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Abidemism
Members of the Abidemist Church celebrating Christmas
Type	New christian 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 it competed with the Asalewan Section of the Workers' International for the affections of the early twentieth-century Asalewan lower classes and received significant suppression by Estmerish colonial authorities soon after it became widespread. The Abidemist Church was also intensely suppressed by the Asalewan Section and early revolutionary socialist state as part of its policy of state atheism, and the Lokpa Spiritual Freedom Army adopted a variant of the faith during the Lokpaland insurgency. Nevertheless, the religion survived decades of persecution, and the Pyschological-Technological Revolution of the early 1980s resulted in the legalization of the pro-government Revolutionary Abidemist Church. 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

Eschatology

The Lord says: "The time is coming when the poor will be oppressed and the Christians 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 would be in the streets like an outpouring rain from heaven."

Early Pentecostal prophecy

Some 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 Christian 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 Antichrist with Estmerish colonists and missionaries who advanced an interpretation of Christianity 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 Christian socialist society in the Millennium, followed by the Second Coming and Last Judgment.