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Abidemism
Members of the Abidemist Church celebrating Nativity Day
Type	New Sotirian religious movement
Classification	Bahian-initiated church
Theology	Pentecostal
Region	Asase Lewa
Language	Asalewan
Founder	Abidemi Omolayo
Origin	January 1913
Members	7 million

Abidemism is a millennarian and Charismatic Sotirian new religious movement in Asase Lewa founded by Abidemi Omolayo in 1913. A postmillennial faith, Abidemism regards Abidemi as an incarnation of the Holy Spirit sent to prophesy an imminent apocalyptic war taking the form of an anti-colonial and class war that would inaugurate the Millennium, followed by the Second Coming and Last Judgment. Abidemism synthesizes this millenarian doctrine with Pentecostal liturgical practices, most prominently footwashing, glossolalia, Baptism with the Holy Spirit, and faith healing, and with highly Puritan ethics, including the practice of vegetarianism and community of goods and strict prohibitions on alcohol, tobacco, polygamy, magic and witchcraft, and dancing.

Originating in the early twentieth century as an outgrowth of the Oathing movement, Abidemism has historically suffered from intense state repression in Asase Lewa. Its revolutionary and millenarian doctrines meant Abidemism received significant suppression by Estmerish colonial authorities soon after it became widespread; Abidemism first competed with the Asalewan Section of the Workers' International for the affections of the early twentieth-century Asalewan lower classes before Abidemists joined the Section in large numbers in the 1920s and 1930s, before being purged during the Lokossa Rectification Campaign. After the Rectification Campaign, the Abidemist Church was intensely suppressed by the Asalewan Section and early revolutionary socialist state as part of its policy of state atheism. Nevertheless, the religion survived decades of persecution; the Lokpa Spiritual Freedom Army adopted a variant of the faith during the Lokpaland insurgency in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the Pyschological-Technological Revolution resulted in the legalization of the pro-government Revolutionary Abidemist Church in 1982. One of the largest Bahian-initiated churches outside the Brethren Church, Abidemism is today the only growing major religious denomination in Asase Lewa and its adherents in the country number approximately 7 million people, roughly one-tenth of the country's population.

Doctrine

Charismatic practices

Abidemist worshippres speaking in tongues in Edudzi Agyeman City.

Abidemism traces its historic religious roots to the early Pentecostal movement, as some of the earliest Pentecostal missionaries in Bahia converted Abidemi Omolayo to Sotirianity in 1909 and Abidemi subsequently worked as a Pentecostal preacher and missionary until founding Abidemism in 1913. Based upon that Pentecostal, Ebidemi subsequently incorporated Pentecostal and Charismatic practices into Abidemist liturgy that remain until this day; practices such as footwashing, laying on of hands glossolalia, Baptism with the Holy Spirit, and faith healing all figure prominently in the Abidemist spiritual experience. Abidemists view these practices as spiritual gifts that reveal the divine in everyday believers' lives, revive what Abidemists believe to be the practices of Early Sotirianity, and imbue believers with spiritual power so that they might use such power during the end times and Armageddon, which Abidemi believed to be imminent, literal, and necessary for inaugurating the Millennium and Second Coming.

Puritanism and lifestyle

In accordance with classical Pentecostal and Westmarckian ethics, Abidemism instructs its believers to maintain outward holiness, or modesty in dress, appearance, and speech, and to abstain from dancing, alcohol, Religion and drugs#Christianity other drugs, including tobacco, khat, and ibogaine, all of which are commonly-used in Asase Lewa. Furthermore, Abidemism places an emphasize an emphasis—at least theoretically—on Puritan ethics aimed at purifying Asalewan life of Fetishist and, more broadly, worldly and material practices. As such, the sect prohibits traditional practices such as polygamy and magic and witchcraft, and its clerics have frequently been much harsher in denunciations of syncretism of Sotirianity with Bahian Fetishism—a common practice in Asalewan Folk Sotirianity—than many Mainline Amendist clerics.

In addition to classical Pentecostal and Puritan ethics, Abidemism's literal interpretation of the Bible, including passages heralding universal vegetarianism among all species, has led the sect to mandate vegetarianism. Though other Sotirian sects have strongly discouraged the consumption of meat, encouraged pescetarianism, or mandated vegetarianism on special occassions such as fast days or Lent, Abidemism is distinct in that its prohibition on meat consumption is both absolute and moralistic; though the perceived health benefits and self-sacrifice associated with vegetarianism that motivated other Sotirian sects to encourage the practice are not discouraged by Abidemism, Abidemists argue that vegetarianism is a moral necessity in accordance with these Biblical passages, and Abidemist preachers, including Abidemi himself, have identified non-human animals as part of the larger category of the poor and oppressed. Consequently, Abidemists in modern-day Asase Lewa have become early and notable advocates of animal rights and to a lesser extent environmentalism in the country.

