It was intellectually nourishing and exciting on January 22, 2026, when the Political Theology Network and Villanova University’s Center for Political Theology at Villanova University hosted Professor Chammah Kaunda (Oxford University and Zambia) and Dr. Isaac Kekemeke (a Nigerian state official) for a virtual panel on African Political Theology and Statecraft. The panel inaugurated a series on African Political Theology that brings together theologians, theorists, intellectuals, and practitioners (including policymakers).
One of Kaunda’s thoughts stood out to me as it captures his concerns about the state of African Political Theology (APT). “Pentecostalism as a political theology has failed,” he said. Kaunda’s conclusion raises many questions: Why has Pentecostalism failed? What will its failure mean for African Political theology?
Before answering these questions, Kaunda’s other remarks on Pentecostal Political Theology (PPT) should be highlighted and engaged. He emphasized the success of PPT in the 1980s and the ’90s, especially as it ignited energy and power in the margins, orienting marginal people toward a life of dignity, freedom, and renewal. PPT’s success reflects the success of Pentecostalism as a brand of Christianity in Africa. Pentecostalism reimagined and recentered the idea of the people of God at a time when it appeared the institutional churches had become lethargic and neutral to the structure of the state and its politics, which has been described as necropolitics. The political implications and outcomes of Pentecostal rethinking of Christianity were evident within three decades. Its robustness decentered the ‘Caesar,’ the state, as the lord of public space and encoded the public sphere as the domain of the spiritual, as Andreas Heuser points out. Its “politics of affect” reimagined economic thinking, incorporating its version of liberal economics into public space, as theorized by Jean Comaroff.
African Pentecostalism is an African version of Protestant Reformation (see Allan Anderson’s work). Its theological tactic of merging “eros” and transcendence, its technic of the self that leads the self to ascend nature, reconnects African Christianity with the early Church of the New Testament (See Nimi Wariboko 2024, Kalu Ogbu 2008). Just like the early Church, with its idea of a new people, unknowingly inspired a political alternative to the mainstream politics of the Roman empire, African Pentecostalism, with its version of a new people, inadvertently fashioned a new republic – a spiritual republic. The difference between the political success of the early Church and African Pentecostalism is that what took African Pentecostalism decades to achieve, it took Christianity of the Roman empire about 400 years to achieve.
The political success and the implications of a spiritual republic, especially in its capacity to fashion a political system, albeit a sectarian one, have been well theorized by Ebenezer Obadare in the case of Nigeria and Chammah Kaunda in the case of Zambia. With its success, Pentecostal Political Theology is a factor in African Political Theology. PPT has enlivened APT. PPT’s capacity to generate spiritual energies and translate them into political organizing remains unmatched in APT. However, Pentecostalism’s political success and theology appear to be overrun by prosperity theology and the Pentecostal embrace of the status quo, where political ethics is shaped by the economic success of its members rather than the morality of the status quo and the common good. PPT’s (new) thinking and its sectarian implications pose a challenge to African political theology. PPT energy and its reshaping of APT are momentous; so would be its failure. As such, PPT’s failure puts African Political Theology in peril.
Is the transitioning of PPT to a republic the trigger for its failure? Dr. Isaac Kekemeke, Prof. Kaunda’s co-panelist, articulated his concerns and the possible consequences of religious sectarianism when a political theology is oriented towards a republic. Kekemeke’s concern is reasonable, considering his multi-religious context. A spiritual republic in a diverse religious context inclines governance toward theocracy, where the machinery of the state is conterminous with the divine, or at least God’s instrument for manifest destiny of “God’s people.”
Political theology appears vulnerable to two temptations of power: political and economic. Like Jesus’ temptations by the devil with “bread,” “spectacle”, and “power,” political theology is endangered by those temptations. Regarding political power, when a brand of political theology is embraced by a religious body with influence, it develops a form of manifest destiny: God becomes the state, and the state becomes God. Similarly, the more mainstream a political theology is, the more defenseless, susceptible to prosperity theology and its economic ideology. Its success becomes coincident with God.
