Nigeria is Africa's most populous state and its estimated 24 per cent of Protestants (Baur 1994: 524) represent a significant portion of African Protestantism. Catholicism is perhaps as large, but exact proportions of religious communities are unknown, and for good reason. Nigeria is the front line between modern Africa's main religions: Christianity and Islam. Since they are probably evenly balanced, and the country is the regional superpower, the political prize is tantalising. Clashing religious visions of the nation have become prominent, giving Nigerian evangelical politics a different dimension from the African cases already studied. Nigeria has one of the most important Muslim-Christian political clashes in any nation-state today.

Muslim and Christian political projects have arisen against a background of economic and political failure and ethnic rivalry. Oil wealth at first kept hopes of rapid development alive, but since the early 1980s the economy has plummeted. In addition, Nigeria has had military regimes rather than one-party civilian governments, and, after a ‘feigned conversion’ (Joseph 1997: 375) to democracy in the early 1990s, the military fended off international pressure and maintained a repressive system.

Regional and ethnic questions simmer near the surface. In the 1960s the largely Catholic Igbo in the east tried to break away as Biafra. The Igbo, the (predominantly Protestant or Muslim) Yoruba in the south-west and the Muslim Hausa-Fulani in the north together make up two-thirds of the population.