Asian Journal of Advances in Research

This study examines materialism and cyber fraud: an exploration of transactional gospel teachings in Nigeria. The rise of materialism in Nigerian churches is rooted in the teachings of the transactional gospel, a religious paradigm where material wealth is perceived as a sign of divine favour and God’s acceptance. The research objectives are ‘investigate the impact of transactional gospel teaching on youth involvement in cyber fraud and examine the impact of materialistic adorations on youth involvement in cyber fraud’. The work was anchored on the Calvinist model, a derivation of Weber's ‘Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism’. Warri Metropolis is the study scope because of the prevalence of what the study seeks to achieve. The study was both qualitative and quantitative in the sense that it explored the views of stakeholders (religious leaders and youths) using interviews; also, copies of questionnaires were distributed to 400 youths within the age frame of 15–35 years. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the respondent’s social demographic characteristics, and the inferential statistics (Pearson Product Moment Correlation) were adopted to analyse the hypothesis of the study. The SPSS version 23 was used in analysing the data. The study concluded that there is a significant relationship between transactional gospel teaching and youth involvement in internet fraud, and also there is a relationship between church materialistic adorations and youth involvement in internet fraud in the city of Warri. The study thus recommended that religious leaders should teach more on salvation and morality rather than prosperity. Again, there is a need for urgent public awareness in collaboration with NGOs, CAN, religious leaders and governments where church leaders and stakeholders can be educated on the danger of teaching the transactional gospel of materialism and the negative consequential effects on the youths in particular and society in general.