Public Righteousness: The Performative Ethics of Human Flourishing

By Pickwick Publications

Public Righteousness: The Performative Ethics of Human Flourishing is driven by the idea that part of what manifests as a disorderly display of virtue in public culture is underlined by the desire to see a more righteous society and an expression of the will to enact such an ideal world into reality. This book re-structures the ferment of such public displays and fashions an ethic that overturns the ostentatious signals of self-righteousness and the fierce contest of animating visions. This book engages the work of social ethicist Nimi Wariboko to explore an idea of public righteousness. In place of smug superiority and phony pieties, the performative ethics that inaugurate this public righteousness offer an intellectual and moral competence that establishes rectitude and culminates in human flourishing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: May 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666799408

Book preview

Introduction

Public Righteousness: The Performative Ethics of Human Flourishing

Historians and cultural studies scholars tend to agree with Raymond Williams that the language and the expressions that pervade at a particular period in time encode the sensibility of a social phase.¹ Even when casual and mundane, those expressive activities reflect the informal domains of social existence where the subaltern’s alternative apprehensions of social reality manifest as a challenge to bureaucratic and official accounts. Our purpose in this book project is underscored by the idea that much of what is seen as the fallout of the influencer culture—the narcissistic display of morality in public culture diversely expressed through the language of critique and counter-critiques of anti-woke/ism(s), performative (or exhibitionist), call-out, virtue-signalling and other (pejorative) terms—is underlined by desire to see a more righteous society and an individualistic will to enact this ideal world into reality.² While such utopic vision and the means of attaining it are understandably contested by the various ideological factions discretely pursing this ideal, the marriage of theatre and theology that underwrites this sensibility remains.

Our conceptual preoccupation in this project has been to restructure the ferment of the public displays and fashion an ethic that overturns the ostentatious signals of self-righteousness and the fierce contest of animating visions toward the social reality of human flourishing. In place of an idea of public righteousness that evokes smug superiority and phony pieties, we offer the ideal of an intellectual and moral competence that, through attentive practices of thought, illustratively establishes the rectitude that culminates in progress and flourishing for all humans. The vision of this book, Public Righteousness: The Performative Ethics of Human Flourishing, is to generate an intentional reflexivity in the activism that seeks to make righteousness the normative condition of the society. Performative ethics as means to achieve public righteousness shifts the focal centres of attention and attraction from the persons and personalities advocating justice to the processes of thoughts and actions, and the social structuring that presses on human innate instinct to not only rebel against injustice, but to also do so exhibitively. We call this de-centering and re-centering performative ethic, because the shift in focus does not lose the tendency to display the virtues of having a morally refurbished society. The argument for displacing personalities whose zeal to see righteousness implanted is not to take away the human components of fighting social injustice or merely abstract the issues.

Rather, the goal is that the practices of thinking that underlay those ideologies do not get bogged down by the morally draining and physically exhausting distractions of antagonizing the personalities whose identity complex intertwines with the issues at stake. Performative ethic is a conceptual frame for maintaining focus on exegeting and engaging social justice issues, wittingly turning the performances of advocating against injustice towards those analyses of structures obstructing flourishing. Chapters contributors variously demonstrate the performative ethic of human flourishing through their analysis of social phenomena and situations. Their pursuit of the ideal of public righteousness is reflected in how, in their practices of analytical thinking that centers issues of demanding social justice as the necessary object of collective attention, they beckon the reader to witness how the passion for public righteousness of human flourishing can be distilled into an ethic of social coexistence. Taking on issues of social inequities across geospatilities, they exhibit the work of thought that shapes social progress and seeds the norms of righteousness into public culture. Contributors’ engagements, unfolding through the pages illustrate analytical generosity, a radical heed to the encrustations of social structure that hinder human flourishing and how they might be peeled away to give room to public righteousness.

