Heart and Soul: Will God protect me?
BBC World Service

It’s not often that mainstream radio offers an exercise in pure theology, but Robert Beckford’s take on divine providence in the era of Covid-19 (23 August) was exactly that. If the focus was limited to the outer fringes of Pentecostalism, then this spiritual particularism altogether failed to subtract from the immediacy of the subject matter: a series of interviewees who believed that, whatever the nature of the physical or metaphysical challenges thrown at them, God would see them through.

We began with a tape recording of the faintly notorious Bishop Climate Wiseman of the Kingdom Church assuring his Camberwell congregation that he had patented a holy oil able to cure not only Covid-19 but any other affliction that raised its head. There followed Pastor Peter Nembhard, hospitalised by the virus, who believed, first, that his illness had been foreseen, and second, that prayer had seen him through, on the grounds that he and his creator had agreed that “we’re not finished yet”.