In addition to its promotion of vegetarianism, Abidemism is distinguished from other Sotirian sects in its promotion of community of goods. In accordance with its call to live according to the perceived uncorrupted ways of Early Sotirianity, and passages in Acts that spoke of early Sotirians holding possessions in common, Abidemism promotes—at least nominally—common ownership of property, and Abidemi prophesied that the Millennium would be basically communistic.

However, Abidemism differs from other Sotirian sects promoting community of goods in that it historically has not emphasized the voluntary organization of its members into autonomous, self-reliant communes for practical reasons; because its followers primarily came from the lower classes, during the Toubacterie Abidemists' landlessness and indigence, combined with colonial practices of forced labor and severe restrictions on Bahian ownership of land, meant that founding self-reliant communes was virtually impossible. Instead, Abidemi encouraged his followers to struggle towards a society based on communal ownership, leading Abidemists to join Asalewan Section of the Workers' International in large numbers before their purge from the Section in the late 1930s. Because such a society has been constructed in modern Asase Lewa—but by the secular Asalewan Section rather than by Abidemists— contemporary Abidemists have debated the legitimacy of communal Asalewan society.

Though during its prohiition most Abidemists were either passive or moderately opposed to common ownership at the hands of the state and, later, Workers' Councils, the majority position of most Abidemists following legalization has been supportive of secular common ownership, as an economic system equivalent to that prophesied to exist in the Millennium. Because its practical position on common ownership has changed radically in its accordance with the political situation of the time—from incorporating it as part of a broader anti-colonial millennarian program in the early twentieth century, to embracing secular common ownership as part of an increasing friendliness with the Asalewan state in the modern day—some scholars have argued that its commitment to common ownership has been more theoretical than practical, and a far less important element of its ethics than classical Pentecostal ethics and vegetarianism.

Eschatology

The Lord says: "The time is coming when the poor will be oppressed and the Sotirians can neither buy nor sell, unless they have 'the mark of the beast'... The time will come when the poor man will say that he has nothing to eat and work will be shut down... That is going to cause the poor man to go to these places and break in to get food. This will cause the rich man to come out with his gun to make war with the laboring man... blood [will] be in the streets like an outpouring rain from heaven."

Early Pentecostal prophecy

Many Abidemists believed the Asalewan Revolution, a violent anti-colonial class war along the lines Abidemi prophesied, to be a sign of the end times.

Abidemism is distinguished from other Pentecostal churches in that it rejects dispensationalism and instead adopts a postmillennial eschatalogy. While it regards the Millennium and end times as divinely preordained—and that the divine indeed sent Abidemi Omolayo, an incarnation of the Holy Spirit, to prophesy and hasten these events—it believes that the Millennium must ultimately be achieved by human action through the establishment of a society founded on Sotirian ethics and social justice.

However, as a millennarian sect, Abidemists differ from traditional postmillennialists and agree with the Pentecostal and dispensationalist notion that the Great Tribulation, Armageddon, and the end times more broadly, are both literal and imminent, though it believes that the Great Tribulation, Armageddon, and the Millennium are all prerequisites to the Second Coming. Abidemists also agree with traditional dispensationalists and Pentecostals, and disagree with many postmillennialists, in viewing the Great Tribulation and Armageddon as literal and the Millennium as something not established through gradual, peaceful means, but as necessarily established through violent struggle at Armageddon.

In addition to its postmillennial view, Abidemism's interpretation of eschatology and Armageddon is basically historicist and humanistic in nature. In its early-twentieth century form—and in the interpretation of most mainstream and Edudzist Abidemists today—Abidemism equated the Great Tribulation with colonization, and the Antisotirias with Estmerish colonists and missionaries who advanced an interpretation of Sotirianity congruent with colonialism. Consequently, Abidemism argued that Armageddon would specifically take the form of an anti-colonial and class war—first as a war against colonialism in Asase Lewa, and second as a war of the global Subaltern and working class against Euclean elites–that would lead to the establishment of a utopian Sotirian socialist society in the Millennium, followed by the Second Coming and Last Judgment.