ABSTRACT
In southern Nigeria, recent decades have seen the shape of public heritage undergo fundamental changes, caused by shifting political dynamics and the ascendence of immensely popular reformist religious movements. This chapter considers the link between these phenomena and studies its impact on the production of heritage. It describes how a breakdown in the secularist state project and a rise in increasingly politicised Born-Again Christianity within the region has produced alternative forms of heritage-making. Describing one such site – a museum built for the living leader of one of Nigeria's foremost Pentecostal churches – it shows how this experimental heritage site simultaneously borrows from and reacts against an existing heritage logic while underscoring church doctrine by encouraging visitors to look forward rather than back. Through this, it examines Pentecostal heritages’ concrete forms but also ask how the relationship between heritage and evangelical Christianity more broadly might evolve as both continue to expand.
