One of the singular features about this expansion is that, unlike in Weber’s day, it isn’t being directed from above, by imperial powers or centralized churches in the northern hemisphere, but from initiatives within developing countries such as Nigeria, Brazil, and Ghana. The Ghanaian spin on Pentecostalism takes full advantage of modernity while reaching into its own past for a little spiritual frisson. As the country has modernized in the past twenty years — its democracy becoming more entrenched, its society more transparent — Pentecostal leaders have in their own way helped nudge it along. The preachers may disparage the sexual and cultural mores attendant to modernity, but they nevertheless conceive of themselves as smoothly modern. Their success is predicated upon their savvy uptake of new technologies, from text messaging to the Internet; their promotion of education; their aptitude for marketing and business; and their obsession with theories of organizational bureaucracy and competitive advantage. But for all these sophisticated overlays, the core of the religion’s appeal remains its capacity to connect people with a deep, enduring substratum of primal spirituality and the hidden ecstasies of human experience. In the process, they are rewriting what it means to be modern in Africa.

Travel along any major street in Accra: the hand-painted placards for its bewildering array of churches are as prominent as those for any other goods or services, from hair extensions to used tires and wash basins. The places of worship themselves — some as slight as timber-framed hovels hosting so-called “one-man churches” and their prophets, others arena-scaled “chapels” like Action International — variously boast of miracles, prophecy, healing, or prosperity, as though communicating their divine mission were a matter of brand differentiation.

Much of my time shuttling between Accra’s churches in trotros and taxis was spent in the company of slim, twenty-five-year-old Albert Successful, a loquacious and hustling young evangelical clad in a crisp white, wide-collared dress shirt, sports jacket, pointy Italian shoes, and an unfortunate belt bearing a large Dolce & Gabbana logo at the buckle. I was introduced to Albert by Girish Daswani, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who has focused much of his research on Ghanaian Pentecostalism. “He represents some of the main reasons why someone would become Pentecostal,” Daswani told me. “It helps him deal with his fears, his marginalization, the obstacles he faces. And it feeds his aspiration for something better.”

As I learned through Daswani, Albert was born Albert Atta Gyimah to a poor farming family in arid west-central Ghana. When he was still quite young, a spiritualist preacher foretold that he would enjoy a rich, prosperous life and one day lead his family. Rather than feeling blessed by the news, his stepmother grew envious and suspicious of his powers, worrying over the future status of her own, preferred kin. He began to suspect her of consulting a local fetish priest and using witchcraft to cause him physical discomfort. “I was so sick; I believed she was trying to kill me,” he said as we sat, stuck in one of Accra’s endless traffic jams.

Later, after Albert’s twin sister died under peculiar circumstances, his father accused him of invoking the spirits that killed her. He ceased paying Albert’s school fees, threw him out of the house, and revealed that they weren’t biologically related. Albert had by then already converted to Pentecostalism, but, cut off from both sides of the family and denied his inheritance, he embraced the feverish intensity of multi-day prayer camps, disposing himself toward their promises of wealth, travel abroad, and personal transformation through an intimate relationship with God.

He eventually migrated to Accra, and there he took his new name — an act that represented a conscious break with his troubled past and enabled him, along with prayer and worship, to conceive a new, liberating narrative for himself. He tried out several congregations before joining the Church of Pentecost and immersing himself in its social network, which helped clothe, shelter, and feed him. The Bible provided him with symbols and stories that sustained his goals — he identified especially with Joseph of the Old Testament, whose jealous brothers sold him into slavery. And as Joseph overcame his plight, rising to the rank of Pharaoh’s viceroy, so, too, would Albert Successful.

On a return visit to Action International, Albert gamely chatted up various church officials while I waited to speak with its second-in-command, Bishop James Saah. I lingered at a bookstall lined with self-improvement paperbacks, the most thumbed-over and prominent of which were dedicated to the topic of God and the wealth he wants us to enjoy. The leading counsellor in the field appeared to be one Isaac Giwa, prolific author of Provoking Your Harvest; Be a Super Achiever; Million Dollar Generating Habit$; and my personal favourite, Get Ready . . . Money Cometh, whose cover teased prospective readers with a fluttering pile of American dollar bills.

Although some Ghanaian assemblies, including Albert’s Church of Pentecost, oppose the open commercialization of Pentecostalism, preachers like Saah embrace the marketplace with entrepreneurial flair. They know they’ve helped create a soup of competing creeds, and insist that their canniness hardly diminishes the integrity of their faith. They are merely making religion relevant. And the competition forces them to innovate. “The question is always, how can we immediately connect the gospel to people’s lives?” explained Saah. “We tailor our message to the needs of day-to-day life. We can take the gospel into peoples’ marriages and relationships, but we can also apply it to their work, money problems, and businesses. This is where we bridge the gap.”

This sort of prosperity preaching isn’t unique to Ghana. In impoverished African countries with few clear routes for upward mobility, little in the way of state services to address social ills like alcoholism or spousal abuse, and complex kinship systems that place onerous financial stress on those who achieve even modest success, the church promotes itself as one of the few ladders to wealth and happiness that is accessible to all. The first time I witnessed Saah onstage at Action International, he was talking up the prosperity angle, but with this warning: “God wants you to have success, but having success also means you will have more enemies.”

Saah earned a master’s in leadership and governance from a Ghanaian business school, and gives leadership seminars almost as often as he preaches. For him, many of the “secular principles” that engender success in the business world are present in the Bible if you read it correctly. He likes retelling the Old Testament story of David and Goliath, for example, as a lesson in competitive advantage. “When I studied strategic management,” he said, “I could see the building blocks and benchmarks of a successful organization. Strategic advantage, core competency, critical factors, treasury — all the things we don’t normally apply to life I applied to the word of God. It was a hit.”