Chapter 13  

Beloved, Feel Free

Beloved, the moist Xeroxed form implored me, feel free to give accurate and complete information.

That injunction, like so many I received during the weeks I spent in Nigeria, was loving but commanding, half demand and half suggestion. The questions were simple, and yet a certain shrewdness belied their order, as if the author demanded increasingly concrete evidence to back up the responses.

Are you a Christian (Yes/No)?

When did you accept the Lord Jesus Christ? Give testimony of your salvation.

Do you believe every word in the Holy Bible?

Are you baptized by immersion in water (Yes/No) . . . If yes, when?

Are you baptized in the Holy Ghost with evidence of speaking in tongues (Yes/No)?

The answers to these questions made me a lukewarm Christian at best, but even if I said yes to all of them, I knew more were sure to follow. Do you read your Bible every day? No. I didn’t even bring one to Nigeria. Do you evangelize? Not a chance. Do you indulge in cultic activity? I read my horoscope faithfully. Do you smoke? Sometimes, to the dismay of my faculty sponsor. Drink? Yes. Use the Lord’s name in vain? Yes. Swear? Yes. Gossip? Yes. Engage in sexual immorality? Yes. That was the thing about Pentecostals. It wasn’t enough to simply believe or to go to church on Sundays. After you accepted the Lord into your heart, you then had to demonstrate your beliefs on a daily basis, becoming purer and holier by the day. Becoming a Christian meant leaving your old self behind and being recreated in the image of God.

Beside me, my friend Bukke pinched her mouth into a smile. She was a tall woman in her early twenties, and the long braids framing her face swayed in the breeze of the outdoor amphitheater. She patted my shoulder and told me to take my time. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to try to get out of filling out the form by reminding her that I wasn’t a typical visitor. Back in Houston I’d written a grant proposal that used words like “methodology” and “participant-observation” and “fieldwork.” I proposed a two-month research trip to Nigeria, where I would interview believers and collect their testimonies while also studying the history of Pentecostal Christianity. I left Houston with a suitcase full of notebooks and recording devices and a hard drive packed with articles from journals like the International Bulletin of Missionary Research and the Journal of Religion and American Culture. I imagined that I’d come back from Nigeria with reams of notes and transcripts of interviews, and then I’d synthesize all those notes and write a dissertation that answered the question I’d posed in my grant proposal: Was the faith of my childhood actually born in West Africa, from the same Yorùbá rootstock as Santería and Voodoo?

But since arriving in Nigeria I’d had a difficult time getting traction on that question. I’d interviewed several professors of religion at the University of Ibadan, the oldest university in Nigeria, who shook their heads dismissively when I brought up the various ways that indigenous beliefs seemed to play out in Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Only one professor, Dr. Jegede, agreed that Pentecostalism had something in common with traditional beliefs.

“What’s in African Traditional Religion that’s not in Pentecostalism?” the stately professor asked me. “Nothing! There’s laying on of hands—we Yorùbá believe that the forehead is the real head, not the back of your head. So when the pastor touches you, the power flows through your forehead into your whole body. There’s speaking in tongues. There’s money—you bring money, I give you God. If you go to an Obàtálá festival in Ife, you would never think you were in any place but the church.”

When I had first shown up at his door to ask if he might have time for a few questions, Dr. Jegede settled back in his chair and made himself comfortable, starting at the very beginning. He explained that long before the missionaries came to what is now southern Nigeria, the babalawos—the fathers of the mysteries—were the ones who courted the spirits and shades. They guarded the great abyss separating the living and the dead, marching its steep edges in masks and feathers, hollering warnings to tricky spirits who dared to creep close to the living, making sacrifices to appease the gods, singing praise-chants to the supreme creator, Olodumare, the sky father Sàngó, and the divine couple, Obàtálá and Yemòó.

“Nowadays,” Dr. Jegede continued, “if you are barren, you go to the Pentecostal church on Sunday, you bring baby clothes. You give money and you pray and you will get many children. That’s original Africanism. The traditional missionary enterprise—the British kind—says if you are barren, you should go to the doctor—not the church!”

