‘Persuasive Worship’: Mediating Religious Emotions in Nigerian Pentecostal Music

Abstract

This study explores the intersection between music, religion and affective experiences in Nigerian Pentecostal Christianity. Specifically, it discusses how Pentecostals including musicians utilize oral modes of songs, testimonies and personal experiences to engender and frame religious emotions. The study adopts a qualitative content analysis approach. Two music videos by a Nigerian Pentecostal music minister and other archival resources provided data for the study. Data were textually and structurally analysed. Through the conceptual framework of Meyer’s aesthetics of persuasion, the study demonstrates how music serves as the rhetorical and sonic conduit for appealing to the senses and invoking religious emotions among Pentecostal believers. This article concludes that religious emotions are not only religiously facilitated but are also socially shaped through the agency of people, oration and musical sounds in Pentecostal Christianity.