“To God be the glory”: Hallelujah movies and the constructions of popular Pentecostal morality in Nigerian cinema

Abstract

From its emergence in 1992, Nollywood—the cinema of Nigeria—has burgeoned into a dominant form of cultural production in Africa and its films offer a most powerful, enduring, and intelligible expression of Nigerian popular culture today. These films have continued to influence and be influenced by conceptions and practices of popular religion in Nigeria. No expression better captures this interplay between Nollywood and popular religion in Nigeria than the “to God be the glory” doxology that often precedes credit rolls in many Nollywood films and reemphasizes a dénouement of the authority of the Christian God over Satan and the power of darkness. Using critical discourse analysis and drawing from two Nollywood films, Billionaires’ Kingdom and Church Business, this article interrogates Nollywood’s deployment of films to present a unique African perspective of engaging popular religion in Nigeria. It begins by delineating the theoretical framework and the context for its analysis, employing the Divine Command Theory. Then, this article explores Nollywood’s constructions of a social moral compass with the Pentecostal-charismatic Christian endings of its films. Afterwards, it examines the specific engagement of “alleluia movies” and the proselytization history it bears for Nigeria’s Pentecostal-charismatic churches. Finally, it highlights the interplay between Nollywood and popular religion and argues that Nollywood films demonstrate how their representations of popular religion in the particular context of southern Nigeria have not only shaped that society but have equally been influenced and transformed by religion’s engagement of film.

Introduction

Nollywood, the cinema of Nigeria, might not have figured among the film contexts that Marshal McLuhan (1967/1994) considered when he coined his now legendary “the medium is the message” phrase. However, it fits into and illustrates the argument he and other media scholars like Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979, 2011), Manuel Castells (1996, 2009), and Friedrich Kittler (1999, 2013) have made over the years that a medium of communication impacts and is impacted by the information it communicates in such a way that it becomes difficult to isolate the message from the medium. From its emergence in 1992, Nollywood has not only burgeoned into a dominant form of cultural production in Africa; as one of its foremost scholars Jonathan Haynes (2000, p. 4) puts it, its films also offer “the strongest, most accessible expression of contemporary Nigerian popular culture.” These films have continued to influence and be influenced by conceptions and practices of popular religion in Nigeria, bearing out S. Brent Plate’s (2003, p. 4) assertion that religions and culture “do not merely use media, but instead are used by media, and created by them.” No expression better captures the interplay between Nollywood and popular religion in Nigeria than the “to God be the glory” doxology that often precedes credit rolls in many Nollywood films and reemphasizes a dénouement of the authority of the Christian God over Satan and the power of darkness.

This mind-set feeds off the dominant Pentecostal-charismatic Christian culture of southern Nigeria. In a milieu where individuals have been Christianized to be wary of assuming God’s glory for/unto themselves, people are cautious to take credit for whatever work they put in toward any success they achieved, lest God withholds subsequent favors. Hence, to any compliment paid for whatever accomplishment, the stock response is “to God be the glory” or its other variants like “we thank God,” “by the grace of God,” or “na God” (short for “it’s God” (na God) that made whatever it is possible). “Na God,” for instance, also provides a cover for those whose wealth, for example, derives from their exploitation of the corruption in the system. Since they lack logical explanations for the source of their sudden riches, their “na God” response suffices, especially for the less fortunate around them who are encouraged in their aspiration that God will one day equally turn their own luck around “in an instant.” Pastors and charismatic priests promote this mind-set by reiterating how God manifests God’s might by dispensing such miracles.

Operating, then, within this world informed by a popular Pentecostal-charismatic Christian mentality, Nollywood filmmakers bring their knowledge of this world as well as its influence on them to bear on their (re)productions and representations of the world they create. The phrase not only represents the most common way that Nigerians infuse religion into everyday life, it also signals the accepted Pentecostal-charismatic Christian living that will ultimately lead individuals to acclaim “to God be the Glory.” It has become, according to Biodun Jeyifo (2009/2014, p. 606), the “most dominant imprimatur or current of Nollywood films,” . . . while aspiring to be “the universal solvent that dissolves all the conflicts, challenges, dilemmas and contradictions in Nollywood.”

