NJOMACS

Nigeria is one of the most intensely religious and most media-saturated nations in Africa, yet the relationship between its dominant religious institutions and its mass media landscape has received insufficient critical attention. This article examines whether Nigerian Christian broadcasting, across television, radio, and digital platforms, functions as a genuine prophetic voice contributing to public moral consciousness, or whether it has degenerated into what this article terms “sacred noise”: institutionally self-promoting communication that crowds out authentic moral discourse while projecting the appearance of spiritual engagement. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, the philosophy of religious communication, and African communal ethics, the article argues that the dominance of prosperity gospel theology in Nigerian religious media has produced a systematic distortion of the communicative function that authentic religious witness is called to perform in a pluralistic democratic society. The article identifies three diagnostic markers of this distortion, the commercialisation of religious airtime, the displacement of structural justice by personal prosperity, and the colonisation of religious authority by political patronage, and proposes a framework for prophetic communicative renewal grounded in the church’s irreplaceable moral vocation.