On Performance, Theology, and Ethics

While performance, theology, and ethics are discrete areas of study with relatively distinct methods of analysis and truth propositions, they tend to have in common the goal of realizing human flourishing. Studies of performance, long preoccupied with achieving progress and flourishing for humanity, have variously enunciated the dimensions of attaining a more righted society.³ Engaging the symbolic means of everyday and dramatized activities, they explored how the impressions established through these actions can be meaningfully deployed to facilitate human flourishing. In his book on the sociology of performance, Erving Goffman demonstrated how social interaction scripts the performance that shapes social ecosystems.⁴ Performance theorist Judith Butler would later apply this impression-building processes to theory of gender, describing how performance and performativity inscribe identity.⁵ By showing how the semiotic weight that gender carries in material reality is constructed through significations, Butler also charted a conceptual path to an understanding of how performance constructs meanings to shape the being and becoming of reality. The imperative of remaking the world was also strong in Dorinne Kondo’s Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. A book on dramaturgy and anti-racism, Worldmaking studies the ways theatre artists unmake a world built by racial ideologies and remake the structures of power through theatre.

As performance engages the world to destabilize its oppressive structures, theologian too are frequently concerned with mending a worn world by employing religious thought to bear in their efforts.⁶ For James Cone’s formulation of Black Theology consistently has liberation of the poor, weak, and oppressed as its end goal. Theological expression, he insisted, must be attentive and responsive to social situations and must set the oppressed free.⁷ Theologian Miroslav Volf also consistently demonstrated this thematic preoccupation through his studies of religion and human flourishing, and the role religion can play in fulfilling a vision of a more righteous society.⁸ He has explored the role religion can play in fulfilling a vision of a society where live can be well-lived and goes well. The many possibilities being produced as consequence of a globalizing world widens the modelling scales of social advocacies. Religion especially, given the universalism of its moral motivation and introspection, can play a key role in the shaping of life to be well-lived, to feel good, and to go well.⁹ Volf and Matthew Croasum, in For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference, developed a moral manifesto that sees social transformation as an obligation of theological discourse.¹⁰ Both scholars observed that a theological study that does not reckon with the thirst for human flourishing—or public righteousness— that is redolent in the public sphere risks irrelevance.¹¹

The connections between theology and society took a creative turn in Robert Beckford’s Jesus Dub where the theological analysis in Jamaica was an interaction between the church hall and the dance hall. The dub, the re-production of sound, became the basis of exploring both the inventiveness of music artists who break apart, alter, and remake to generate new meanings and practices of worship that become enhanced because of the interface with social culture.¹² The ingenuity to harmonize the sites of religious worship and social activity are pointers to the resourcefulness necessary to facilitate human flourishing. As Robert Neville noted, harmonies of social structures create the conditions that make human flourishing possible because they link the things with internal consistency with one another, producing beauty to be enjoyed.¹³ Studies of ethics manifest the same agenda of promoting the fullness of life and even transmitting it across generations.¹⁴ This overflowing and shareable abundance, argues Nimi Wariboko in his study of ethics, would entail a social framework to support it. By interpreting arete as an ongoing actualization of human potentialities, he fashioned excellence, a form of clearing in the social sphere to empower humans to resist militant forces and manifest their potentials.¹⁵ Elsewhere, he also defines human flourishing as the pursuit of "a set of virtues, capabilities, and conditions that generates higher levels of well-being, the good life, prosperity, as well as generating new relations, practices, and realities that support the actualization of potentialities of a person, group, or community. The goal of the drive toward human flourishing is to create community that perpetually permits every human being to be the best that she can be given her gifts, talents, and communal-institutional support for her sake and that of her community, individual and community aiming for the highest human good, eudaimonia."¹⁶