Using critical discourse analysis and drawing from two Nollywood films, Billionaires’ Kingdom (2012) and Church Business (2007), this article interrogates Nollywood’s deployment of films to present a unique African perspective of engaging popular religion in Nigeria. Although randomly selected from the volume of Nollywood productions, the films depict a characteristic portrayal of Nollywood’s representations of the essay’s subject matter. The essay begins by delineating the theoretical framework and the context for its analysis. Then, focusing on “to God be the Glory” as the singular most representative phrase of how Nollywood conceptualizes its infusion of religion into everyday life, this article explores Nollywood’s constructions of a social moral compass with the Pentecostal-charismatic Christian endings of its films. Afterwards, it examines the specific engagement of “Hallelujah movies” and the proselytization history it bears for Nigeria’s Pentecostal-charismatic churches. To the extent that religion impacts the particular medium of film that it deploys to disseminate its message, this article highlights the interplay between Nollywood and popular religion and argues that Nollywood films demonstrate how their representations of popular religion in the particular context of southern Nigeria have not only shaped that society but have equally been influenced and transformed by religion’s engagement of film. Through this interchange between religion and film, Nollywood films have continued to impact the constructions of the dominant popular Pentecostal morality in Nigeria.

Pentecostal-oriented moral compass: a theoretical framework and context

This essay anchors it theoretical framework for the Pentecostal-oriented moral compass on the Divine Command Theory, which states that morality depends on and derives from God and that moral obligation subsists in obeying God’s commands. The theory contends that “morality is ultimately based on the commands or character of God, and that the morally right action is the one that God commands or requires” (Austin, n.d.). The idea of connecting morality to religion and to God has remained controversial from ancient times, with critics (Plato, 1981; Nielson, 1973; J.L. Mackie, 1977; etc.) and proponents (Aquinas, 1947; Adams, 1987, 1999; Quinn, 1978, 1979, 1992; etc.) alike arguing for and against the concept. Nevertheless, beyond the interest of theologians, moral philosophers, and philosophers of religion in engaging the question of the possible connections between religion and ethics, those connections also probe not only the roles of religion in society, but equally the nature of moral deliberations.

As used in this essay, “morality” is not distinguished from “ethics.” Although philosophers like Kant (1996, 1998), Hegel (1997), and more recently R.M. Hare (1981) and William (1993) have contrasted “morality” with “ethics,” this essay does not distinguish between the two (see J. Hare, 2019). Deriving its etymology from the Latin mos and meaning habit or custom, “moral” is a translation of the Greek ethos—of similar meaning—from whence “ethics” originated. In that case, while religion sets out general standards of morality for its adherents, morality is not necessarily dependent on religion (see Dixon, 2008; William, 1993). Hence, this essay acknowledges the two distinct broad senses of morality: (a) “descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct put forward by a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individual for her own behavior,” [and (b)] “normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational people” (Gert, 2020). However, the essay privileges the descriptive sense of morality in its localization of the concept within Nollywood films informed by the pervading influence of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Nigeria.

Given its overarching influence in southern Nigeria, Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity establishes the prevailing morality within this sphere. Its conceptions of morality not only shape the common understanding of morality questions in contemporary southern Nigeria, its worldview also orients popular morality within its compass. That worldview derives from the authority of the Bible and the magisterial interpretations of its content by pastors and members who read their engagement in the world as a compliance with the divine injunction to exercise dominion over the created world (Genesis 1:28). This exercise of dominion is akin to what Abimbola Adelakun (2023) calls the disestablishment mission of Pentecostalism in the Nigerian socio-political and economic public spaces. Pentecostalism, she argues, enters a national and cultural public space as a newcomer, disrupts both the religious and socio-political status quo, disestablishes the prevailing order, and then establishes its own alternative—a Pentecostal-oriented worldview.

Nollywood rides on this new Pentecostal order to create its filmic representations of right and wrong, of good and bad behavior. In the light of the preponderance of Pentecostals among Nollywood filmmakers and also considering the aforementioned prevailing Pentecostal mind-set as well as its particular system of values and principles of conduct within southern Nigeria, Pentecostals bring those same mind-set and principles to bear on the films that they produce, films that consolidate and continue to advance the Pentecostal-oriented moral compass.

Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity pervades contemporary southern Nigeria in the ways that Peter W. Williams (1989, p. 3) articulates popular religion as being popular because it has “mass appeal” and is “of the people.” Thus, given its embeddedness in the products and conveyors of popular culture like social media groups, television and radio programs, newspaper columns, as well as crusades and revivals, the influence of Pentecostal-infused morality on the everyday lives of Nigerians remains ubiquitous (see Mohammed & Adelakun, 2023; Uwalaka & Nwala, 2023). This article locates its analysis in the understanding of Nollywood as a significant popular producer of religion as a lived practice. Nollywood represents that space within which the article’s articulation of cinema’s productions of culture is embodied in its interaction and intersection with Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Nigeria. This understanding of popular religion in Nigeria thrives primarily on the public’s enduring hankering for the supernatural or the miraculous. Although rooted in Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, it also draws from the eclecticism of other religious traditions—traditional and Christian (African Independent Churches, Catholicism)—manifest in the everyday lived experiences of Nigerians.

Taking into consideration the overarching Pentecostal-charismatic mentality and its all-pervading influence on the contemporary sociocultural realities of southern Nigeria, Nollywood parades a number of filmmakers who approach their craft with the conviction that cinema represents a veritable tool for evangelization, albeit not always in a fundamentalist confrontation of dark forces. Some of these filmmakers and actors have become pastors and have transitioned to using their craft to spread the Gospel and the Pentecostal Christian morals. A remarkable case in point is Kenneth Nnebue, the executive producer of Nollywood’s pioneer commercial film, Living in Bondage (1992), who now commits the art, craft, and technology that birthed Nollywood and gave him fame to purging himself of that fame and its “demonic temptations” as well as to promoting the “Brother Kenneth Nnebue Film Evangelism” (Nnebue, 2023). The producer of the film, Okechukwu Ogunjiofor, also doubles as a minister of the Word, in addition to his primary film production vocation.

The melodrama of Nollywood films feeds off the everyday socio-religious realities of contemporary southern Nigeria (see Haynes, 2000, 2016; see also Afolayan, 2014; Brooks, 1976; Brown, 2021; Ekwuazi, 2018; Miller, 2016; Peace, 2020; Ryan, 2023; Tsika, 2022; Witt, 2017). The filmmakers construct narratives from popular stories, individual experiences and religious testimonies that appeal to the audience. Hence, whereas not all the filmmakers share a fundamentalist or radical religious background and conviction, most of them nonetheless generally infuse their stories with enough religious tone and flavor to appeal to the audience. There is no doubting the commercial motivation for such a business model. However, some filmmakers have also used comedy to circumvent the strictures of the audience’s tacit demand for overt religious content.

“To God be the glory”: Nollywood films as a Pentecostal-oriented moral compass

Like many Nollywood films, Church Business (2007) and Billionaires’ Kingdom (2012), for instance, demonstrate the dénouement of “to God be the Glory.” In Billionaires’ Kingdom, for example, protagonist Martin (Kenneth Okonkwo), one-time successful businessman, unsatisfied with his current financial conditions, goes on a wealth-making adventure by joining The Great Idusaku secret society, at the insistence of his friend, Don Oscar (Clem Ohameze). The cult demands that he sacrifice his only child (and later his loving and supportive wife, Tessy (Tessy Oragwa)), to regain his riches. Martin storms out of the shrine in total rejection of the cult’s demand. However, he returns after Oscar urges him to be “reasonable,” telling him: “Money answereth all things. Life is nothing without money. A man is but a piece of rag without money.” Martin finally gives in to Oscar’s “wisdom,” sacrifices his child, and becomes rich overnight. Incidentally, the protagonist Kenneth Okonkwo also played the leading role as Andy Okeke in Nollywood’s inaugural movie, Living in Bondage (1992), which set the tone for the industry’s foundational focus on the genre of ritual killings for money (see Azuawusiefe, 2013, 2020, 2022; Haynes, 2016). Like it happened to Andy, the ghost of Martin’s murdered wife haunts and torments Martin until he finally confesses his evil deeds and finds redemption in Christ through the deliverance prayer of a pastor and his praying team, “to the glory of God.”