Dr. Jegede’s office was on the top floor of a four-story walk-up. Meanwhile, professors of biblical studies and Christian ethics had ground-floor, air-conditioned offices in a neighboring office building with its own generator, as well as elaborate titles, job security, and fawning graduate students. Dr. Jegede complained to me that in all his years of teaching African Traditional Religion, he had only had one PhD student, and when he tried to encourage students to take his courses, they shrank back, telling him that they didn’t want to go to hell.

In all my other interviews with professors and pastors, the people I spoke to politely dodged my questions about the history of the Pentecostal church. They’d share their own testimonies, but when I talked about the history of the megachurches or brought up traditional practices, they didn’t have much to say. Their next question was always the same. What about you—are you right with God? It was a question I didn’t want to answer.

This wasn’t just the case in my interviews, but also in conversations with taxi drivers, the government official who stamped my visa, even the security guards at my dormitory. On my flight over to Nigeria, I’d met an elderly couple—a stern-looking woman who wore a head wrap and a gentle-faced man with wiry gray hair. They introduced themselves as Pastor and Mrs. Afolabi. Pastor Afolabi explained that he had once been a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Ibadan, but at the age of thirty-five he met Jesus and decided to give up his field entirely. He left his prestigious position at the university and went to seminary in order to better serve the Lord. “I was a psychologist,” he said, “but now I’m a Christologist!” He had no choice, he explained. Psychology was all about the mind and body. Never the spirit. Never the soul. He laughed at the idea of trying to understand human behavior apart from God. God had rewarded his sacrifice, and Pastor Afolabi ended up spending the rest of his career at a thriving Baptist church on the same plot of land where the Afolabis now lived in retirement.

Just past two in the morning, as we yawned next to each other at the gate in the Atlanta airport, Mrs. Afolabi asked me if I was a Christian. I knew what she was asking: Are you a good person? Can I trust you? I hedged and then answered yes, ignoring the unsettled feeling that rose up in me when I said those words. The typical Christian testimony was one of being lost, then found. But my own testimony ran backward. I had been found once, but somewhere along the way I had gotten lost.

Bukke and I had first met at the University of Ibadan library. I’d been transcribing my interview notes when she pulled up a chair beside my study carrel and asked me where I was from and what I was doing here. When I’d explained that I was researching the Yorùbá roots of Pentecostal Christianity she furrowed her brow, but when I added that I’d be heading to Lagos the following week to visit Redemption Camp, she squealed with delight and clasped my hands in hers. Then she took me back to her dorm room and she and her roommate made me egusi soup on a hotplate.

The power had been out for several days at the university, so we sat eating in the half-darkness, lit by the faintly purple light of the dashiki cloth that wavered in the wind of the window. As we ate, street noise filtered in: the sputtering of the okadas, the motorbikes that ferried students and staff around the sprawling University of Ibadan campus for less than a nickel; the sound of someone hacking at the grass outside with a rusty machete; the swishing sound from a broom as an elderly woman crab-walked across the courtyard, sweeping leaves away with a small handle-less brush. Nearby, children shrieked with delight, playing clapping games near their families’ carts while their parents hawked cheap spiral-bound notebooks or ears of spiced corn.

Bukke and her roommate Titi were both members of the Redeemed Church, and as I ate they talked over each other, narrating the mythical history of the church. It was a story that I knew well. The pastor who founded the church had once had a vision of a blackboard bearing the English words: “The Redeemed Christian Church of God.” He couldn’t read or write—in any language—but miraculously he managed to write the words down. Shortly after that, the Lord made a covenant with him. God told the pastor that he would provide for the church as long as its members would serve the Lord faithfully and obediently. God also told him that when Jesus finally returned, he would meet the church in all his glory.

I told Bukke and Titi about a book I’d been reading by a pastor named Leo Bawa. He called Nigeria the trigger of Africa. He pointed out that if you pivoted the continent counter-clockwise ninety degrees, so South Africa rests against India, then the shape of Africa looks like a gun with southern Nigeria serving as the trigger. Bawa wanted to see Nigerians carry the gospel to other African nations first, and then, once those souls were won, the gun could fire off missionaries from Africa to win the world for Christ. “God will use Africa,” Bawa said, “the downtrodden and overlooked Continent, to usher in the King.”

