Missionaries to the City of God: Christian Citizenship and African Immigrants in Rome, Italy

Abstract

This study offers a new perspective on African Pentecostal-Charismatic churches in Europe by presenting a multi-sited ethnographic investigation of migrants’ religious practices in Ghana and Italy. In addition to their political and economic motivations, migrants also lead pious Christian life, which they aspire to pass on to their host society. These migrants experience the paradox of two conflicting statuses that originate from their positions as “migrants” and as “missionaries,” and they navigate this terrain by assuming a status of “Christian citizens,” a biblical term which refers to the after-life of the believers in heaven. “Christian citizenship” becomes a path for the Pentecostal migrants to challenge and negotiate their “non-citizenship” as immigrants in Europe. Believers become Christian citizens based on their mission, moral conduct, and piety. The concept of citizenship is often interpreted as a form of belonging and participating in the nation state. The Pentecostal migrants, however, link it to their religiosity. The believers’ moral conduct, therefore, comes to counterweigh the immorality of their Italian host society, and thus represents an alternative manner for contributing to, and participating in Italian society.

Italy, long a country which people migrated from, has, in the past three decades, became a destination for many immigrants. Its Mediterranean coastline and its proximity to North Africa has transformed it into a back-door-to-Europe for many African migrants. African migration to Italy has rekindled earlier orientalist discourses about southern Italy and exoticization of Africans during Italian colonial rule; these have now been redirected towards the new ‘Other,’ the African-migrant. I argue that, by becoming Christian citizens, believers counter the hegemonic narratives of exclusion of African migrants from Italian society.

This dissertation follows the process of religious migration from Ghana to Italy in three main stages: The historical rise of African Pentecostalism and Christian conversion of children in Ghana, missionary-life around the church in Italy, and life in Rome as immigrants. By exploring the house and the church as places where Christian citizenship is taught and performed and the Italian cooking and hygiene courses, where Italian-citizenship is defined and portrayed, I analyze the various discourses of sovereignty and citizenship as they pertain to the lives of African Pentecostal believers in Italy. These arenas reveal practices of spatiality and temporality, inclusion-exclusion and moral distinction. Thus, this study develops a different understanding of the concept of citizenship, one that is beyond the nation state, and adds to our understanding of the massive global expansion of the Charismatic movement in recent decades.