The willingness to cross the threshold of the occult to gain material wealth does not apply only to lay people. Church Business illustrates how ministers of God can equally be ensnared in that world. Such pastors, the film’s soundtrack notes, “are in [the] ministry because of money . . . [and] are no [longer] afraid of God.” Young father of two Jimmy Okoye (Ramsey Nouah) loses his job for “trying not to be fraudulent with [company’s] account,” but cannot get a new one because of being considered “overqualified” by employers. He convinces his school friend Pastor Mike (Ofiafuluagu Mbaka) to let him join his preaching ministry, expressing the hope that God will bless him “abundantly in return.” However, when he thinks that God’s blessing is taking time in coming, he abandons Mike who he believes lacks the ambition to understand that “money answereth all things.” Surreptitiously, his path crosses with Paul Badmus’s, a former notorious ruffian schoolmate who now pastors a big church. Prophet Badmus (Segun Arinze), hearing that Jimmy is “ready to do anything” for money, takes him to meet Grand Master, the leader of a shrine. Jimmy’s ministry flourishes afterwards, but Princess Mia (Shan George) of the marine kingdom of the wealth behind Grand Master’s power falls in love with Jimmy and demands to have a child for Jimmy. He hesitates and Mia kills his daughter. She eventually moves in with him and orders him to drive away his wife Chioma (Genevieve Nnaji) and their son. Chioma cries to Pastor Mike who visits and confronts Mia, finally defeating her with prayers and redeeming Jimmy, again “to the glory of God.”

The two films, while they are not “religious films” per se, convey a religion-informed moral message. Their redemptive “to God be the glory” ending becomes didactic, reminding their viewers of the consequences that attend Martin’s and Jimmy’s kind of life. As Azuawusiefe (2020, pp. 216–217) notes: The appeal of such Nollywood films to the religion-infused everyday experience of the Nigerian society drives their huge success, as the films employ their good-versus-evil spiritual warfare binary to arbitrate social morality and shape attitude (see Oha, 2000; Ojo, 2006; Okome, 1995). That appeal and its attendant influence generate what Birgit Meyer (2004) calls a “Pentecostalite” spectacle, a predominance of Pentecostal-charismatic style of entertainment representation. Within Nollywood and Ghollywood (the cinema of Ghana), Meyer argues, the moral framework of the Christian-themed movies provides filmmakers the space and justification for presenting their spectacle of violence, sex, occult, and witchcraft—all of which are condemned in the end as antithetical to the life of a good Christian (see also Asamoah-Gyadu, 2005). The films, then, remain a preferred medium for transmitting religious truth, hope, and ideas (Ukah, 2003, see also Adelakun, 2021). According to Hyginus Ekwuazi (1987/2000, p. 139), the films “coalesce to activate the spiritual realm, reminding us so often in these films that the spiritual and the physical are the continuum of a common world.” Even when Nollywood filmmakers do not intend nor interpret their movies as “religious,” Afe Adogame (2008, p. 150) points out, the presence of the supernatural and religious motif in majority of the secular, popular films indicates the scope of the prominence of “religious imagery and symbolism” of the films (Azuawusiefe, 2020).

In a Christianity Today’s article wherein she argues that spirituality sustains Nollywood’s tremendous success, Sarah Zylstra (2009) calls Nigeria the “Christian movie capital of the world.” The “to God be the Glory” mind-set thrives within this cinema metropolis; it posits a divine intervention which, through the prayer of a minister of God, always saves the day. The devil is vanquished and confidence restored in the saving power of the Christian God. The predominance of Christianity and Pentecostal-charismatic popular mentality means that the theme of salvation through Christianity prevails even when the films are produced by, say, Muslim filmmakers like Rasak Abdullahi and Taiwo Hassan. Non-Christian filmmakers understand the financial implications of producing films that contradict this popular Christian outlook. Given this monetary reality, non-Christian Nollywood filmmakers, particularly in southwestern Nigeria, concentrate on making films that speak to the public, no matter the religious background that informs the film’s message.

Nevertheless, the fascination with these films transcends pecuniary concerns. Nollywood films infused with Christian perspective or even outright Christian message equally appeal to Muslims, in this case southern Nigeria Yoruba Muslims, for these movies that plumb the tension between light and darkness weave into their stories “the central beliefs of the Yoruba cosmology” (Olayiwola, 2019, p. 10). As Meyer (2015, p. 172) writes, for instance, Ghana’s Ahmadiya Muslim filmmaker Hammond Mensah notes that it does not matter after all what religious tradition undergirds such productions, as “a strong convergence exists between Muslim and Christian morals and ideas about evil.” This underlying intersection of religious values also incorporates traditional religions whose adherents the films address through their “syncretic representations of the spirit world” (Olayiwola, 2019, p. 1).

