THE ways wherein the religion of Nigerians within the UK helps them to navigate education, work, and racial discrimination are the topic of latest research.
Dr Bisi Adenekan-Koevoets, the British Academy Postdoctoral Researcher within the School of Humanities on the University of Roehampton, has interviewed second-generation British Nigerians aged 19-39, and intends to publish a paper by the top of 2026.
Speaking about her findings this week, she said: “In the case of Nigerians, they learn in church the behavioural code, the norms and values. You almost at all times can’t separate culture from church, or family from church. So, what they’re learning at home almost at all times is reinforced by what the pastor teaches. How did this thing, this factor, influence the alternatives that they make? To help them turn out to be socio-economically mobile? That’s what I’m taking a look at now.
“The point for me, and I believe for academia as well, is: how are you going to extrapolate this into other people of religion and other people of no faith?”
Referring to her 2021 paper, “Nigerian Pentecostal Diasporic Missions and Intergenerational Conflicts: Case studies from Amsterdam and London”, which explores the tensions between first- and second-generation Nigerian Pentecostalists in Europe, Dr Adenekan-Koevoets said that it was easier to seek out participants for this study because she “belonged to certainly one of those churches”.
“But on this current one, I’m probably not a member of any of those churches, and that has made it a bit difficult. My focus is on individuals, but, after all, churches are a recruiting ground, where I could find them.”
Her 2021 study explored how the intergenerational conflicts hindered the broader aspiration of “reverse mission” to evangelise white Europeans.
“The aim of the study was to achieve an in depth insight into the strategies that migrant Pentecostal churches used to draw non-Africans. I used to be also excited about the theological and social aspects that shape a few of their evangelistic practices.”
For the study, Dr Adenekan-Koevoets interviewed 40 people, mostly university undergraduates, in London and Amsterdam, between 2017 and 2020.
“The first generation will likely be the migrating population. The second generation will likely be those that are born either in Britain, or across Europe, or other Western countries where their parents have migrated.”
She found that the primary generation based most of their selections on divine instruction and norms from their Nigerian background. The second generation tended to accuse them of over-spiritualisation. “Young people see opportunities for influence to Western society with the gospel, but provided that the structure can contextualise their approaches.”
Dr Adenekan-Koevoets hopes that, in the long run, her study may be done on a bigger scale, “to seek out out what it’s like in other church traditions and other communities”.
Last month, the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch — who spent her childhood in Nigeria — spoke of drawing strength from her Christian beliefs during a difficult time, but said that she had lost her faith when she discovered about Josef Fritzl’s child abuse (News, 15 August). “The world that now we have within the UK may be very much built on many Christian values,” she said, in a BBC interview.