Despite the harmony of these disciplinary goals, there has not been a more intentional effort to reconcile these categories and see how they can jointly produce human flourishing. Some works have made some effort though. The trio of Alynna Lyon, Christine Gustafson, and Paul C. Manuel have studied Pope Francis, arguably the most visible personification of theology, as a global actor, and connected the politics of his public performance with a moral agenda.¹⁷ The term performative ethics came up in Esteban Leonardo Santis and Staci M. Zavattaro study of how the forty-fifth president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, reconciled the realms of the theatrical and the ethical. In the postmodern context where administrative ethics are based solely on bureaucratic codes, professional obligations, and democratic ideals, they show how the mass appeal of political actions is now treated as having more significance than a listed set of principles that guide public conduct.¹⁸ The question of how the presentation of ethics might become efficacious which they do not quite address is answered in Jeffrey Alexander’s civil righteousness. Writing within the context of immigration politics, he appraises how public displays of goodness can both reverberate and be regenerative.¹⁹

From these, we build our idea of performative ethics to reconcile the various categories. We go the vocabulary of performative that currently reigns in public culture, a put-down that connotes a merely pretentious display of one’s virtue to generate a framework that unabashedly performs thoughts. Treating thought as a theatrical performance is a thoughtful representation of ideas to subvert oppressive normative practices and inaugurate righteousness into public culture. In Ancient Greece, the word theatre meant a place of seeing. We appropriate the imagery of site and vision congealed in this definition to derive performative ethics as a work of bringing people to a place or position where they can see the paths to public righteousness or they see themselves actively participating in the mental and social processes that promote human flourishing. This is not a book that singularly explores either theology or theatre or social ethics, but a discursive interaction and transdisciplinary dialogue that explores social sensibilities by compounding the thematic concerns of these areas of study. By approximating their end goals into performative ethics that establishes human flourishing, we present a model of entraining and orienting toward a larger moral vision. We argue that agonistic exchanges in public culture rehearse the individual and collective senses of virtue, and that those performances of public righteousness can be intentionally routed toward fashioning human flourishing.

Contributors to this book espouse their moral vision through thinking and reimagining, in ways that call critical attention to ways that human flourishing can be generated, and public righteousness enacted. The series of chapters start with theologian J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu. In his contribution titled, ‘It Is Well’: Pentecostal/Charismatic Gospel of Prosperity in Africa and the Theology of Human Flourishing, he takes on one of the most popular expressions among African charismatic Christians/Pentecostals, it is well. The catchphrase, it is well, is a Pentecostal verbal signature and one of the means of performing faith before the public. The phrase articulates the resilience of the belief of contemporary Pentecostals in the theology of prosperity gospel even in the face of suffering and hardship. Asamoah-Gyadu reflects on this popular expression as he inquires the relationship between the gospel of prosperity and human flourishing. Following is Mark Lewis Taylor, who takes on two philosophical reflections in postcolonial Africa. In ‘When I Survey . . .’ Nimi Wariboko’s Work: History, Crises Incredible, and Radical Political Theology, Taylor examines two recent essays on the production of violence in postcolonial Africa and governance as trauma both written by ethicist/theologian Nimi Wariboko. The essays are a meditation on the increasing absurdity that typify social life in postcolonial Africa amidst a governance crisis and Taylor surmises they offer a philosophical and Christian vision for redirecting the destructive energies of the Pentecostal incredible to bring the grand promise of a healing disorder that disrupts postcolonial and Pentecostal crises.

Taking a more psychoanalytical approach, Chammah Kaunda explores what he sees as the narcissist expressions and performances of African neo-Pentecostalism. Analyzing media content in his chapter titled, Not What God Is, but What God Pentecostals Want: The Split Man of God and the Split God," Kaunda argues that the neo-Pentecostal obsession to display to the public that they have secret access to the mysterious divine realm creates a fertile ground for the flourishing of narcissist men of God. Kaunda shows how the manifestation of partial organs split from God is linked to the neo-Pentecostal obsessional quest for spiritual power as the means to eliminate material disgrace and obtain wealth and health. Monte Lee Rice also takes on critical theological analysis in his chapter titled, Coming to Glory through Human Alterity: Critically Advancing from Split God Philosophy. Engaging theorists such as Wariboko and Richard Kearney, Rice teases out the prescriptive potential of their work an everyday theology. The next chapter by Michael Kamenicky, Recent Methods in Pentecostal Aesthetics: A Comparative Analysis of the Work Of Steven Félix-Jäger, Ashon Crawley, and Nimi Wariboko, is a study in how these three scholars have diversely approached aesthetics. He conceptualizes aesthetics is about playfulness and shows how this ludic feature makes it a public participatory affair.

