As the most prevalent form of associational life in Sub-Saharan Africa today, churches wield potentially important influence on ordinary citizens and political elites alike. Not surprisingly, human rights organizations have reached out to the leadership of various churches on the continent—particularly to mainline Protestant and Catholic churches—for help in mobilizing against corruption and in advocating for more equal distributions of wealth. But what views about poverty, inequality and corruption are contemporary churches actually communicating to their congregants, and to what effect? The speaker examines new survey, textual, and experimental evidence on these questions from Nairobi, Kenya, a geopolitically important and religiously diverse city where the stakes of addressing poverty, inequality and corruption are high.

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