This article employs social listening techniques to capture the themes and public response to popular coronavirus-related social media posts made by leaders via their public Facebook pages at two of Ghana’s largest and fastest-growing churches: The Church of Pentecost (CoP) and the United Denominations Originating from the Lighthouse Group of Churches (UD-OLGC). We examine how religious leaders employed social media in response to the pandemic, and how these religious groups reinforced their relevance and reinvented themselves in the face of COVID-19. Additionally, we explore the major beliefs, perceptions, and values that the church’s social media users portrayed in response to the church’s pandemic postings, using social listening techniques and sentiment analysis. These results show how, while adapting to the realities demanded by the pandemic, the social media presence of two of Ghana’s largest churches served as a site for the contestation and negotiation of the religious authority of the leadership.
This article discusses the role of mega size African Pentecostal/charismatic prophets and charismatic figures in the public response to Covid-19. There were responses to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in late 2019, and in Africa, a lot of these were religious. This article examines the intersection between religion and the Covid-19 pandemic, in the context contemporary African charismatic-prophetism. The data is sought mainly from oral and media sources of the various charismatic figures at the center of the discussion. The same religious interpretations that inform the understanding of events in society and human life in Africa were extended to the interpretation, diagnosis, and response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The charismatic power and influence of Pentecostal/charismatic church leaders, such as Emmanuel Makandiwa of Zimbabwe, was evident through the public role that the prophets played as these churches articulated their responses to the pandemic as a public health issue with spiritual implications.
The COVID-19 pandemic flustered dimensions of public and private life in varied ways. In Nigeria, as in several parts of the world, faith-based groups variously tried to make sense of the event as they also try to cope with government ‘lockdown’ measures introduced to contain and limit the spread of the virus. This study focuses on the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), one of the largest megachurches within global religious landscapes. The study compares the narratives birthed within the RCCG to what obtained among other Pentecostal denominational leaders to make sense of the pandemic as everyone confronted a befuddling global event. Both science and religion became instruments of discerning the meaning of the pandemic, sometimes as competing and sometimes reconciled.
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