This sense of syncretism speaks to Andre Bazin’s (1997, p. 61) popular assertion that “the cinema has always been interested in God.” The God of cinema’s interest does not subsist, however, in the Christian God, even though the first decade of cinema, beginning with the Lumiere Brother’s first screened film for a paying audience in December 1895, witnessed “at least a half dozen filmed versions of the life and passion of Jesus Christ” (Plate, 2017, p. xiv). Cinema’s attraction to God and to religion transcends Christianity and its divinity. Films from different regions of the world explore this diversity by focusing on religion and conflict. The commonest of the conflicts arises, S. Brent Plate (2017) argues, when, particularly within a postcolonial milieu, socio-political, economic, and religious realities of modern life challenge older religious values (see also Plate, 2005). Friction surfaces when adherents of different religious traditions, now occupying the postcolonial space, try to navigate the interconnections of their modern life and confront the tensions that emerge therefrom. Informed by Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, Nollywood began from its inception to deal with the tensions between the traditional and the modern. It continues to incorporate within its portrayals of religion religious practices, questions, concerns, and conflicts, together with how these issues intersect the boundaries of different religious traditions, like Christianity and African Traditional Religions (ATRs).

Nollywood thrives in its exploration of the liminal space between these religious traditions. The enchanting lure of that often under-explored region and the complexities generated therein for men like Martin (Billionaires’ Kingdom) and Jimmy (Church Business) keep Nollywood seeking answers to the questions that Africans confront as they navigate how to be both Christian and African at the same time. In her examination of the particular context of the Ewe people of southeastern Ghana, for example, Meyer (1992) highlights how Christian missionaries, obsessed with the power of the devil in the world and their eagerness to save the African soul from such power, created a dualistic worldview of good and evil and condemned all traditional religious practices as acts of devil association.

That duality persists among African Christians, leaving the occult—understood here as connoting secret or hidden and manifesting unseen powers (Bartlett, 2008)—the room to thrive in the unresolved tensions that arise therein. The ordinary folks, convinced of the real existence of the devil, initiate a theology from below, which incorporates elements of traditional religions, in their attempt at engaging the realities of both religious traditions. Nollywood films, like an art form from below, articulate the elements of this duality and makes visible (with the aid of special effects) elements of religious conceptions that may ordinarily remain inaccessible to the naked eye. Since human-constructed visuals harbor and transmit the divine, thereby transforming the primary tools for accessing them into windows to the sacred (Morgan, 2005), Nollywood films bridge the space between the physical and the spiritual and in the process reveal the everyday engagement with religion in the world that they construct.

Nollywood often salvages that constructed world by making films with endings that invite viewers to acclaim its standard doxology: “to God be the Glory.” In what Victor Dugga and Mwadkwom (2001, p. 87) classify as Nollywood’s “sacred films,” for example, they note that at first, people read the “to God be the Glory” doxology as “the response of producers overwhelmed with gratitude.” But then, the “sacred” assumption, that is, the religious connotation usually extended to the films ending with the doxology began to wane when it became apparent that every film “no matter how immoral, irrelevant to religion or how anti-religious it was, carried the doxology” (Dugga & Mwadkwom, 2001). Citing the works of Hubert Ogunde, Nigeria’s foremost playwright and pioneer of the Yoruba traveling theater (the precursor of Nollywood), Dugga and Mwadkwom (2001, p. 88) contend that Nollywood corrupted Ogunde’s formula of good and evil. Where, in articulating the spiritual warfare between the forces of good and evil, Ogunde locates the good in the “loveable, harmless and helpful priest/priestess in the traditional religion”; Nollywood, on the other hand, does not only present this representative as an agent of malevolent forces, it also frames his or her religion (which it often portrays as synonymous with the occult) as backward, primitive, pagan, and, therefore, evil.

This representation of ATRs and everything associated with them as negative and “devoid of any positive character” (Tasie, 2013, p. 24) is, however, rooted in ignorance. Despite the constant framing of the money-making rituals of secret societies as elements of ATRs, neither the films’ association of ATRs with occult rituals nor the individuals’ quest to make quick wealth through introduction to secret cults is supported by evidence, since the occult groups actually have no established connections with traditional religions. But Nollywood continues to portray ATRs as a source of evil and everything un-modern, pitching them against Christianity in a perpetual fight for supremacy, with the latter constructed to always emerge victorious. This portrayal continues the Christian missionary narrative which framed African cultures and religions as “primitive” in need of salvation in the name of Jesus. Hence, in every confrontation with Christianity, “the indigenous religion must collapse ‘Jericho-wise’” (Tasie, 2013, p. 24).