In Prosperity Theology and African Traditional Religion: Assessing Their Resonance through a Case Study, Andrew Court takes up flamboyant Nigerian pastor Chris Oyakhilome, to see how both his highly demonstrative pulpit-craft and the poetics of his sermons on material success resonate with the theology of African Traditional Religions. Studies of Prosperity Theology in Africa might have burgeoned, but few of the theological analyses have bothered to explore the significance of African Traditional Religions and their role in shaping Prosperity Theology as Court does here by studying one of Africa’s most colorful pastors.²⁰ In the following chapter, Anna Droll draws on the research she conducted in four countries— Ghana, Togo, Nigeria and Tanzania—to expand microtheology, an apprehension and appreciation of theology through studying how people of faith behave in social situations and the meanings they accrue through such interactions. Titled The Pentecostal Principle and the Dreams and Visions of African Visioners, the chapter examines the way visioners and dreamers interpret and make spiritual application of their dreams and vision experience to reveal an epistemic stance. This experience, Droll says, is especially associated with Pentecostal agency, including that of women who demonstrate special resolve in the face of perceived impediments.

The rest of the chapters in Public Righteousness analyze spatial contexts outside Africa to cover issues such as race, ethnicity, class, and even generational divides, interrogating diverse forms of obstacles that militate against human flourishing. In On Preaching and Justice: The Hermeneutics of Liberation and Resistance, Tony Baugh looks at the lived experience of Black people in the USA to argue for rebellion against the structural ills of white supremacy. In the same wise preachers interrogate texts weekly as they prepare to speak from the pulpit, Baugh argues that the hermeneutical methodology of their performance provides a novel posture for interpreting and reevaluating the pernicious texts that persist in American life (such as Confederate monuments and street names), and subsequently refurbishing them with a new creative and liberative perspective as pathway to creating a more just society. In Taylor Thomas’s chapter, A Mountaineer Isn’t Always Free: Cultural Identity, Economic Exploitation, and Resistance in Rural Appalachia, she crucially examines economic inequality and social marginalization. Thomas argues that oppression in rural Appalachia is legitimized by externally imposed stereotypes, some of them an outcome of cinematic performances and literary works that mine crude representations for profit. Taylor explores how the cultural maligning of rural Appalachia creates harmful categories that detrimentally impact conversations on class in America and highlights the processes through which multi-ethnic working class can form political coalitions nationally. The last chapter takes on extant economic issues in the USA and concomitant tensions. Nick Rodriguez, writing on Basic Income to Achieving Communal Excellence: Yang, Continental Thought and Wariboko, reflects on what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about modern American society and the necessities of change. Finally, since the chapters of this book were also collected from a conference cantered on the works of African theologian and social ethicist Nimi Wariboko, majority of the contributors engaged his ideas on human flourishing in this volume. Thus, the epilogue of this book, written by Olufemi Vaughan, is on Wariboko and how to account for the wide breath of his thoughts. Altogether, the chapters demonstrate performative ethics by grandly centering the necessary work of thought and practices that produce human flourishing and ultimately establishes public righteousness.

1

. Williams, Structures of Feeling. Also see Hendler, Public Sentiments.

2

. See a brief list of terms in Hamilton, Virtue Signalling,

12

–

14

.

3

. Richards, Theatre and Social Change; Vásquez, Pregones Theatre; Vlachos, Finding Social Change Backstage; Friis and Larsen. Theatre, Improvisation, and Social Change.

4

. Goffman, Presentation of Self.

5

. Butler, Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions; Butler, Gender Trouble; Butler, Bodies That Matter.

6

. See, for instance, Das, Compassion and the Mission of God; Holman, Healing the World with Righteousness?; Tuğal, Spiritual Transformation of Giving.

