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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
At what point does faith turn into tyranny? In Immanuel, winner of the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Matthew McNaught explores his upbringing in an evangelical Christian community in Winchester. As he moved away from the faith of his childhood in the early 2000s, a group of his church friends were pursuing it to its more radical fringes. They moved to Nigeria to join a community of international disciples serving TB Joshua, a charismatic millionaire pastor whose purported gifts of healing and prophecy attracted vast crowds to his Lagos ministry, the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN). Years later, a number of these friends left SCOAN with accounts of violence, sexual abuse, sleep deprivation and public shaming. In reconnecting with his old friends, McNaught realized that their journey into this cult-like community was directly connected to the teachings and tendencies of the church of their childhood. Yet speaking to them awakened a yearning for this church that, despite everything, he couldn't shake off. Was the church's descent into hubris and division separable from the fellowship and mutual sustenance of its early years? Was it possible to find community and connection without dogma and tribalism? Blending essay, memoir and reportage, Immanuel is an exceptional debut about community, doubt, and the place of faith in the twenty-first century.
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‘Matthew McNaught is a strong and welcome new voice in essayism, clear-sighted and hugely empathetic. In this deeply affecting account of his own spiritual journey, he weaves in and out of the byways of religious belief once known as “enthusiasm”, charting the body-shaking, mind-breaking experiences of friends and strangers alike. By turns cynical, doubtful, wounded and yearning, his words give astonishing shape to the space that only faith can fill.’
— Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia
‘“Empathy” is a popular critical buzzword, but Matthew McNaught’s writing exemplifies the work of empathy at its most intense and, dare one say, sincere. Whether his subject is ordinary Syrians trapped by war or the fellow parishioners of his childhood church, ensnared by a false prophet, he always gives voice to the motives and emotions of those he writes about, mixed as they are and fraught with tragic consequence. McNaught is a sublime listener who knows how to put listening into words.’
— Marco Roth, author of The Scientists
‘Matthew McNaught’s Immanuel is a mesmerizing and compelling trip to the very edges of faith. The author explores the seductive pull of radical belief systems that can lead followers towards communal joy, transcendence, human folly and, at times, brutality. Through his journey as a member of an evangelical Christian community in his youth to an adulthood of questioning the more extreme manifestations of this community in Nigeria, McNaught has created an expansive narrative that asks the fundamental questions around our need for faith and belonging whilst exploring their limits. Immanuel is a beautiful and important book.’
— Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender
‘This patient, absorbing account of evangelicalism in England and Pentecostalism in Nigeria neither romanticizes nor disdains religious belief. Instead, McNaught adopts friendship’s middle distance as the right vantage point from which to narrate his own spiritual history and that of childhood church friends who found themselves caught up in a cult. Neither indulgent nor disdainful toward believers, McNaught offers a fascinating look at how the search for ultimate meaning can go both wrong and right.’
— Emily Ogden, author of On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays
‘Taking us on an unexpected journey from English suburbia to a Lagos megachurch, Immanuel offers a fascinating, empathetic glimpse into the extreme edges of evangelical Christianity.’
— Samira Shackle, author of Karachi Vice
IMMANUEL
MATTHEW MCNAUGHT
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Immanuel was the sound of around a hundred people singing more or less in tune. It was baptisms in the River Itchen, picnics on the South Downs, praying in tongues in suburban living rooms.
Hebrew for ‘God with us’, Immanuel was a name uttered by the Prophet Isaiah, whose words were later recalled in Matthew’s gospel as evidence of Christ’s divinity: ‘Behold, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and she will call Him Immanuel.’ A bridge between the Old Testament and the New, Immanuel was God’s promise to His people, fulfilled.
Immanuel was a house church first, before expanding to fill a rented room in Winchester Guildhall and then the grand Georgian building that stood on the opposite side of the Broadway. Immanuel was the centre of the world once. Long after it imploded, its gravitational pull remains.
When friends visit me in Southampton, I soon run out of things in the city to show them, so I take them on the 30-minute train ride to Winchester. We walk down the paved High Street, passing cafés and boutiques, turn right at the Buttercross into the Cathedral grounds, then head towards the Water Meadows. I always feel, as we set out on this tourist walk, a tug towards the Broadway at the bottom end of town.