In reality, however, African Traditional Religions have survived their stifling encounters with Christianity and have continued to adapt and thrive in modern times (see Kalu, 2003; Mbiti, 1969; Olupona, 2004, 2011; Peel, 2000). As Jacob Olupona (2014) notes, they have become part of the globalizing world through African Diaspora religions, contemporary African immigrants’ religious practices, and the New Wave of African religions, where migrants establish and run African versions of Christianity with huge followership in Western world. Today, in a reverse mission movement, the Orisa (Yoruba traditional religion) Diaspora, for instance, has turned Ile-Ife (the mythic birthplace of the Yoruba in Nigeria) into a pilgrimage site, with mainly American and Caribbean devotees making monthly and annual pilgrimages to the ancient city for religious festivals and celebrations (Olupona, 2011).

Nollywood’s engagement with these elements of religion in the Nigerian culture, even when not always properly articulated, bears out the larger involvement of media in religion today. Increasingly Nollywood films assume central position in Nigeria’s articulation and interpretation of its society and cultures, indicating, as John C. Lyden (2003, p. 1) notes, “a growing appreciation for the role that technological media play in our lives, from television to computers.” The twenty-first century, more than any other century, demonstrates how media and religion are ever more connected, for much of people’s knowledge of and interaction with religion and spirituality is made possible through the media. According to Stewart Hoover (2006), media and their use in contemporary world constitute an integral part of lived religion, given that practices of belief inform not only the production but also the distribution and reception of mediated communication. Media, thus, become a tool for representing culture, in this case, the religious practices Nollywood engages in portraying everyday reality in the life of the people. The blending of multiple life quests of the people expressed through the melodrama of the occult and spiritual corruption, for instance, undergirds then the avarice that films like Billionaires’ Kingdom and Church Business depict (see Musa, 2019; Garritano, 2013; Krings & Okome, 2013; Larkin, 2008; Tsika, 2015).

Nollywood leverages the power of the media to dislodge cultural elements of traditional religion and to infuse them into Christian conceptions of the world as well as contrasts them, to some extent, with Islamic cosmology. No doubt, engaging in this enterprise of grafting traditional religious elements onto new religious materials has created some tensions on how people try to navigate and engage these two traditions. However, since media consumption is not only rooted in human ontological imagination and practice, it also plays a quasi-religious role in everyday life of the people (Hoover & Clark, 2002; see also Carey, 1989). Given the persistence of witchcraft fears among African Christians, for instance, as well as the incorporation of religious values from both the traditional and Christian traditions by Pentecostalism in today’s Africa, traditional religions continue to endure, albeit even sometimes in the covert encounters practicing Christians have with it.

Nollywood, hence, offers an insight into what Africans believe and how that belief affects their worldview, especially given the close connections and relationship between the sacred and the secular in that worldview. It bears noting, however, that African religions are as diverse as the continent itself, with each of the hundreds of ethnic groups inhabiting the continent having its own unique religious expression at the heart of its relationship with its immediate world, other groups, and the wider world. Echoing John Mbiti’s (1969) now memorable phrase: “Africans are notoriously religious,” Olupona (2014) underscores how religion imbues all aspects of daily life of the African. Hence, by focusing on elements of ATRs, Nollywood opens up the vistas for reexamining anew those religious traditions, serving as a medium through which individuals grapple with modern anxieties and complexities rooted in traditional worldviews, beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and concerns. Billionaires’ Kingdom and Church Business bear out such anxieties. Their plots become essentially stories informed by tradition but invested with Christian morals. “To God be the glory,” then, that despite sacrificing his wife and child to a satanic cult in exchange for wealth, for example, Martin confesses his sins in the end and receives Christ’s redemptive grace through the prayers of a pastor.

Nollywood “Hallelujah movies”: a history rooted in evangelization

As noted above, a religious moral outlook informs even Nollywood films that are not, strictly speaking, religious. Nevertheless, the ones classified as “religious films” do not all fit into one neat category. Scholars like Afe Adogame (2008), Onookome Okome (2007), Elizabeth Olayiwola (2019), and Asonzeh Ukah (2003) have distinguished between secular Nollywood Pentecostal films and Nollywood evangelical films, what Okome calls “Hallelujah movies.” Both are commercially oriented, but they differ in their aims. The one appeals to the religious sentiment of Pentecostals, the other proselytizes. Evangelical films are particularly informed by a strong sense of piety on the part of all those involved with their production. According to Olayiwola (2019, p. 3), “most of those who consume these videos see the video as the word of God; those who act in [the] videos see themselves as enacting the word of God; and those who fund the production see themselves as promoting God’s word and work.”

