Senior Research Seminar with Dr Anna-Riikka Kauppinen (University of Cambridge)
God’s Deposits: Circulation of Cash and Charisma in Ghana’s Retail Banking
When nine Ghanaian banks collapsed during the country’s 2017-2019 financial crisis, a popular Charismatic Pentecostal pastor was at the centre of public debate as the board chairman of one of the closed banks. The case drew public attention to the financial circulation and spiritual ties between Ghanaian retail banks and Charismatic Pentecostal mega-churches that have emerged since the past 30 years of Pentecostal institutional expansion in West Africa. Drawing on several months of fieldwork in another Ghanaian bank that had such ties to a Charismatic mega-church, this paper explores the entanglement of financial and spiritual value in Ghana’s banking sector. Local banks consider mega-churches as important ‘clients’ due to the consistent flow of liquid cash they amass through annual celebrations, monthly tithes, and weekly offerings, which punctuates the cycle of banks’ liquidity management. The circulation of cash is underpinned by the exchange of spiritual favours – bankers’ fellowship and pay monthly tithes to client-churches, and pastors serve as spiritual and ‘leadership’ advisors in banks’ boards. Arguing that banks and Charismatic mega-churches have become interconnected economic infrastructures, this paper raises broader methodological questions on studying trajectories of financialisation beyond the nexus of states and markets.