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| Abidemism | |
|---|---|
 Members of the Abidemist Church celebrating Nativity Day | |
| Type | New Sotirian religious movement |
| Classification | Bahian-initiated church |
| Theology | Pentecostal[Note 1] |
| 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 in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 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.
History
Origins and colonial period
Abidemism traces its origins to the global spread of Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century. Soon after the birth of Pentecostalism at the Not! Azusa Street Revival in [Insert Country Here], some of the earliest Pentecostal missionaries in Bahia arrived in the Estmerish colony of Odo, contemporary Asase Lewa, in 1909. Primarily thanks to its predictions that the end times were imminent—resonating with the local attitude in a society that had witnessed considerable social disruption thanks to colonialism—Pentecostalism spread quickly in Odo, and Abidemi Omolayo, a Gundaya peasant and the son of a traditional religious leader, became one of the earliest Pentecostal converts and one of the first natively-ordained Pentecostal preachers and missionaries in the colony.
Simultaenous to the growth of Pentecostalism, native Odonian society witnessed rising social discontentment and political agitation in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Amongst native elites—particularly the intelligentsia and an embryonic national-bourgeoisie—anti-colonial Pan-Bahianism took root, particularly after the Alààyè Massacre of nationalist protestors and market women in 1912 led to the mass radicalization of Odonian opinion. Simultaneously, increasing dispossession of the peasantry to establish plantations worked on by wage laborers generated intense social discontentment amongst the peasant majority of Odonian society. The largely disorganized peasant Oathing movement drew upon and radicalized the traditional practice of oathing to protest peasant dispossession. Like Pentecostal missionaries and preachers, most adherents of the Oathing movement expected that some sort of apocalyptic, millennarian event was imminent.
It was in this incendiary social context that in January 1913 Abidemi received spiritual visions, both sober and while under the influence of ibogaine, a drug commonly used in Odonian religious ceremonies, that led him to launch Abidemism. According to Abidemi, these visions led him to believe that he had become filled with and an incarnation of the Holy Spirit sent to prophesy an imminent apocalyptic war that would lead to the Millennium and Second Coming. Abidemi connected these visions, and his emerging spirituality, to Odonian tradition and contemporary Odonian social issues; he identified oathing, including its politicization, with Baptism in the Holy Spirit, the prophesied Armageddon with a violent war of national liberation and class struggle, and the Millennium with liberation of Bahians and the establishment of a utopian Sotirian socialist society. His message swiftly led to his excommunication from the mainstream Pentecostal church in Odo; nevertheless, his popularity grew with stories of various miracles attributed to him, most notably the healing of a prostitute with end-stage syphilis. More broadly, Abidemi's millennarian and militant political message aligned well with Odonian opinion at the time, and scholars usually consider early Abidemism a classic example of millenarianism in colonial societies.
In subsequent years, Abidemism expanded rapidly and became articulated much more extensively, resulting in Puritan campaigns against elements of traditional Odonian society considered sinful, an articulated postmillennial doctrine, and members' practices of teetotalism and vegetarianism. By 1916, colonial authorities estimated that Abidemi's followers numbered perhaps 250,000 people, almost all of whom belonged to the rural poor. Though during his lifetime Abidemi did not actively set in motion a revolutionary uprising, his public predictions of, and rhetoric supporting, such an uprising alarmed colonial authorities, which criminalized the public recognition of the religion and arrested and executed Abidemi in August 1916.
Though Abidemi's execution led to much of the Odonian public seeing Abidemi as a martyr, and precipitated mass rioting and upheaval in rural areas in the already-combustile atmosphere, Abidemism—which had only a minimal level of organization thanks to its rapid growth—declined soon after the colonial crackdown, thanks to the crackdown itself and the disorganization in the wake of Abidemi's death, as he had no issue or anointed successors to assume leadership of the faith after his death. By 1919, however, a council of elders made up of Abidemi's extended family and close friends assumed leadership of the remnant Abidemist movement. By 1919, the Asalewan Section of the Workers' International—which in the mid-1910s had competed with Abidemism for the affections of the rural poor, but during the mid-1910s was primarily supported by the intelligentsia, urban proletariat, and seasonal agricultural workers who worked on plantations during peak season but worked most of the year in urban areas—gained widespread support in rural areas as well as urban ones, and had begun actively fomenting people's war by proclaiming the Asalewan Revolution and forming the People's Revoutionary Army in 1918.