Luke Bretherton, Valentina Napolitano, and Vincent Lloyd, in their introduction to What is Political Theology? acknowledge the vulnerability of political theology. Its multiple origins, various contours, and the ghost of Carl Schmitt haunt it and mobilize it towards ideological framings. In its performance and intellectual articulation, political theology, as a lens of seeing the world, is at risk of ossifying, misidentifying its mission, and losing itself to the state and economic structures.
Notwithstanding these risks, political theology, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Pentecostal, is fundamentally about alternative human organizing, which is foundational to establishing a republic. As such, political theology, when energized, inadvertently leads to a republic. Considering its inevitable temptations toward a republic, political theology needs a structure that protects it from misidentification of its mission and from ossification that trick it into a manifest-destiny mentality.
In Let Us Dream, wrestling with the meaning of a “people,” Pope Francis distinguishes a Christian-biblical idea of a people from that exploited by ideologues, informed by sectarian politics, totalitarianism, or class struggle. A people framed by ideologues, although it may be labelled Christian, ends up being un-Christian, as it is deployed for exclusionary purposes and the rhetoric of populism. The idea of a people born of ideology is distinct from the idea of a people born of a mythical concept, whose sources can be historical, linguistic, or cultural, but above all, collective wisdom and memory. The mythic concept of a people, while not contradicting the idea of a people defined legally or constitutionally, expands beyond the boundaries of a nation. It would mean that for an APT to be true to the ground of its thinking, that is, the universality of Christ and of God, its idea of a people must be mythic; otherwise, it loses itself to the virus of sectarianism.
It is, as such, a moral demand on APT of any religious inclination to be scaffolded under three insights:
1) A religious mythic concept: myth in this instance is a form of social imagination described by Emmanuel Katongole, and William Cavanaugh. An example of a mythic concept is the People of God. Its meaning, that is, its theological and social imagination are well articulated in the Second Vatican Council’s account of the “People of God.”
2) An African cultural-philosophical idea: a cultural imagination like “Ubuntu” or “Omoluabi” douses the possible sectarian and ideological tendencies of the religious scaffolding. Africa’s religious context is diversely framed. As such, APT needs a cultural philosophy that provides an ethics grounded in an African universal truth, not ghettoized by any religion. Ubuntu, which suggests interdependence/communion, and Omoluabi, which suggests good character, cannot be reduced to a sectarian/ideological and exclusionary framing of a religion/Church.
3) Praxis: In agreement with Emmanuel Katongole, William Cavanaugh, and Stanley Hauerwas, Christian ethics must be manifested in space. As such, the body of Christ, the Church, has its own politics; that is, it possesses its own distinct human-society organizing framework that must be realized spatially. Bishop Taban Paride’s Peace Village in South Sudan is an example of this Christian political ethics and its spatial manifestation. For Paride, the Body of Christ manifested a peculiar human organizing framework and social ethics in a war-torn South Sudan. Paride’s theology is Catholic. As such, his idea of the Body of Christ was informed by Eucharistic fervor, a Catholic component meant only for Catholics. However, the political manifestation of his Eucharistic body of Christ expanded its frontiers beyond those who were confessionally Catholic. As such, his praxis escaped exclusionary tendencies that triggered the Sudan war. His Catholicism, especially its social manifestation, was Senghorian, that is, civilizing the universal. In other words, it was catholic, as in universal; a universal that is not an overrepresentation of a particular, but a universal that is a “summation of particulars” bringing together various peoples in a polyhedral fashion. (See Pope Francis’s “Evangelii Gaudium”).
The sources of APT, considering the complex nature of Africa, cannot be monolithic. To limit its sources of enrichment is to risk ossification, ideological capture, and failure. For an APT to be Christian, African, and praxis-oriented, its concern must be Africans; Africans in a universal and “Afropolitan” sense, that is, all of those Africans gifted with God’s image, and as such, God’s children.