When I visit Winchester alone, I’m more likely to submit to it. I stand on the pavement of the Broadway, the statue of King Alfred behind me, and look up at St John’s House. The narrow lattice windows of the medieval undercroft. The broader windows of the assembly room above, and the painted ones of the non-existent third floor. I look for the paint pot and brushes on one of the windows of the top row, the trompe l’œil left in the nineties by Immanuel’s resident painter-decorator, along with his name on the pot: ‘Dave’. St John’s is closed to the public now. I walk away with my longing unfulfilled.
I was happy to learn that there was a name for this kind of place – one that captures the strange charge it possesses. A hierophany, according to the religious scholar Mircea Eliade, is a point where the membrane between the sacred and the mundane world seems at its thinnest, where the divine feels within closest reach. Some hierophanies are built structures: altars, temples, obelisks. Some are portable, like the prayer pole of a wandering tribe. Some are offered up by the natural world: the ancient oak, the mountain top. It might have some inherent quality of awe or beauty. It might be improvised or arbitrary. What matters is that people come together around these points; shared rituals and stories accumulate. The moment I came across the word, the places of a church childhood came to mind. The stone floor of the undercroft. The light green carpet of the assembly room.
These were spaces in which we gathered as a single body and called on God. For the most part, He eluded me. I spent far more time in church feeling frustrated, bored or out of place than I ever did giving full-hearted praise. The question of how He moved, and of what precisely He promised, would divide and scatter us. Some of us – myself included – would lose our faith altogether. Others would end up on the extreme fringes of evangelical Christianity. Yet division is not the feeling first evoked when I think of my hierophanies. Instead there is a sense – visceral, undiminished by the passing of time – of being part of this body which extended beyond me.
Other things bring on this feeling. Only YouTube knows about my late-night weakness for the old praise and worship songs that take me back to the assembly room. Lord, you have my heart. And I will search for yours. Jesus, take my life and lead me on. And meeting old church friends always feels different from, say, meeting friends from school. I ask after their families, and their names – ‘How’s Phil?’ ‘What’s Anna doing these days?’ – work a kind of spell that brings Immanuel fleetingly to life again.
I. EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE DELIVERED
In the video, TB Joshua walked along the front row, pressing the palm of his hand against each forehead he passed. A line of people collapsed in his wake, a cascade of Sunday dresses, football shirts, colourful West African fabrics. One woman cried out to him as he passed, her hands held up in supplication: ‘The devil is using the Bible to torment me!’ TB Joshua stopped. ‘How does the devil use the Bible?’
She took a dog-eared Bible from under her arm, and explained how she was compelled to consult the book before doing anything. She couldn’t cook, wash dishes or go out without its say-so. The woman was in her forties, hair tied back in a sensible ponytail, face taut with worry. ‘I have destroyed six Bibles by doing this,’ she said. Her husband stood beside her, looking down with a pained half-smile.
TB Joshua asked her to demonstrate how it worked. A leather handbag and a black shoulder bag were brought out and placed before her. ‘Here are two bags now,’ said TB Joshua. ‘You don’t know which one to carry, so ask!’
‘I’d pray,’ she said. ‘Oh Lord, open my eyes! Which bag should I carry?’ She opened her Bible at random. Her finger alighted on a passage. ‘His glory is like the firstling of his bullock,’ she read. ‘And his horns are like the horns of unicorns.’ She pointed to the leather handbag. ‘Then I would know, because…’
TB Joshua cut her off. ‘What does that say about this bag?’ A ripple of laughter from the congregation. The woman seemed exasperated by the question. ‘It says positive concerning this bag.’
He asked her to demonstrate going out. She put the Bible in the handbag and mimed a walk in her neighbourhood. The camera moved back as she made her way down the front row, stopping at imagined junctions to ask the Bible which way to go. Behind, TB Joshua looked on with a beatific smile, one arm folded across his chest, the other holding the microphone. Beyond him, a sea of congregants watched expectantly. Above them, the balconies, the mounted lights, the giant LED screens of the main auditorium of the Synagogue Church of All Nations, Lagos.
TB Joshua first entered my awareness as a curiosity: a sharp-suited, goatee-bearded Nigerian preacher on the chunky plastic cover of a VHS tape, which sat among books and audio-cassettes on the table at the back of the assembly room. It was the late nineties and I was in my teens. When I first watched the clips of his healings and exorcisms – which seemed to combine Billy Graham’s stadium evangelism with the kinetic drama of WWE wrestling – they provoked, above all, my burgeoning teenage scepticism. There was also a faint hope, a question hovering: what if this was the real deal? It was the remnant of a familiar anticipatory wonder that soon evaporated entirely. In the years that followed, my aversion to TB Joshua deepened and intensified. He came to personify the toxic, tyrannical potential of the Born Again Christianity I’d left behind. After I started writing about Joshua, and the confluence of forces that connected him with the church of my childhood, a kind of wonder returned. Not at the possibility of his anointing, but at his audacity, and the sheer unlikeliness of what he had achieved.
