All Are Welcome

All Are Welcome is a church motto whose promise of universal inclusion becomes an ironic measure of the novel’s religious world. Displayed above grand entrances in both Washington, D.C., and Nigeria, the phrase welcomes congregations that are socially diverse while failing to protect Niru from condemnation, coercion, or attempted religious correction. Its repetition turns a reassuring civic and spiritual slogan into a test of whether welcome means acceptance of a person as he is or merely admission under rules he must obey.

Appearance and Institutional Setting

All Are Welcome first appears as part of the transformed church attended by Niru’s family in Washington, D.C. The building was once an old banking hall on Sixteenth Street, with peeling wooden doors, cracked windows, and concrete lions above the steps. After Reverend Olumide developed it into a large church, its front windows became two stories of stained-glass crosses, its entrance doors were replaced with carved mahogany from Nigeria, and a white marble slab above them announced All Are Welcome. The building’s renovation gives the motto material force. The basement, once a maze of concrete walls and exposed pipes where children ran while their parents listened to sermons, becomes a brightly lit, carpeted area containing day-care rooms, community-group spaces, a library, and a music room. The church draws Nigerians, Ghanaians, Cameroonians, and Congolese living in the Washington area, including embassy workers, taxi drivers, and undocumented people. Reverend Olumide also learns Spanish and holds an afternoon service for Salvadorians and Guatemalans seeking something less exclusionary than Catholicism. His claim that the church must grow or perish presents welcome as an institutional strategy as well as a religious ideal.

The Motto Across Two Churches

The same words appear at Bishop Okereke’s church in Nigeria, but the setting changes their emotional charge. Its long, two-story facade resembles a factory, and without the large gold letters reading All Are Welcome above its massive entrance doors, it could be mistaken for an industrial building. Niru arrives there with his father after being taken to Nigeria for religious intervention, so the motto greets him at the threshold of a place prepared to examine and correct him rather than receive him without conditions. The two buildings create a deliberate contrast. In Washington, the phrase is set into white marble above a renovated, crowded church that serves a broad African and immigrant community. In Nigeria, it is displayed in gold above a stark, unfinished-looking institution with dim fluorescent lights, a registry for visitors, and construction equipment outside. In both places the words claim openness, but Niru’s experience exposes the difference between a church’s public image and the boundaries enforced inside it.

Welcome and Religious Exclusion

The contradiction becomes explicit when Bishop Okereke questions Niru about homosexuality. Niru denies the accusation, while his father insists that he has found incriminating material on Niru’s phone and computer. Bishop Okereke treats homosexuality as a demonic force entrenched in America and approves of bringing Niru to Nigeria, which he presents as a place where the faith remains strong and has not been corrupted by acceptance of gay people. The church marked All Are Welcome therefore becomes the site of a demand for confession, rededication, and submission to a prescribed religious interpretation of Niru’s identity. Niru’s response exposes the motto’s broken promise. He refuses to confess to a bishop he does not know, even as his father urges him to answer. The words above the door offer entry, but they do not guarantee recognition, safety, or bodily autonomy once Niru is inside. His father holds his passport and tickets, and Niru understands himself to be under paternal control; the welcoming institution is consequently connected to forced movement and the threat of spiritual purification rather than free belonging.

Diaspora, Home, and Conditional Belonging

All Are Welcome also gathers the book’s competing ideas of home. Reverend Olumide’s Washington church builds a Nigerian-centered space within the United States, combining Nigerian architectural details, African congregational networks, and services for other immigrant communities. It suggests that diaspora can create a home that is neither a simple replica of Nigeria nor an abandonment of it. Yet Niru’s family remains divided over where home exists. Niru identifies Washington as the place of the family house, possessions, routines, work, and church, while his father insists that Nigeria is home and rejects the idea that the United States can replace it. Niru’s forced arrival in Nigeria intensifies this conflict. He finds the country overwhelming, hot, aggressive, and materially uncomfortable, even while acknowledging his attachment to thunderstorms and the smell of wet red earth after rain. He wonders whether his father and Reverend Olumide are right that American life has filled him with ungodly values, or whether he is simply himself. The motto’s apparent universality cannot resolve that conflict because the welcome offered by the churches is tied to competing national, cultural, and religious claims about what kind of person Niru is permitted to be.

The Motto and Queer Safety

The phrase is further challenged by Niru’s relationship with Damien. At Sportzone in Georgetown and later beside the Potomac River, Damien offers Niru a form of safety grounded in companionship rather than doctrine. Damien says that he can be himself in the park and tells Niru that he is safe with him; Niru’s qualification, that he is safe with Damien only until he is not, preserves the uncertainty that shadows his life. Their imagined apartment in Venice Beach, an adopted cat named Gordon, and their shared intimacy represent a possible future built through chosen connection. That private possibility stands against the churches’ public promise. The motto names a collective space, but Damien’s reassurance creates a more personal version of welcome, one in which Niru’s identity does not need to be confessed, purified, or explained. The contrast reveals why the slogan matters: it is not merely decorative language but a standard the institutions repeatedly announce and fail to meet. All Are Welcome thus becomes an emblem of the book’s central tension between belonging as a declared principle and belonging as an experience of actual safety.