They nodded and smiled. They knew there were some good Christians in America—“Joel Osteen!” Titi chimed in—but for the most part they assumed we’d become a heathen nation. When I told Bukke and Titi about my childhood in the church, dancing and clapping and speaking in tongues, they were amazed. Titi in particular seemed doubtful. “You danced?” she said, trying hard to imagine white people being touched by the Spirit.

Bukke and Titi were thrilled that I’d visited the Redeemed Church in Houston and had attended the convention, but they weren’t at all surprised. They believed, as Leo Bawa did, that Nigerians had a divine mandate to save fallen Westerners, and they shared Pastor Fadele’s conviction that my visit to Redemption Camp would be life-changing. Each of them regularly made the long pilgrimage south to attend the services, and Titi tried hard to explain what was so special about the church.

“It used to be the bush,” Titi told me. “Truly wild. There were apes and snakes everywhere. And then the church came in and cut all the trees down and built the most beautiful houses. You will see. So quiet and peaceful! The light always works and the toilets flush. And when the preaching starts . . .!” She got so excited that she almost burned the soup.

When I told Hannah, a German instructor who lived on my hall, that I’d accepted Bukke’s invitation to attend the Redeemed Church student fellowship on Sunday morning, she rolled her eyes and tossed her shiny blond hair. “These Nigerians and their churches . . .,” she said. “When they ask me to go with them, I say I am busy worshipping Satan.”

I suppressed a smile thinking of the temper tantrum that Hannah had thrown last Sunday around seven in the morning, when a lone man—from the look of him, a graduate student—took it upon himself to set up a megaphone and a makeshift pulpit to conduct a solo church service, aimed up at the dorm rooms on the second floor of Balewa Hall. With approximately one in three Nigerians in the south identifying as Pentecostal, the reaction of most of my dormitory-mates was praise. They praised the lone man for being a witness, even if it cost them a few hours of sleep. Hannah was the lone holdout. Long after the man had packed up, she stood in the hallway in her bathrobe telling anyone who would listen how inappropriate his performance had been.

I’d been in the southern city of Ibadan for three weeks now and unlike Hannah, I’d made a habit of saying yes to every invitation I got. As early as five-thirty in the morning, the open-air auditoriums and cafeterias in the middle of each dormitory would start throbbing with song, drums, and sometimes trumpets, waking me to strains of Yorùbá songs I didn’t understand, and other hymns I remember my mother singing as she washed dishes. By eight o’clock on the Sunday morning that I was supposed to meet Bukke, I’d hit snooze three times, hauled water from the pump in front of my dormitory, gasped my way through a cold-water bucket shower, and mixed up a strong cup of Sanka after heating water on my kerosene stove. As I waited for Bukke and Titi at the edge of the parking lot, I heard the strains of Pentecostal worship songs once again.

Ibadan was a major city, but it had a sleepy feel compared to the thriving metropolis of Lagos, a few hours to the south. Even so, my fellow students at the University of Ibadan had endless choices for which church to attend. I counted approximately thirty-five different options on campus and another seventy or so within a five-minute walk of the campus gates. Posters advertising services hung at every corner. One could attend the ecumenical Christian Chapel of the Resurrection, the lively Assemblies of God church, the miracle-based God Will Do It Ministries, the student fellowship for Mountain of Fire and Miracles, the somewhat traditional Precious Stones Society, the white-garment African Independent Churches—the list went on and on.

Bukke and Titi picked me up in a minivan and we drove a few miles to a kind of worship park on the south side of the campus, a series of large open-structures with red roofs, concrete floors, and electricity hookups for microphones and large electric fans. The services usually followed the same schedule, and Bukke’s student fellowship was no different. First there was praise and worship, then the testimonies, then the tithes and offering, and then the sermon. Just before the final prayer the pastor surveyed the congregation and asked if there was anyone who was attending service for the first time. He politely ignored me, as if there was a veil over my white skin. When I stood up, he started as if he was seeing me for the first time, and the congregation exploded into applause.