It’s hard to disentangle the facts of Joshua’s life from his self-mythologising. The official SCOAN narrative is repeated in many online articles: his birth was foretold by a prophet, he spent fifteen months in his mother’s womb, he received a divine revelation in 1987 while fasting for forty days and forty nights in an area of swampland that would later be called Prayer Mountain.
The basic facts are remarkable enough. Joshua was born into poverty in 1963, in a village called Arigidi in Ondo State, south-west Nigeria. He moved to Lagos as a young man, his secondary school education unfinished, and found work on a poultry farm. He was in his mid-20s when he founded his church. The earliest videos of SCOAN show a skinny young man addressing a small congregation under a bamboo tent, wearing a white gown and a long, ragged beard. He barely resembles the plump-faced, well-groomed millionaire pastor he would become, but his movements are unmistakable: the antic energy, the easy mastery of the crowd.
By the time he was fifty, TB Joshua had become a household name across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and a Christian celebrity in many countries beyond. His satellite channel Emmanuel TV broadcast services and news of his philanthropy across several continents. His prophecies of world events gained tens of thousands of views on YouTube. He travelled the world, drawing vast crowds to his touring prayer events, known as crusades, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. His church became a site of mass pilgrimage, unrivalled in Nigeria, receiving tens of thousands of visitors each week, many seeking healing or deliverance from demons. TB Joshua’s fame transformed the Lagos neighbourhood of Ikotun-Egbe into a thriving commercial hub, as markets, banks, hotels and restaurants rose up to meet the demand of visitors.
‘If I am going to the market,’ the woman told TB Joshua, ‘and I want to buy ogbono, and two people are selling ogbono…’ She stopped in front of two women in the front row, pointing to one of them. ‘I would ask, should I buy ogbono from this woman?’
She hunched over the bag hanging from her shoulder, opened the Bible inside and read haltingly: ‘And Amon had a friend and his name was Jonathan, the son of David’s brother, and Jonathan was a subtle man…’She looked up. ‘Because it said that Jonathan was a subtle man, then I should not buy from this woman, because…’ Drowned out by a surge of laughter from the crowd, she struck the air in frustration. TB Joshua spoke. ‘From what you read now, there is nothing to show whether you should buy or not buy!’
‘I read that Jonathan is a subtle man,’ she said. ‘That is somebody who is too crafty.’
TB Joshua asked how this problem affected her life. She said that she had narrowly avoided being hit by traffic while reading; that she had to consult the Bible if her husband wanted the two of them to meet as ‘husband and wife’; that he got upset because it tended to say no.
TB Joshua doubled up with a laughter that spread through the congregation. Moments later, he turned serious. He faced the woman from a few metres away. ‘How did this start?’ he asked. She explained how it began ten years ago when a colleague showed her how to use the Bible to make decisions. ‘It was working for me,’ she said. ‘But I was not doing it often.’
‘Before,’ said TB Joshua, ‘it was working for you?’
‘It is still working for me,’ she said.
‘Okay, it is still working for you,’ he said.
‘Why do you want to disconnect yourself?’
‘Because it is a torment,’ she said. ‘People see me behaving abnormally, walking up and down the yard with the Bible. I do not even hide it anymore. I want to preach the Gospel. But not this way.’
The congregation laughed again, but the woman looked desperate.
‘So something that worked for you,’ said TB Joshua, ‘is now tormenting you.’
She told him about the voice in her head that spoke constantly of death. ‘That’s why I carry the Bible,’ she said. ‘When I want to do something, the voice would be telling me that I would die or another person would die.’
‘When you sleep, is there a strange man who normally comes to you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you know that you don’t have affection for your husband…’
‘You are very correct, sir.’
TB Joshua told her that she had a spiritual husband, a common form of demonic possession. From childhood, the woman had been betrothed to an evil spirit that now, since she’d married in the human realm, was determined to attack her and undermine her relationship. ‘Don’t let it surprise you that someone could use the Bible like this,’ he said. Evil spirits, he explained, would use whatever was available. He held up his hand to exorcize the spirit. On the video, a man narrated as the woman fell to the ground.
