radio time to the neotraditional Afrikania movement that criticized “brainwashing” by Christian conversion and propagated African traditional religion as a respectable and authentic alternative. Afrikania echoed the PndC’s cultural policy of sankofa,2 which strove to leave behind Christian ideologies in favor of an African identity grounded in indigenous cultural heritage. from the mid-1980s onward, churches—especially Pentecostal ones—became extremely popular. notwithstanding their increasing appeal, which was at least partly due to people’s growing disappointment with the government’s inability to deliver “development” and “progress,” they played a minor public role. 150 bIRgIT MEYER However, returning to ghana in 1996 for a new research project on popular culture (in particular,popular video movies),i noted much to my amazement that the public sphere had undergone a big transformation. under the pressure of the World bank and the international monetary fund, the PndC had instigated a democratic constitution, implying the gradual liberalization and commercialization of media such as film, radio, television, and newspapers.3 the new radio and television stations were to be formally secular, yet at the same time operated on a commercial basis. many Pentecostal churches immediately seized the new opportunities to buy airtime and became a markedly public force.4 While the appeal of Christianity was not new as such, i was struck by its public omnipresence, as well as the fierce public attacks leveled against local religious traditions and Afrikania. flooding the public sphere, Pentecostal images and sounds devoted to “spiritual warfare” were impossible to be ignored in southern ghana.5 this had immediate implications for politics. As, under the aegis of democracy, politicians now had to compete for votes, many of them started to use Pentecostal churches as stages for a ritual cleansing from past sins and for the performance of a cleansed, born-again identity. during the campaign for the elections in december 2008, the mobilization of Pentecostalism by politicians was unprecedented in its intensity, with the presidential candidate (and then the elected president) John Atta mills openly supporting this brand of Christianity, and seeking spiritual support from the Pentecostal nigerian preacher t. b. Joshua. Puzzled by these new developments, along with many scholars witnessing similar processes throughout Africa and elsewhere, i developed a keen interest in the manifestation of religion in the public sphere in general, and in the rise of the latest variant of Pentecostalism—with its flamboyant pastors, skillful use of media, emphasis on the prosperity gospel, and mobilization of a mass following—in particular. While religion’s regained public vitality is widely recognized today, scholars are only beginning to address the theoretical issues raised by its public reemergence in our time. before sketching the stakes in current debates about religion in the public sphere, it needs to be noted that the term public itself is far from clear. Public can refer to matters that concern a community as a whole, being open to all persons and hence generally known. following from this, a public is a group for which what is qualified as public is accessible . While, taken in this broad sense, public is a term that pertains to 151 going and making Public matters and groups characterized by openness and accessibility; it is at the same time a normative, specific concept that is grounded in postenlightenment modern Western societies...