The future of Christianity is perfectly captured in this sad New York Times Magazine image.
12churches-600-1.jpg
The pastor, Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran, is Nigerian, and his chapel, Chapel of Restoration, which is in the Bronx, is a branch of a church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, that's based in Nigeria. Daniel is the son of Okonkwo's son, Isaac. But what we see in the image of him and the American lady on her knees is not just the result of the tragedy in Things Fall Apart (something like "the return of the repressed") but also the unification of underdeveloped spaces. Parts of the Bronx have less and less in common with Manhattan and are more and more becoming one with Lagos and São Paulo.

Ajayi-Adeniran belongs to one of its most vigorously expansionary religious movements, a homegrown Pentecostal denomination that is crusading to become a global faith.

As Mike Davis points out in Planet of the Slums, the rise of Pentecostalism (in African and South American slums) is linked to the rise of neoliberalism. It is a faith that flourishes in zones that have little or no access to basic state services. Faith is fast replacing the withering state.