I recognized the voice immediately. The sonorous English accent; the slight thespian flair. ‘Having explained that all the lady needed was a thorough deliverance,’ he said, ‘Prophet TB Joshua prays for her in the name of Jesus Christ, delivering her in the power of the Holy Spirit.’
It was Eliot. He was two or three years younger than me – probably in his late twenties now. I imagined him in the editing booth in Lagos, watching the footage, writing the script for the voice over.
I started watching Emmanuel TV on YouTube in around 2012. I watched the videos to hear these voices, to catch glimpses of the lives of my old church friends. A group of people from Immanuel became followers of TB Joshua in the early 2000s. As I moved away from the evangelical Christianity of my youth, they had pursued it to Lagos.
Dan Winfield was the first of my church friends to become a disciple. The oldest child of Gavin and Susan Winfield, he was nineteen when he went out in 2001, turning down a place on a university course in London. In 2006, he married Kate, a South African disciple. In the years after his arrival, his two sisters and brother joined him as disciples. Like the Winfield siblings, Eliot went out when he was in his late teens.
Immanuel was not the only British church to encourage its members to go to SCOAN. A number of young British Christians became disciples of TB Joshua, coming from churches in Southampton, Sheffield, Devon, and London, to name a few. Like Immanuel, the churches were evangelical, largely white and middle-class, with a hunger for seeing God move in dramatic ways.
Once in SCOAN, disciples would gradually cut off contact with the outside world. They lived in dormitories alongside a community of disciples. The innermost circle consisted largely of Yoruba-speaking Nigerians. The others were international – largely from the UK, South Africa and the US, as well as mainland Europe, Latin America and Asia. Disciples worked long hours keeping the ministry going: organizing foreign tours, producing videos, welcoming visitors. They gave sermons and learned TB Joshua’s teachings by heart, in training to become evangelists and prophets themselves. During services, they triaged the crowds of visitors in the prayer line: selecting people to be prayed for by the Prophet and his closest protégés, known as the Wise Men; praying themselves for those who remained.
Gavin and Susan Winfield never lived in Lagos full time, but were frequent visitors. From the beginning of Dan’s discipleship, they supported the ministry from afar. They organized group trips to SCOAN from the UK, and later helped out with TB Joshua’s humanitarian work and foreign tours. Soon after Dan got married, he was relocated to London with his wife to help set up a UK branch of SCOAN.
With time, friends and relatives of the Winchester disciples became alarmed at the extent of their devotion. Personalities appeared to change. On the rare visits home, disciples were odd and evasive in conversation, speaking of little other than TB Joshua, replying to questions with a patchwork of quotes from his teachings. Susan’s sister and brother tracked down other former disciples, whose stories about life in SCOAN convinced them that their family had been drawn into a cult.
Much of this I gathered later. For most of the 2000s, SCOAN existed on the periphery of my awareness. My old church friends’ devotion to TB Joshua was utterly alien to me: one of the weirder outcomes of an evangelical childhood that I was relieved to have left behind. It wasn’t until 2010, after Dan and Kate Winfield left SCOAN suddenly, that I started paying more attention.
Watching Emmanuel TV, I would find the Winchester disciples interviewing visitors, asking about the problems that brought them to SCOAN, and the dramatic results of TB Joshua’s prayer. I would see them giving sermons in the main auditorium, striding across the stage, microphone in hand, leading the crowd in call-and-response. What were the forces that kept them there? What did they see in TB Joshua? What, for that matter, did anyone see in him?
Few of the videos gave much in the way of an answer. Some were just boring. In TB Joshua’s sermons, he seemed to take a banal Christian platitude and make it last half an hour. He’d repeat it, restate it, get the congregation to tell it to their neighbour. I’d skip forward a few minutes and he’d still be saying it. There were eloquent Nigerian pastors, I was sure, but TB Joshua was not one of them. Other videos I found abhorrent: the lines of people holding placards naming their ailments – AIDS, CANCER, ARTHRITIS; the confidence with which TB Joshua moved down the row, raising his hands to heal each one.
