There is a scene that repeats itself, with only the props changed, from Lagos to Lusaka, from Chennai to Cebu. A tent revival, a mosque compound, a prayer camp on the edge of a city that has outgrown its own infrastructure. Inside, thousands of people, mostly young, mostly precarious, mostly failed in some specific and personal way by the state that claims them as citizens, are being told that their suffering has a name, an enemy, and an imminent end. Outside, in air-conditioned rooms in Washington, Riyadh, Doha, Moscow, and occasionally Beijing, other people are having a very different conversation about the same tent. They are talking about it as infrastructure. As reach. As an asset class.
I want to be precise about what I am claiming and what I am not. I am not claiming that the woman weeping at the altar, or the boy memorizing verses by lamplight, is an instrument of foreign policy. Faith of that kind is real, and it deserves better than to be reduced to someone else's strategy. What I am claiming is that the institutions that shape, fund, and scale that faith increasingly are instruments of foreign policy, sometimes deliberately, more often as a welcome side effect of money that was sent for other reasons, and that a South African scholar, writing from a continent that has been the object of every great power's affection at least twice in living memory, has a particular obligation to say so plainly.
A Rise That Outpaces Every Secular Explanation. The data is not ambiguous, even if its meaning is contested. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has grown faster in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past three decades than any religious movement has grown anywhere in recorded history, reshaping not just Sunday mornings but labour markets, marriage law, and electoral coalitions from Lagos to Nairobi. Salafi and Wahhabi-inflected Islam has displaced older, more syncretic Sufi traditions across the Sahel and parts of East Africa, arriving with new mosques, new schools, and a theology considerably less patient with local custom than the one it replaced. Hindu nationalism has moved from the margins of Indian politics to its administrative centre, rewriting textbooks and citizenship law along the way. Evangelical blocs have become kingmakers in Brazilian and Filipino elections. In each case, the standard explanations - postcolonial disillusionment, the failure of secular nationalism, urbanization without employment, a genuine hunger for meaning that Marxist and liberal modernity never managed to satisfy - are true. They are just not sufficient. They explain why the ground was fertile. They do not explain why the seed arrived in such enormous, well-financed, precisely targeted quantities, at exactly the moment it did.
Following the Money, Cautiously. Here the evidence becomes harder, and honesty requires slowing down rather than speeding up. American evangelical organizations have poured an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars annually into African, Latin American, and Southeast Asian ministries over the past two decades, sums that dwarf the missionary budgets of the colonial era and that flow through a dense, only partially mapped network of foundations, media platforms, and Bible colleges. Gulf state funding for mosque construction, madrassa curricula, and imam training across West Africa and South and Southeast Asia has been documented by researchers tracking everything from textbook content to clerical appointments, and it correlates closely with a visible hardening of doctrine in regions that previously practiced far more accommodating forms of Islam. None of this money arrives with a memo attached explaining its geopolitical purpose. Most of it, I suspect, is sent by people who sincerely believe they are saving souls, not containing rivals. But intent and effect are different questions, and a scholar's job is to ask about effect.
And the effect, increasingly, sits alongside a second, quieter contest, the one over what kind of state the twenty-first-century Global South will become.
The China Variable. China's engagement with the developing world has been resolutely secular, transactional, and this is the part that matters here, largely indifferent to the internal belief systems of its partners. Infrastructure loans, port concessions, and telecommunications contracts arrive without theological conditions attached. Beijing does not ask whether a government is Muslim, Christian, animist, or officially atheist; it asks whether the deal closes. This is precisely what has made Chinese influence so effective across so much of the Global South, and precisely what other external actors find hardest to compete with on economic terms alone. You cannot easily outbid a Belt and Road port deal with a soft loan. You can, however, maybe offer something China's model structurally cannot: meaning, community, moral certainty, and a transnational identity that competes directly with the identity a purely transactional patron never bothers to build.
It would be too tidy and, frankly, beneath the dignity of the people whose faith this is to claim that Washington or Riyadh sat down and designed religious revival as an anti-China containment strategy. The more honest reading is that American strategic culture, shaped by a Cold War in which religious civil society was a genuine and effective tool against Soviet secular materialism, never fully retired that instinct, and found it ready to hand again as competition with Beijing sharpened after 2015. Religious soft power did not need to be invented for this purpose; it only needed to be redirected, and organizations already flush with donor money and missionary zeal did not require much persuading. Analysts in Washington have written with striking candour about faith-based civil society as a durable advantage the United States holds over China in the contest for the developing world's alignment, a point rarely made this explicitly in African or Asian public discourse, where it is instead experienced simply as the arrival of a new church, a new curriculum, a new NGO.