7

. Cone, Black Theology of Liberation; Cone, Black Theology and Black Power.

8

. Volf, Public Faith; Volf, Free of Charge.

9

. Volf, Flourishing.

10

. Volf and Croasmun, For the Life of the World.

11

. See also Gorrell, Always On.

12

. Beckford, Jesus Dub.

13

. Neville, Metaphysics of Goodness.

14

. Magesa, African Religion.

15

. Wariboko, Principle of Excellence. The Greek word arete is translated into English as virtue or excellence. Wariboko demonstrates that in the ancient Greece it also meant the actualization of human potentialities.

16

. Wariboko, Split Economy,

1

.

17

. Lyon et al., Pope Francis as a Global Actor.

18

. Santis and Zavattaro. Performative Ethics in the Trump Era.

19

. Alexander, Conclusion.

20

. For one of the rare exceptions, see Heuser, Pleasures of Plenty.

1

It Is Well

Pentecostal/Charismatic Gospel of Prosperity in Africa and the Theology of Human Flourishing

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu

The expression It is well is one of the most popular catchphrases that drop from the lips of many African Pentecostal/charismatic pastors and prophets. It is usually used during such times as preaching and praying or making declarations of blessing and motivation.¹ It is well is a catchphrase that articulates succinctly the belief of contemporary Pentecostals in the prosperity gospel and its underlying theological thought that even in the face of suffering and hardship, people must believe that It is well. To avoid doubt, I use the expression contemporary Pentecostal/charismatic churches or ministries to refer to the historically younger and doctrinally versatile prosperity preaching movements of the last half-century. They have burgeoned in Africa forcefully and their key characteristics are fairly well known. These features include a charismatic orientation that emphasizes the gifts of the Spirit, media-driven expressive forms of worship, an appeal to Africa’s upwardly mobile youth, and motivational messages of positives, success, and well-being.

This chapter reflects on the understanding of wellness as the equivalent of the contemporary Pentecostal theological orientation of prosperity as the religious privilege of Christians who exercise faith in God and deploy the appropriate principles of faith in life. One of the questions guiding these reflections is: What is the relationship between the gospel of prosperity and human flourishing as articulated by theologians like Miroslav Volf? Scholars like Nimi Wariboko have done much to disabuse minds of the monolithic nature of prosperity preaching by pointing to its different categories to help us to realize the nuance of its message.² In other words, what do we find when we look beyond the simplistic understanding of prosperity to see how, in fact, in spite of its many theological pitfalls, it could help us to appreciate human flourishing from a new perspective?

Contemporary African Pentecostal/charismatic churches have been doing well, in terms of their numbers and public presence and subsequent influence. This is partly because their contemporary worship styles and how their prosperity messages of success and upward mobility resonate with African understandings of flourishing and well-being. Several of these Pentecostal/charismatic preachers in Africa, Wariboko points out, also consciously carry the weight of blackness into their spirituality.³ Nevertheless, the materialistic nature of aspects of this gospel, I will point out, could at the same time lead to religious nominalism. Although this is not the main point of the discussion, it is worth touching on so that the downsides of prosperity preaching as a source of well-being are not underestimated. In other words, some of the paradigms of prosperity and flourishing identified in this essay falls very much on the secular categories of development for legitimacy, and therefore stand in danger of further marginalizing the poor that these churches seek to help. This means that although there is a case to be made for the development of Africa through a certain type of prosperity, the message and its recommendations need not be romanticized because its pitfalls.

