Description: Since independence in 1963, Kenya has been a personalised patronage state, run by a corrupt elite for its own benefit. Under the bland label 'Kenyan Christianity', several different if overlapping realities can be distinguished, and it is these which this book investigates, relating them to the country's politics and public life.
Review Quotes: "A longtime observer of Christianity in Africa, Gifford has written a keen survey of the ideas and actions of Christian organisations and their leaders in Kenya. Gifford writes convincingly about the nature of Kenyan theology and various doctrinal issues, but the more notable contribution of this first-rate study derives from his focus on churches as social and political actors."--Foreign Affairs
"An impressive book, full of detail to surprise the scholar....As in his earlier work on Ghana, Gifford goes through the sermons he's heard in Nairobi's churches with a finetoothed comb, highlighting the rhetorical strategies that preachers use and the theology that underpins them. This is a very valuable book. For Europeans and Americans, it usefully illuminates the great variety of Christian practice in Kenya today. And for Kenyans and their friends, it raises important questions about the role the church ought to play in the corrupted political world."--Dr D.R. Peterson, University of Cambridge