Thinkers in all sorts of states have sought to construct and narrate foundation myths about those states—stories about the tasks around which a state's progenitors first came together to work in unison. In Religion and the Making of Nigeria, Olufemi Vaughan offers at least a prologue for such a myth for Nigeria: a prologue, as opposed to a myth itself, because Vaughan does not identify a central cast of actors—no founding fathers and mothers as it were, but instead makes a case for a twin set of political religious forces that through the dialectics of their complementary interaction have driven forward state formation as it has occurred in Nigeria. Many commentators have seen the battle between Christians and Muslims over the right to declare their creed as the religious face of Nigeria as a fatal flaw that will inevitably doom Nigeria as a nation-state. Vaughan argues against this perception, stating that it is the larger shared battle against the modern civilization, introduced to the region from the West, that has pulled both Christian and Muslims Nigerians back toward each other as countrymen over the last two centuries. His book is dedicated to proving this argument through an analysis of the political actions undertaken by Nigerians with explicitly religious goals.

The application of the theories of Robin Horton and John Peel, and modified by Terence Ranger, that delineate the difference between collective and individual conversion, is key to Vaughan's argument. As Vaughan historicizes these notions, they help explain how, through explorations of the “cult of the Supreme Being,” in other words, Abrahamic monotheism, Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, and the many ethnic groups that have embraced those faiths, have provided themselves with mental toolkits to maintain and reaffirm shared identities in the face of the atomizing self-alienation triggered by modernity. Important for Vaughan is the idea that these collective processes of conversion began before the advent of colonialism—along the Atlantic coast among the Yoruba through the instigation of missionaries representing the Church Missionary Society; in the region north of the Niger-Benue among the Hausa-Fulani peoples through the reform movement that eventuated in the Sokoto Caliphate. Colonial occupation brought these two movements together and provided them with a common antagonist, not the British per se, but the immoral, secular civilization that the British introduced. Christians and Muslims have fought each other, but primarily for the opportunity to show all Nigerians, not just their coreligionists, the path out of the immoral morass of contemporary society.

The point Vaughan takes from Ranger's work is the idea that global or universal ideas gravitate toward local articulations and frames of reference. Vaughan's book plots the twin trajectories of Nigerian Christianity and Nigerian Islam toward such expressions. On the evolution of Christianity, he dedicates one chapter to talking about the growth of Christianity in the southern region and the area of Nigeria known as the Middle Belt, and one other to talking about the emergence of Pentecostalism since the colonial era. Vaughan dedicates more space to explaining cultural and political developments among Nigeria's Muslim peoples, his concern being to show how these have sought to affirm the legitimacy of Nigeria as a state. Christianity enters these narratives as the force that pulls Muslim ambitions back toward a sense of nation. His last few chapters, which offer a thorough discussion of the debate over the imposition of Sharia law as a movement of religious reform and the Christian critique of this movement, illustrate this dynamic.

Religion and the Making of Nigeria works its way through an impressive amount of scholarly research. The book has real value for the due diligence Vaughan displays in examining all aspects of the debate over religion in the country. For this reason, it is recommended reading for scholars and graduate students interested in the religious history of modern Nigeria. Unfortunately, Vaughan's overarching thesis about the complementarity of Christianity and Islam in the foundation of Nigeria could leave his readers a bit frustrated. The problem is that he does not spend enough time showing the connections between the political actions of the religious groups he details and the dialectics of state formation that he sees those actions as facilitating. His thesis is a grand one, and one that other scholars should take up. But his book is best appreciated as a prolegomena.