I want to register the counter-argument fairly, because it deserves a hearing and because overclaiming here would dishonour the discipline I practise. Most serious scholars of global Pentecostalism and political Islam resist the containment narrative as too neat, and they have good reasons: the growth of these movements has deep endogenous roots, in the specific failures of African and Asian postcolonial states to deliver security, healthcare, and economic mobility; in genuine theological innovation led by local clergy, not foreign handlers; in the sheer demographic weight of youthful populations searching for structure their governments cannot provide. To read all of this as proxy warfare is to erase African, Asian, and Latin American religious agency and replace it with a story where the Global South is, once again, merely a stage on which great powers perform. That erasure is itself a kind of violence, and I do not want to commit it. The truer picture, I believe, is a layered one: indigenous hunger, met by opportunistic external financing, some of which is geopolitically motivated and some of which is not, arriving in a vacuum that China's own model, for all its economic success, was never built to fill, because it never tried to.
What This Produces, and What It Costs. Whatever its origins, the consequence is measurable. Governments across the Sahel, hollowed out by fundamentalist insurgency, have in several cases proven more receptive to Chinese and Russian security partnerships precisely because Western-aligned religious civil society failed to prevent the radicalization it was, in part, funded to counter, a genuine irony, and one worth sitting with. Elsewhere, newly assertive religious blocs have pushed governments toward foreign policy alignments that track suspiciously well with the theological sympathies of their funders, complicating the multi-alignment strategies African and Asian states have otherwise pursued with real sophistication. And beneath the geopolitics, an ordinary human cost accumulates in the currency this trade is actually paid in: women pushed out of public life by imported doctrine, minorities converted or displaced, older syncretic traditions - the ones that had, in fact, made pluralism workable for centuries - dismissed as backward and swept aside by better-funded, harder-edged imports from elsewhere.
What Can Be Done. None of this counsels despair, and it certainly does not counsel hostility to faith itself, which remains one of the most enduring sources of resilience, ethics, and community in the Global South. It counsels discernment, and four concrete commitments follow.
First, transparency in religious financing deserves the same regulatory seriousness that political-party financing now receives in most functioning democracies. Congregants and communities have a right to know when their pastor's salary, their mosque's construction, or their seminary's curriculum is underwritten by a foreign government or its proxies, not to delegitimize the faith, but to let believers make informed choices about which version of their own tradition they are being offered.
Second, the deliberate rebuilding of indigenous theological infrastructure. Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America each possess centuries-deep intellectual traditions in Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and syncretic thought that predate and do not require foreign underwriting. Investment in local seminaries, madrassas, and religious universities, funded domestically or through unrestricted, no-strings multilateral endowments, is the single most effective long-term counter to imported doctrine, because it out-competes on legitimacy rather than money.
Third, interfaith and intra-faith literacy as public education, taught with the same seriousness as civics, so that the next generation can recognize the difference between a theological claim and a strategic one arriving dressed as a theological claim.
Fourth, and hardest: governments across the Global South must resist the temptation to instrumentalize this contest themselves, courting fundamentalist blocs for electoral convenience, or conversely persecuting minority faiths in the name of resisting foreign influence. Both moves trade a long-term sovereignty problem for a short-term political one, and both have been tried, and both have failed, in living memory.
A Closing Word, as a Scholar and as an African. I am a South African, which means I write from a country that has watched itself be the object of foreign moral certainty before: Dutch Calvinism, British missionary paternalism, Soviet solidarity rhetoric, American Cold War anti-communism, and now this. We know, better than most, the particular vertigo of discovering that a belief you held with total sincerity was also, simultaneously, someone else's instrument. That knowledge should not make us cynical about faith. It should make us insist, loudly and without apology, that the Global South's next great religious awakening, and it is coming, on every continent, faster than any government can currently plan for, belongs to the people having it, and to no patron, East or West, who thought to fund it first.
This briefing reflects the independent analysis of the author and does not represent an official position of the University of Pretoria, Veritas Global Advisory, or any affiliated institution. Readers interested in the underlying scholarship on religious soft power, faith-based development financing, and great-power competition in the Global South are encouraged to consult the peer-reviewed literature in this fast-moving field directly.
This research briefing is published by Veritas Global Advisory's editorial desks. Views expressed are those of the authors and do not constitute investment advice.