Olayiwola’s point speaks to the fact that films have always made use of religious subject matter and that “religious groups used film as promotional tools as soon as they could find the means to do so” (Mitchell & Plate, 2007, p. 2). Kunle Ogunde pioneered church-produced evangelical films in Nigeria, with his founding of The Word Production outfit in 1982. But Mount Zion Faith Ministries International (MZFMI) remains the most prominent player in this field. Founded in 1985 by Mike Bamiloye as Mount Zion Christian Productions, MZFMI defined its mission as “to evangelize the world through the means of evangelical drama” (MZFMI n.d.). It would later venture into television and movie productions, creating its Mount Zion Television and Mount Zion Films Production to cater to those media, respectively. MZFMI, for instance, recorded its first television-transmitted stage play in 1990, five years after it was established on a university campus with only three college students. The play, “The Unprofitable Servant,” sponsored by “a man of God,” aired for 2 minutes on a regional channel of the Nigeria Television Authority, NTA Ikeja, Lagos, during the Easter period in April of 1990. In 1994, MZFMI released its first film, Agbara Nla (“Ultimate Power”), a four-part home video produced from a 13-week television serial (see Adogame, 2008; Olayiwola, 2019).

Film technology, today, represents a major way through which Christian denominations use media in Nigeria and Nollywood constitutes a central production of that media engagement. Echoing MZFMI’s mission, Obododimma Oha (2002, p. 122; see also Oha, 2000) contends that the verisimilitude of Christian films makes them “a useful instrument of evangelization which shapes ‘attitudes in a social context of fear, uncertainty, helplessness and hopelessness.’” Helen Ukpabio, another big player in Nollywood’s evangelical film production, who started her home movie outfit, Liberty Gospel Films in 1998, understood her foray into Nollywood “as one of the means of spreading the gospel” (quoted in Okome, 2007, p. 1). Ukpabio’s position reflects, for instance, James Carey’s (1989, p. 16) contention that the earliest “moral meaning of communication,” informed by the religious origin of the transmission view of communication, “was the establishment and extension of God’s kingdom on earth.”

In their commitment to establish and extend the kingdom of God on earth, these proselytizing filmmakers also fancy themselves as the enablers of the hierophany (the manifestation of the sacred) within a profane space which Mircea Eliade (1959/1987) illuminates. Eliade writes that “the manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world . . . [and] the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center” (p. 21).By breaking any illusions of Nollywood as a homogeneous secular site for producing profane popular content, these filmmakers deploy the Hallelujah movies to re-center Nollywood on a pronounced sacred outlook (as against the implied religious message of typical Nollywood films) that “reveals” an active participation and interference of the divine in the activities of Nollywood. This re-reading of Eliade agrees with Meyer’s (2015; see also Meyer, 2006) argument that Nollywood filmmakers position themselves as agents of revelation, intent on re-orienting the public moral compass.

Nevertheless, Funke Ogunleye (2003, p. 108) maintains that the Christian films that now predominate Nollywood genres emerged as a reactionary response to secular films which, among other reasons, portrayed Christians “as weaklings, hypocrites, passé and unpopular,” while representing successful individuals “as having no time for church or the Bible.” The problem with this framing, Ogunleye maintains, is that it “presents a propaganda world in which ‘normal people’ are not Christians” (Ogunleye, 2003; see also Adeboye, 2012). What Ogunleye’s intervention fails to acknowledge, however, is the preponderance of Nollywood films in general and the evangelical ones in particular to frame ATRs and their agents as evil, vile, and deplorable.

