The Sociology of Religious Entrepreneurship and Social Change in Nigerian Pentecostalism: An Original Theoretical Account

Nigerian Pentecostalism's explosive growth has generated a distinctive institutional form, the mega-church, that operates simultaneously as a religious organisation, economic enterprise, media corporation, and social welfare provider, yet existing sociology of religion frameworks inadequately theorise this multi-institutional character and its social change implications. This doctoral study develops an original theoretical account of religious entrepreneurship and social change in Nigerian Pentecostalism, grounded in six years of comparative multi-site research across Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Ibadan. Fieldwork combined immersive institutional ethnography at four major Pentecostal organisations, 89 in-depth interviews with pastors, congregants, and critics, discourse analysis of prosperity gospel media content spanning 2014 to 2024, and survey data on congregant social outcomes from 480 respondents. The original theoretical framework, termed Spiritualised Social Capitalism, proposes that Nigerian Pentecostalism has developed a distinctive mode of articulating religious authority with capitalist enterprise logic in ways that simultaneously generate genuine social welfare contributions and reproduce class inequality through spiritual merit stratification. Three original theoretical propositions are advanced: Pentecostal prosperity theology functions as an indigenous theory of social mobility that partially substitutes for absent state social protection; the mega-church functions as a parallel welfare state providing healthcare, education, and employment networks; and the religious entrepreneur-founder constitutes a distinctive social type irreducible to either charismatic authority or rational-legal bureaucratic categories. The doctoral contribution advances the sociology of religion through theoretically original analysis grounded in the world's most dynamic Pentecostal context. Keywords: Pentecostalism, religious entrepreneurship, social change, prosperity theology, Nigeria.