Machiavelli cannot accomplish conversion of the world by himself. He has to convince future philosophers to follow or obey him. This is his succession problem.

This chapter highlights an important but neglected type of evidence for Christianity: the content of the Christian revelatory claim. This content consists, at its core, of scriptures and definitive statements of doctrine; these are structured, vivified, and interpreted through various media. Though evidence of this sort is neglected by natural theologians, it has substantial evidential value in the minds of ordinary believers, underwriting both God’s existence and Christianity itself. The chapter offers beginning defenses of three theses: (1) The content of a revelatory claim may provide evidence enabling an inquirer to assent simultaneously to the revelatory claim and the embedded proposition that God exists; (2) Aquinas’s systematic unfolding of Christian revelatory content can enhance the plausibility, both for agnostic inquirers and for believers, of the claim the content was revealed; and (3) An argument from revelatory content can reasonably persuade agnostic inquirers that assent to theism and Christianity is personally obligatory.

The chapter analyzes how frequent- and infrequent-churchgoing youth understand their citizenship identities and obligations at the local and national levels. Both frequent and infrequent churchgoers highlight communal aspects of citizenship, but frequent churchgoers stress citizenship as faith-inspired actions such as prayer and reciprocal ties in church communities. Frequent churchgoers view citizenship as acts that build the nation, though this citizen goal often has a distinctly Christian tenor. Frequent churchgoers use more legalistic language than infrequent churchgoers and display more political efficacy. Afrobarometer findings confirm that more religious involvement relates to higher political activism, but our respondents illustrate that youth agents at times contest religious leaders’ political messaging and question those leaders’ integrity. Case studies from a renewalist church in Ghana and a mainline Protestant South African leadership program illustrate how youth adapt political messaging as they craft their own citizen identities.

Disagreements over a religion’s interpretation can cause a schism – a formal division into variants with their own officials, doctrines, and rituals. Islam’s Sunni–Shii split over succession disputes came early in its history. One might expect either Muslim modernizers or liberal Muslims to have split Islam further. They have done so only informally, in that the global Muslim community is divided between practicing and nominal Muslims. But nowhere in the Middle East is discontent lacking among practicing Muslims over state-approved interpretations. This is evident in the popularity of unregulated fatwa services. Substantial constituencies consider rituals outdated, clerics unprincipled, and gender discrimination unacceptable. But widespread discontent within a religious community need not generate a disunion. If the risk of joining the leavers is grave enough, disaffected members will stick with the status quo. A successful schism requires, at some stage, open collective action on the part of a constituency with a shared religious vision, possibly under leaders able to strategize, represent the membership, and coordinate moves. Also necessary is that supporters of the religious status quo lack the organizational capacity to erect roadblocks. At present, any group trying to develop an alternative to Sunnism or Shiism would face major resistance.

Chapter 4 provides a rich ethnographic analysis of everyday transnational practices of relatedness, including calling, texting, visiting, and sending remittances. It begins by considering power and affect in moral economies of transnational kinship, along with various communicative means of staying in touch across space, to illuminate the factors, contexts, and modes that inform the ways in which kinship dilemmas are experienced. What follows is a look at interactions and exchanges in which kin draw on the discourses and logics of ‘tradition’ and born-again Christianity to negotiate what being related means and entails. In considering specific familial dilemmas, I show how they call into question ideas of migrant personhood and who is materially responsible for whom, illuminating the moral, affective, material, and existential stakes of these transnational practices.

In the Conclusion, I reflect on the importance of adopting a generational, life-stage, and gendered lens to the study of transnational families. Close consideration of the interplay between physical, social, and phenomenological distance in transnational families demonstrates that the experience of distance is affectively mediated and inevitably relative, just as the meaning of relatedness is negotiated over time and across space. Since economic and social processes are always made sense of from particular social locations, the Conclusion underscores how attention to familial transformations is productive for understanding wider social change.

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.

we have a moral code that meshes with Christianity, why then are we so often non-social and why do we so blatantly disobey the dictates of Jesus Christ? “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–4). Think about it. The Great War (later called the First World War), 1914–1918, between (depending how you count) 20 and 40 million dead. The Second World War, 1939–1945, 60 to 80 million dead. The Russian Civil War, 1917–1922, 5 to 10 million dead. The Chinese Civil War, 1927–1949, 10 million dead. And so it goes. We are not yet at the pogroms, from the Turks killing Armenians, Stalin and the Kulaks, Hitler and the Jews, down to Rwanda and the killing of the Tutsis, not to mention half a million women raped as a preliminary to grotesque mutilation of genitals.