In the light of Ogunleye’s argument, nevertheless, it becomes ironic to imagine that a tool that Christian missionaries used for their evangelization would one day be deployed by other interests to undermine the Christians themselves. Missionaries brought Christian drama to Nigeria in the late nineteenth century and also used Christian film shows to aid their preaching of the gospel (Adedeji, 1971; Ogunleye, 2010). The Yoruba traveling theater developed from school and church dramas which had their roots in the early missionary activities (Ukadike, 1994). For two decades starting in the 1940s, the Yoruba traveling theater maintained its connection to churches and primarily presented topics from the Bible. That link, however, grew thin in the 1970s when the traveling theater became more commercial. The oil boom of that decade nonetheless afforded the Yoruba traveling theater, then at its peak, the wherewithal to incorporate film clips into its plays, particularly supernatural qualities that would have ordinarily tasked staged performers to dramatize convincingly. Soon afterwards, the Yoruba traveling theater started recording whole plays to be shown on television (see Barber, 2000; Merz, 2014; Ogundele, 2000).

Hence, by the time the economic crisis of the 1980s hit, the stage was already set for filmmakers to embrace the alternative inexpensive video format. The Yoruba home video productions that grew out of the Yoruba traveling theater added elements of Yoruba folktales and masquerade performance to the church and school drama origins of its predecessor. These new elements explain the Yoruba films’ keen interest in representing the occult and the spirit world (Adesanya, 2000; Faniran, 2007; Ogundele, 2000; Oyewo, 2003). The Nollywood Christian film genre emerged from this tradition, which accounts for its preoccupation with “exposing and hunting down demonic powers in the name of God” (Meyer, 2015, p. 171). Today, many Christian denominations in Nigeria employ the film medium in diverse ways in their respective missions. But it is the Pentecostal-charismatic churches that have engaged more seriously and actively the production of videos as a way of preaching the gospel and enthroning the word of God over the powers of darkness.

Not all Nigerian Pentecostal-charismatic pastors, however, have always had a positive relationship with media technologies. In the 1980s, for instance, Pastor William F. Kumuyi of the Deeper Life Bible Church considered television immoral and forbade his members from owning television sets. Interpreted as an evil conduit, the media, particularly the video medium, acquired another purpose beyond its primary preaching and proselytizing mission in the hands of Pentecostal pastors. It became “an instrument of ‘Othering’ certain elements within society according to particular religious convictions and stereotypes” (Ukah, 2011, p. 212). Kumuyi used his distaste for media to establish and strengthen dissimilarities between his adherents on the one hand and his non-church members on the other. However, when he and other pastors like him realized the necessity of audiovisual media technologies like television, video, and radio, to bringing their messages and miracles to audiences beyond their churches, it became easier for them to accept these technologies. Kumuyi changed his teachings against owning such electronic devices when he started producing video and audio tapes of his own sermons. In a recent YouTube video, Kumuyi (2019) explained that it no longer makes any sense to discourage people from owning television sets as a way of protecting them from exposure to immoral contents when they can access more unchristian materials on their handheld mobile devices.

Conclusion

From the foregoing discussion, this article has established how Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in southern Nigeria continues to play a prominent role not only in engaging film (particularly video technology) in growing and giving currency to the medium as an education and entertainment tool but also, and most importantly, for preaching as well as disseminating its message and moral worldview. Just like from the inception of the contemporary film culture in Nigeria, religion continues to engage film technology “as conduits for the dissemination of its religious ideologies, as a means of developing new visual publics, and as a channel towards negotiating old and new identities” (Adogame, 2008, p. 141). Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity persists in investing the films with the responsibility of functioning as “purveyors of religious ideas, preferences, images, and meanings [which] . . . represent powerful ways of reaching the religious believer, touching the unbeliever, and addressing the common issues they face” (Ukah, 2011, pp. 211–212). It does not matter, then, whether Pentecostals disapprove of, shun, or find fault with these movies or the technology through which the movies reach their publics. What matters, according to Meyer (2015, p. 174) is that “it makes sense to regard both the film phenomenon and Pentecostal churches as part and parcel of a broader process in which belief and spectatorship, religion and mass entertainment, became ever more entangled, sedimenting in a particular embodied habitus and urban habitat.”

By foregrounding the phrase “to God be the glory,” then, this article demonstrates how Nollywood films not only further the infusion of religion into everyday life in the context of the dominant Pentecostal-charismatic Christian culture of southern Nigeria but also how they construct a popular social moral compass within that milieu. As the article highlights, this success of Nollywood is rooted in the proselytizing mission into which Pentecostal-charismatic churches and ministers incorporated the video technology and evangelical drama in Nigeria prior to the inception of Nollywood in 1992. To the extent, therefore, that religion impacts the particular medium of film that it deploys to disseminate its message, both religion and film continue to impact each other in this creation and representation of popular Pentecostal morality in Nigeria.