Why did I keep coming back to the deliverances? Perhaps because watching them, I was not entirely immune to TB Joshua’s charm. There was something powerful about the way he moved so deftly between playfulness and sincerity. I could almost imagine being won over by him. The videos were also compelling because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Was I witnessing a meaningful cathartic ritual? A scene of exploitation or abuse? Or just one of cynical artifice? On the one hand, the YouTube thumbnails were pure clickbait: men with bulging eyeballs, young women with faces caught in quasi-orgasmic contortions; titles like ‘WATCH ALL HELL BREAK LOOSE IN CHURCH!’ or ‘SATANIC SEDUCTION! NO MAN CAN RESIST MY BODY!’ The demons shouted phrases that would turn up across multiple deliverances. Was this evidence of a script, or at least of preparation or prompting? The performances were worthy of the Nollywood horror films produced down the road in Lagos. There was something addictive in the dependable rise and resolution of the story arc: the set-up, the conflict, and then the climax, in which the possessed person collapsed to the ground under the power of prayer. I was often moved, despite myself, by the final scene of the exorcisms. Lying on the floor, the recipients of prayer were commanded to stand up. It felt oddly voyeuristic to witness this moment, like catching someone waking up and remembering who they are. They’d open their eyes, adjust their clothes and gather themselves up, before rising, dazed and unburdened, to their feet. This was not pure fiction. It was clear that there was truth in these encounters.
The deliverances were an odd mixture of the chaotic and the formulaic. They were led either by TB Joshua or one of the Wise Men. When a possessed person came forward, the deliverer would always ask the same questions. They’d first demand that the demon identify itself. The demon, speaking through its host, would respond with a name. ‘I am the Lion,’ said one. ‘I am Leviathan,’ said another. ‘I am the Queen of the Coast.’ ‘I am the Boss of the Boss.’ ‘I am the Serpent of Nembe Kingdom.’
The deliverer would ask how many demons or spirits were occupying the host. There was rarely just one. The demons usually shouted something vague: ‘We are legion!’ or ‘We are numberless!’ This kind of answer was rarely accepted. The deliverer would push for a specific number, as if driven by some obscure bureaucratic imperative. ‘HOW MANY?’ he would shout again and again, until the demon spokesperson finally gave in: ‘There are seven of us.’
Another one said there were five. Another said they consisted of twenty-one elders, whose powers came from the rainbow colours of the seven seas. One man, dubbed King of the Wizards by TB Joshua, had been possessed by 186 evil spirits. He’d had 180 cast out already, but 6 were still hanging on. ‘This guy is very dangerous,’ TB Joshua warned the congregation.
The deliverer would ask the demon how they entered, how they operated, what they wanted. Interrogation over, he would raise his hand, strike the air and shout – ‘OUT! IN THE MIGHTY NAME OF JESUS CHRIST!’ The possessed person would be thrown back, screaming and convulsing. Some would vomit clear fluid into a pool on the tile floor. Some held out for longer than others, darting around the auditorium like trapped animals, before succumbing and falling to the ground. After they stood up and thanked Jesus Christ for their deliverance, the video would cut to an animated title screen: ‘TESTIMONY TIME’. The newly delivered person appeared in a change of clothes and recounted their ordeal.
My old church friends. What does this even mean, when I have been churchless and agnostic for over fifteen years? The bond feels at once tenuous and profound. Gavin and Susan Winfield were, along with my parents, among the earliest members of the church. Like their children, I belonged to the sizeable first generation of native Immanuelites. We were raised together, in and out of each other’s houses, sharing Sunday lunches and camping trips.
For a long time the Winfields were my favourite Immanuelite family to visit. They had the nicest garden. They had the best snacks – Gavin’s speciality was millionaire shortbread, the height of decadence in the early 90s. The children lined up roughly in age with my siblings and me. Perhaps the biggest draw was their collection of Christian rock music. It was at the Winfield’s that I first encountered the rap-rock of DC Talk, the harmony-drenched indie rock of Jars of Clay. At an age when I was fast learning to be embarrassed by my tribe (the corduroys, the acoustic guitars, the brown-bread wholesomeness), the Winfields were emissaries of a Christian culture that was new, exciting, alive. Gavin and Susan had a modern people-carrier with a sliding door, which looked particularly sleek and space-age when parked alongside my parents’ 1960s camper van. Once a month, on a Saturday night, a group of us Immanuel youth would pile into the back, and either Gavin or Susan would drive us to Southampton Community Church for a youth service called Cutting Edge, whose resident worship band would later find global fame as Delirious. The songs were epic, joyous, unashamedly Christian. The soaring singalong of ‘Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble’. The folky stomp of the ‘Happy Song’. The anthemic groove of ‘History Maker’. The floor would quake with the pogoing. ‘Is it true today,’ we’d sing, over what was probably the best bassline in Christian music, ‘that when people pray, cloudless skies will break, kings and queens will shake? Yes, it’s true. And I believe it. I’m living for You.’
