1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the fourth International Conference on Religion, Media, and Culture, September 1-4, 2004, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA, in the panel “The visual cultures of Pentecostalism.” I thank Tamar Gordon for her stimulating comments. The paper is based on fieldwork in Accra from July to September 2001 and from March 2002 to March 2003. The research was carried out within the framework of the PIONIER research program “Modern Mass Media, Religion, and the Imagination of Communities” (see www2.fmg.uva.nl/media-religion) sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I am grateful to Peter Geschiere, Francio Guadeloupe, Steven Hughes, Birgit Meyer, Martijn Oosterbaan, Esther Peperkamp, Mattijs van de Port, Vincent de Rooy, and Rafael Sanchez for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
2. The notion of African traditional religion is a problematic one, as it suggests a static, unchanging and clearly bounded set of beliefs and practices, and is itself a historical construction that placed these beliefs and practices in opposition to modern Christianity. For lack of a better alternative, however, I use it, following common usage in Ghana, to denote the highly diversified, ever changing, and unbounded field of pre-Christian cults, shrines, practices, and beliefs.
3. In principle all positions in Charismatic churches are open to both men and women. In practice, however, almost all church leaders (and owners) are men and female pastors do meet restrictions in their work. One important exception in Ghana is Christie Doe-Tetteh, founder and leader of the Solid Rock Chapel International. In most churches, the main female position is that of the church leader's wife, the “First Lady.”
4. According to the latest population census, Charismatic-Pentecostalism has become the main religious orientation, with 24.1 percent of the total population and 45.8 percent of all Christians in Accra regarding itself as Charismatic-Pentecostal (Ghana Statistical Service 2000).