The Prosperity Gospel

In the contemporary Pentecostal/charismatic context of belief, the prosperity gospel simply refers to the notion that in Christ, a believing Christian could expect to be blessed in this life, both materially and spiritually. Often referred to as the theology of health-and-wealth, those who expound it teach that, through the faithful fulfillment of tithing and other obligations such as seed sowing as in the giving of substantial offerings, God reciprocates the exercise of faith by blessing tithers and givers immeasurably.⁴ It is a message that has grown popular in Africa’s developing economies but which has also left strugglers without a testimony. The impression is often created that the rich are blessed, and the poor are cursed. Thus, Bishop Dag Heward-Mills of Ghana’s Lighthouse Chapel International titled one of his books Why Non-Tithing Christians Become Poor and How Tithing Christians Become Rich. He suggested that tithing Christians would be healed of their diseases, their businesses would prosper, and in the spirit of Psalm 1, in all that they do, they would flourish. The Pentecostal/charismatic oral theological discourses of testimony sharing are how the benefits of prosperity may be widely shared. If we consider that material and well-being are synonymous with human flourishing, then in fact it would not be out of place to see what the theology of human flourishing has to teach about Pentecostal prosperity.

The prosperity gospel or gospel of prosperity has the same ends as the very existential ends to which African religiosity may be directed. If we take the Akan of Ghana as representative of most African religio-cultural traditions, the ends to which prayer and ritual are directed are health, success, abundance, fertility, longevity, and general well-being. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic era, many Africans sought solace in religious solutions to the pandemic rather than the scientific ones based on this worldview of spiritual causality.⁵ Some other people combined both scientific and spiritual solutions. It is in the search for these elements of prosperity that ritual may often be directed at reversing curses and invoking the powers of beneficence to bless the efforts of humankind. In the process, evil must be cursed even including human beings—such as witches—believed to be the sources of evil in society.

The public lynching of people suspected to be the sources of supernatural evil such as witches, particularly old women and vulnerable children among many African societies—including African Diaspora communities—is now fairly well known and documented. The problems people face are believed to be supernaturally caused, and in trying to explain the sources of evil, the distinctions between the biblical and African worlds get blurred.⁶ Witches and evil spirits known in the African world get reinvented as the biblical principalities and powers that are the obstacles to human flourishing. What this means is that spiritual warfare, the creation of the ritual context to resist evil through the practices of prayer, exorcism and deliverance, constitutes very important means of achieve health, well-being, prosperity and flourishing in the African religio-cultural context. Therefore, this chapter takes on the sensitive issue that the preaching of prosperity either directly or indirectly buys into this mindset in which misfortune, calamity, and evil generally do not occur by chance.

Christianity and Human Flourishing

I have borrowed the expression human flourishing from Miroslav Volf who explains it in terms of a life that is lived well, the life that goes well, and that life that feels good.⁷ Decoding these thoughts from a biblical perspective, Volf writes that his explanation of human flourishing evokes an image of a living thing, thriving in its proper environment. The biblical images include associated with flourishing include:

a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season and whose leaves do not wither (Psalm

1

:

3

), a sheep lying down in green pastures and walking beside still waters (Psalm

23

:

2

), an eagle, with great wings and long pinions, rich in plumage colors (Ezekiel

17

:

3

).⁸

The two most important images of human flourishing in Western cultural traditions, according to Miroslav Volf, come from the Bible. The first is an image of the ‘verdant garden, beautiful and nourishing, a habitat for humans to till and keep and a temple in which to converse with their God’ (Genesis 2). The second is the image of a universal city that has become a temple, the ‘new Jerusalem’ on a ‘new earth,’ rich in glory and honor of the nations and utterly secure (Revelation 21).⁹ Although Volf does not say so, the image of flourishing in Genesis has an existential orientation that concludes with an eschatological one in Revelation. The comment by Volf on the relationship between these images of human flourishing and the Christian narrative makes it relevant for our understanding of the theology of prosperity in Pentecostalism. He writes:

For those who embrace them, these images aren’t mere dream-clouds, floating around in the sky of religious fancy. They are part of a grand narrative arc starting with the world’s creation and ending with new heavens and the new earth, of which the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures tell; and both, the grand arc and the visions of flourishing, are rooted in convictions about the reality of the One who dwells in inapproachable light. The promise of these visions of flourishing is a prize jewel in the treasury of the Christian faith, one of its best gifts to the world.¹⁰

The aggregate witness of the Christian Scriptures as far as human life in this world is concerned is that God, the one who dwells in inapproachable light want