Faith Writers Are Killing Nigerian Literature

Let’s stop pretending. Nigerian faith writers are sitting on a goldmine and acting like gatekeepers of mediocrity. The same people screaming about “winning souls” are the ones suffocating Nigerian literature  and they don’t even realize it.

1. Faith writers are scared of the world.
Instead of exporting our faith narratives to global audiences, they hide in tiny Nigerian bookshops and church bazaars. Nollywood already proved the world is hungry for our spiritual imagination: Agbara Nla packed cinemas in the 90s, Abejoye runs viral in the diaspora, and even “deliverance movies” like Apoti Eri spread like wildfire on VCDs. But writers? They’re still recycling village-witchcraft plots that never leave Oshodi.

2. Faith writers confuse tract writing with literature.
There’s a difference between a novel and a sermon, but Nigerian faith writers collapse both into flat storytelling. Go to any Redeemed church fair, you’ll see rows of thin “books” with titles like Married But Lonely in Christ or My Husband is a Serpent in the Spirit Realm. These don’t travel because they’re not literature, they’re pamphlets. Meanwhile, Chimamanda’s Purple Hibiscus weaves faith and trauma and sells worldwide. Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities pulls Igbo cosmology and faith into Booker Prize territory. Faith writers? They think adding a Bible verse at the end of every chapter makes them authors.

3. Faith writers kill ambition with small thinking.
When global publishers are begging for African spiritual narratives, Nigerian faith writers stay locked in their ghettos. Look at demand: Afrobeat-inspired gospel like Sinach’s Way Maker went global, covered in over 50 languages. Nollywood’s The Figurine played on faith and superstition and won international festivals. Even Kunle Afolayan’s October 1 used religion as a backdrop and found audiences beyond Nigeria. Meanwhile, faith writers are busy producing “daily devotionals” no one outside their WhatsApp group reads. They’re so obsessed with “church audience approval” they can’t imagine their stories shaking Berlin, New York, or São Paulo.

Faith writers are killing Nigerian literature not because faith doesn’t sell — it does — but because they refuse to scale their imagination. They bury gold, polish pebbles, and call it ministry. The world is waiting for Nigerian stories that merge faith, culture, and raw human struggle. But as long as our faith writers keep writing like scared evangelists instead of global novelists, they’ll keep suffocating what should be our loudest literary export.