‘People of God, we are listening to our sister,’ said Michael to the congregation. ‘We are learning a lot from what she is saying. This is someone who has practical experience. Someone who was part of that Kingdom.’
The video was entitled ‘A MERMAID FROM HELL WASHES UP IN CHURCH!’ The woman had been explaining how she’d been crowned Queen Mother of the Marine World; how she could cure infertility by sending snake spirits to enter the womb; how the baby would grow but the snake would kill the mother.
Conducting the interview at the front of the auditorium, Michael seemed at home with the subject matter, at ease with the crowd. In the years since he’d been at SCOAN, his accent had gained a Nigerian tinge. As the youngest of the Winfields, he’d been the last to go out. He’d become a disciple when he was 16; his parents had let him give up his A-levels.
‘Our sister is explaining that in the spiritual kingdom of darkness, the Marine World had the power to give wealth,’ said Michael. ‘But conditions were attached.’
Watching the video, I was struck by the depth of Michael’s immersion. I’d heard that disciples saw little of Nigeria outside of the SCOAN complex. But a lot of Nigeria came into SCOAN. He must have absorbed so much in his years as a disciple: the dialects, the culture, the local traditions and stories. What other white Brit knew as much as him about spiritual husbands and marine spirits?
The woman spoke at great length about the intricate workings of the Marine World, heading off on tangents, talking with such intensity that she barely paused for breath. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed. This was not good TV. I imagined the congregation losing patience. I couldn’t help feeling anxious on Michael’s behalf. How would he wrap it up? He was unfazed. Far from curtailing her story, he pressed for more information.
‘OK Madam, we want to take it step by step,’ he said. ‘Exactly how would you go about giving people wealth in this physical world?’
What was odd about these videos was how unchristian it all seemed. These lengthy accounts often seemed to be a mixture of traditional West African beliefs and individual confabulation. Their reality was always taken for granted. Every spiritual entity was regarded as demonic, but nothing was dismissed as superstition or fantasy. Why was so much airtime given to this amateur demonology? Why did we need to know our senior demons from our supervisor demons, our water spirits from our snake spirits, if Jesus Christ was going to be the answer anyway?
Later, I recalled how the gospels were full of exorcisms and sorcerers. In the Book of Acts, Paul curses a magician, striking him blind. Mary Magdalene was said to have been possessed by and delivered from demons. According to the Gospel of Luke, there were precisely seven of them. The world that Michael inhabited was a long way from suburban England. Perhaps it wasn’t so far from the world of the New Testament.
‘It started when I was seven,’ said Rosemary, a woman from Ghana. ‘I was half-naked, wearing a white cloth. I knelt behind my mum. A cow was killed. They poured the blood into a calabash. I dipped my middle finger in the blood and placed it on my tongue. That was how the covenant was made.’
The spirits in these videos fell broadly into two groups. There were those who were ancient inhabitants of the land. They were spirits of the forest and the water, taking the form of mermaids, snakes, crocodiles. They ruled over the mangrove swamps of the Nigerian Delta; the mountains, forests and rivers of the Ghanaian Volta. These spirits were often passed down from one generation to another. Sometimes this happened through a deliberate ritual, like Rosemary’s covenant. Sometimes they were passed on inadvertently, like a hereditary disease.
Then there were the modern spirits. Untethered from the land or the bloodline, they occupied the untamed wilds of the internet and technology. A demon known as Numeral lived in numbers and the letters of the alphabet, possessing people through passwords and ID codes. Others would lie in wait on a website like a computer virus, ready to enter anyone who opened the page. One man explained how he was possessed by a demon who inhabited a page on Facebook. He’d clicked on an image that appeared on his feed then scrolled through a series of pictures. It was then that the demon entered him. He held up print-outs of the images to the congregation: a red-skinned demon with giant horns, a picture of Gollum from Lord of the Rings wearing a dinner jacket.
In isolation, these testimonies were bizarre. Taken together, they seemed to tell a story of dislocation, of navigating the uncertainty of an ever-shifting, globalized world. The ways of the ancestors weren’t working. And modernity, with all its technologies and diversions, was just as diabolical.