Based upon this growing popularity and militancy, Abidemist elders identified the Section and its attempts at fomenting revolution with Abidemi's prophecies of, and support for, an apocalyptic anti-colonial revolution and class struggle and consequently encouraged Abidemists to join the Section en masse. Subsequent to this reorganization, Abidemists played a major role in the Section's revolutionary efforts throughout the 1920s and 1930s, in turn receiving relative toleration and the ability to reestablish clerical organization in Sectoin-controlled rural revolutionary base areas. Subsequent to the end of the Great War, however, the re-entry of Estmerish forces to the country—though considerably weakening all Section and PRA forces—caused special devastation to Abidemist forces in particular, with People's Revolutionary Army divisions predominantly comprised of Abidemists routed at the Battles of Ikirun and Bohicon in 1936 and 1937, respectively.
This devastation to Abidemist forces substantially strengthened the position of orthodox Nemtsovist and Councilist leaders in the Section relative to their Abidemist counterparts, as did the influx of aid from new revolutionary Councilist states such as Chistovodia and Dezevau. Furthermore, the Abidemist doctrine of vegetarianism conflicted with the Section's attempt to appeal to Pygmy groups in the Highlands; while plants traditionally comprised the vast majority of agrarian Lowlander communities' caloric intake even before Abidemist vegetarianism, Pygmies' traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle meant that meat was a far substantial part of Pygmies' caloric intake during this period. It was in this context that secular Nemtsovists Edudzi Agyeman and Adelaja Ifedapo launched the Lokossa Rectification Campaign from 1938 to 1943, enforcing state atheism in Section revolutionary base areas and systematically purging or re-educating Abidemist members of the Section and People's Revolutionary Army.
Early socialist period
Today
Doctrine
Charismatic practices
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, other drugs, including tobacco and khat, both 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 disregarded by Abidemism, Abidemists argue that vegetarianism is an absolute moral necessity, 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
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.
Status of women
Consistent with Pentecostalism's outgrowth from the Westmarckian tradition, the faith has consistently permitted the ordination of women without restrictions since its foundation. Women were essential to the early spread of Abidemism, and many took on key leadership roles in the movement at a time when ordination of women outside churches that did not have roots in the Westmarckian tradition. Many women became attracted to early Abidemism, especially, thanks to its emphasis on female participation and ethical mores that preached against polygamy and against female genital mutilation, alongside opposition to circumcision and a broader opposition to body modifications, ranging from these modifications to modifications such as piercings and tattoos. Early Abidemism, therefore, is generally considered to have had a relatively progressive attitude towards gender and the status of women relative to Odonian society more broadly.
However, contemporary Abidemism is frequently considered to have highly conservative views on gender relative to the broader Asalewan population. Though early Abidemism's emphasis on female participation has not changed since the early twentieth century, this emphasis on female participation and empowerment has become generally accepted by most of Asalewan society and is no longer distinctive. Furthermore, most Abidemists have maintained their historic opposition to abortion and divorce at a time when such things have long been legalized and uncontroversial amongst Asase Lewa's majority. Furthermore, though the mainstream and Edudizt Abidemist sects have maintained their historic opposition to body modification, including female genital mutilation, many Lokpa Abidemists are unopposed to body modifications; indeed, opposition to the strict government prohibition of female genital mutilation was one of the key grievances driving the Lokpaland insurgency.
Sects
Mainstream Abidemism
Edudzist Abidemism
Lokpa Abidemism
Abidemism Outside Asase Lewa
Notes
- ↑ While Abidemism maintains Pentecostal and Charismatic liturgical practices, most Pentecostal churches do not consider the Abidemist Churchpart of the Pentecostal tradition, as its theology differs significantly from most Pentecostal churches.