The drummer and piano player broke out into a rendition of a jazzy traditional song with an English chorus: Welcome, friend / Welcome, friend. Then I was handed around for handshakes and hugs. Bukke gathered my things for me and directed me to the back of the church, where I signed my name in a ledger. With all the services I attended I was used to being given welcome cards to fill out with my name and contact information, and I’d become spoiled by the boxes of fruit juice and packets of cookies that were handed out to new faces. But this was the first time that the welcome card took up a whole sheet of paper, and the first time it had such a personal tone.

Bukke rummaged in her purse for a pencil and directed me into a plastic chair at the back of the open-air sanctuary. As she and Titi stacked up plastic chairs alongside the pastor, I finally started filling out the form, beginning with the easiest question. When did you accept the Lord Jesus Christ? At the age of five, sitting on my mother’s knee. “I believe,” I’d whispered, because Jesus felt as real as California, as my aunt Marilyn’s postcards of palm trees and oceans and dolphins and all those other fantastic things that I hadn’t yet seen but which definitely still existed. My mother had cried with gladness and recorded the date of my confession in lovely scrolling letters in her olive-green Bible, next to the date of my birth. My mother said that God had his own book up in heaven, and when it was time for us to go back there, he’d run his hands down its pages until he found our names, and then the pearly gates would be opened for us. It was so easy it felt like I was getting away with something. All I had to do was believe, and then I would be saved from hellfire. God would hold us close to his heart, and even when we died we’d still be together in heaven. What God has written, my mother told me, no man can erase.

Do you believe every word of the Holy Bible? No, but I wrote yes anyway. I thought back to the first Bible that was my very own, the one I’d gotten when I was ten, the Precious Moments edition complete with pen-and-ink sketches of bobble-headed, doe-eyed children lying down with lions and lambs. I was taught to treat that book with respect. God wrote it, my mother cautioned me, through the hands of many men. That Bible was only ink and paper, with a white pleather cover and a glued binding, but I was taught to never put that book on the ground.

When I got to the question about water baptism, the memories flooded back, thick and fast: The maroon choir robe, the chemical taste of the chlorinated water, the pastor’s heavy hand resting on my back. The crowd of people just behind my parents, lifting their hands in my direction, praying that I would be blessed with God’s favor and kept safe from the Evil One.

There was a clatter as the pastor secured a tarp and a padlock over the A/V equipment, and it broke up my reverie. I could see Bukke and Titi waiting for me over near the car park. It was long past lunchtime, and I needed to walk over to the market to pick up some rice and tomato sauce before heading back to Balewa Hall. I hoped that Hannah and our friend Efi would be home as well so we could all eat together.

Are you baptized in the Holy Ghost with evidence of speaking in tongues? It was the final question, and I answered yes. Despite all my talk about ethnography and fieldwork, despite my doubts and lapses, I had started to wonder if it might be possible to believe again. Since arriving in Nigeria, I found myself murmuring prayers and thumbing through the small green Bible that I’d bought from a street vendor at the market just outside the university’s gates. I was falling into that old familiar way of thinking, the same way that I felt my syllables melting and lengthening when I came home to Maryland after a long time away. I thought maybe that old Holy Ghost language might still be wedged inside me somewhere after all, sleeping like a baby, waiting for the moment when I was no longer ashamed to let it out of my mouth.

In a way it would be a relief to speak in that language again. It would be like choosing sides. I’d be casting my lot with the poor and disinherited, those left behind by a cold and calculating capitalist economy. I’d be claiming the inheritance of William Seymour, the half-blind preacher who led a hardscrabble band of believers to revival on Azusa Street. I’d be sitting beside Bukke and Titi as they worshipped a God who was a gift to the world from the Yorùbá people, a God who seemed as indigenous to this country as pounded yam or talking drums. I’d be standing on their side and the side of my parents, casting off worldly concerns, the jargon of my grant proposal, and everyone who chased after worldly sensation or fame and reputation over all the things that really mattered.

There was only one problem—I didn’t believe in that God anymore. But part of me was so intrigued by the prospect of believing again that that problem seemed surmountable. Maybe I just needed to get closer, like Pastor Fadele had recommended. I needed to stand with a million other worshippers at the annual Holy Ghost Service at Redemption Camp and feel the power of God all around me. Maybe then my doubts would shrivel up under the weight of all that praise. And so I went back to the top of the form and tested out that language, writing yes, I am a Christian.