During Testimony Time, the interviewer would ask each person how their demons manifested. After all the florid detail of the spirit world, the outward symptoms of possession were surprisingly mundane: losing jobs, businesses failing, accidents, illnesses, miscarriages, trouble concentrating, marital discord, lashing out at kids. The demons were as strange to me as any fantasy novel, but here was something I understood only too well: the impulse to gather a crowd of sorrows and give them a name.
I watched exorcisms on YouTube at night. In the daytime, I made telephone calls. I spoke to plumbers from Hythe, military veterans from Gosport, HR managers from Chandler’s Ford. I worked for an NHS psychological therapies service. Each person had made contact because they were depressed, anxious or otherwise in distress. Each time, I asked them the same list of questions on my assessment template and typed their answers. What’s your main problem? When did it start? What are your physical symptoms, thoughts, feelings?
The service was part of a nationwide initiative aiming to make evidence-based therapy available to the masses for the first time in the UK. It was not without its critics. Some said that the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) that formed the basis of our service offered a quick fix for complex problems. Others said that it expected low-paid practitioners with minimal qualifications to do work previously done by psychologists. Could you really teach people how to lead someone out of the depths of depression after just a year’s training? As one of these low-paid, scantly qualified practitioners, it was in my interest to be optimistic.
As a Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner (PWP), my job was to assess new patients and then, along with my supervisor, decide on the most appropriate treatment. I’d take on the more straightforward cases, offering them up to eight sessions of CBT-based ‘Guided Self Help’ over the phone. I’d step up the more severe cases to a higher level of the service, or refer them out to specialist teams. What us PWPs lacked in training and experience, we more than made up for in questionnaires. We had a diagnostic questionnaire for everything. Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
It wasn’t always straightforward. In our supervisions with Senior PWPs, we’d have discussions about whether someone was depressed or just grieving, if someone had GAD or SAD; OCD, PTSD, BPD or all three. We were aware, of course, that none of us knew for sure. We were novices, as yet uninitiated in the complexities of the diagnostic model. All diagnoses we recorded were strictly provisional. Our role was not to understand the details, but to maintain the smooth running of the service: ushering people in, managing the most manageable, directing others to the right support.
The 45-minute assessment was packed with questions, a fraught compromise between the therapeutic impulse and the bureaucratic, and I nearly always overran. It was good to hear people’s stories. For some people, there seemed to be a power in telling them, and in having them heard, even in this limited form. Several times, partway through assessments, people mentioned to me that they’d never talked to anyone about this stuff before. Some of those I worked with got better. More often than not, they didn’t. If they didn’t drop out, I’d step them up to step 3 for full-strength CBT. I liked the job, but I longed to ascend to that higher tier, to wield those strange acronyms with precision, to become a real therapist.
In the meantime, I learned the questionnaires off by heart. Feeling down, depressed or hopeless. Feeling compelled to count while doing things. Having trouble concentrating. Feeling afraid as if something awful might happen. We asked the questions, in part, so that our commissioners could know who had been delivered from which disorder. The electronic records system had added a feature that illustrated this on each patient’s file. When someone who started with a high score dropped into the ‘healthy’ range, a tiny icon would appear: a little stickman with his arms raised above his head, backed by yellow rays that shot upwards and outwards in all directions like some kind of celestial light.
Some people struggled to complete the questionnaires at all. The last question on the PHQ-9 would ask each person to rate, on a scale of zero to three, how often in the last two weeks they’d had thoughts of being better off dead or wanting to harm themselves. ‘I don’t want to be dead, exactly,’ someone would tell me, after a long pause. ‘Too many people need me. But every day, I want it to be over. If I could just press a button and stop existing, I wouldn’t hesitate.’
I’d make sympathetic noises into my headset. But the questionnaire would be filling my screen, waiting for the last box to be checked. ‘I’m sorry,’ I’d say, ‘but I’m going to need a number.’
At some point, I took a break from my Emmanuel TV habit to watch some other Nigerian pastors on YouTube. SCOAN was not the biggest ministry in Lagos: several churches boasted more than double its 50,000 person capacity. There were more esteemed Nigerian pastors than TB Joshua. It seemed odd that out of all of them, it was TB Joshua who had the most appeal outside of West Africa and the diaspora, and who’d attracted a large following of foreign disciples who hung on his every word.
