Abstract
This paper examined how Deuteronomy 28’s covenant blessings and curses interact with African Traditional Religion’s own curse cosmology, and what happens theologically when the two frameworks merge inside contemporary Nigerian Christianity. The problem addressed is that this merger has occurred largely unexamined. It has produced a popular curse theology that blends biblical covenant language with indigenous ancestral sanction, applied by many pastors without distinguishing where one system ends and the other begins, sometimes with serious human cost, including continued witchcraft accusation against vulnerable women. Existing scholarship has documented the popularity of generational curse teaching and the witchcraft accusations it can fuel. It has done comparatively little sustained textual comparison of Deuteronomy 28 itself against African Traditional Religion’s curse logic to establish precisely where the two frameworks agree and where conflation misrepresents both. From a qualitative, library-based comparative method, this paper filled that gap. It found that Deuteronomy 28 and African Traditional Religion share a covenantal, relational understanding of curse as consequence for broken obligation. The two frameworks diverge sharply, however, on curse’s transmissibility, permanence and locus of remedy, differences popular Nigerian theology has largely collapsed. It concluded that a textually disciplined, comparative theology can correct this collapse without dismissing either tradition, and proposed a corrective framework for preaching and pastoral practice.
Keywords: Deuteronomy 28, blessing, generational curse, African Traditional Religion, Pentecostalism, witchcraft
Author name(s):
Bukola Comfort Olusegun,
Federal University Lokoja Department of Christian Religious Studies
Peter Anakobe Adinoyi,
Federal University Lokoja Department of Christian Religious Studies
DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23157734
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.