From the issue dated March 29, 2002
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A New ChristendomBy PHILIP JENKINSEurope is the Faith. -- Hilaire Belloc The end of the 20th century was marked by an obsessive compilation of retrospective lists, which assessed the greatest moments and the most important individuals of the previous 100 years. Some observers, still more ambitious, tried to identify the high and low points of the whole millennium then passing. Yet in almost all those efforts, religious matters received remarkably short shrift. When religious individuals were highlighted, they were usually those most closely identified with secular political trends. Martin Luther King Jr. is an obvious example. After all, the attitude seemed to be, what religious change in recent years could possibly compete in importance with the major secular trends, movements like fascism or communism, feminism or environmentalism? To the contrary, I suggest that it is precisely religious changes that are the most significant, and even the most revolutionary, in the contemporary world. Before too long, the turn-of-the-millennium neglect of religious factors may come to be seen as comically myopic, on a par with a review of the 18th century that managed to miss the French Revolution. We are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide. Over the past five centuries or so, the story of Christianity has been inextricably bound up with that of Europe and European-derived civilizations, above all in North America. Until recently, the overwhelming majority of Christians have lived in white nations, allowing theorists to speak smugly, arrogantly, of "European Christian" civilization. Conversely, radical writers have seen Christianity as an ideological arm of Western imperialism. It is self-evidently the religion of the haves. To adapt the phrase once applied to the increasingly conservative U.S. electorate of the 1970s, the stereotype holds that Christians are un-black, un-poor, and un-young. If that is true, then the growing secularization of the West can only mean that Christianity is in its dying days. Globally, the faith of the future must be Islam. Over the past century, however, the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Already today, the largest Christian communities on the planet are to be found in Africa and Latin America. If we want to visualize a "typical" contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela. Whatever Europeans or North Americans may believe, Christianity is doing very well indeed in the global South -- not just surviving but expanding. This trend will continue apace in coming years. Many of the fastest-growing countries in the world are either predominantly Christian or else have very sizable Christian minorities. Even if Christians just maintain their present share of the population in countries like Nigeria and Kenya, Mexico and Ethiopia, Brazil and the Philippines, there are soon going to be several hundred million more Christians from those nations alone. Moreover, conversions will swell the Christian share of world population. Meanwhile, historically low birthrates in the traditionally Christian states of Europe mean that their populations are declining or stagnant. Christianity should enjoy a worldwide boom in the new century, but the vast majority of believers will be neither white nor European, nor Euro-American. According to the respected World Christian Encyclopedia, some two billion Christians are alive today, about one-third of the planet's population. The largest single bloc, some 560 million people, is still to be found in Europe. Latin America, though, is already close behind with 480 million. Africa has 360 million, and 313 million Asians profess Christianity. North America claims about 260 million believers. If we extrapolate those figures to the year 2025, and assume no great gains or losses through conversion, then there would be around 2.6 billion Christians, of whom 633 million would live in Africa, 640 million in Latin America, and 460 million in Asia. Europe, with 555 million, would have slipped to third place. Africa and Latin America would be in competition for the title of most Christian region. About this date, too, another significant milestone should occur, namely that those two regions will together account for half the Christians on the planet. By 2050, only about one-fifth of the world's three billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. Soon, the phrase "a white Christian" may sound like a curious oxymoron, as mildly surprising as "a Swedish Buddhist." Such people can exist, but a slight eccentricity is implied. This global perspective should make us think carefully before asserting "what Christians believe" or "how the church is changing." All too often, statements about what "modern Christians accept" or what "Roman Catholics today believe" refer only to what that ever-shrinking remnant of Western Christians and Catholics believe. Such assertions are outrageous today, and as time goes by, they will become ever further removed from reality. The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning. The idea of Christianity literally "going south" is not unfamiliar, at least to religious-studies scholars. The theme is well-established in Europe, where African affairs are more attended to than they are in the United States. As long ago as the 1970s, this global change was discussed in well-known works by European scholars like Andrew Walls, Edward Norman, and Walbert Bühlmann, and the theme was consecrated by its inclusion in the World Christian Encyclopedia, first published in 1982. It was B¸hlmann who coined the term "the Third Church," on the analogy of the Third World. The phrase suggests that the South represents a new tradition comparable in importance to the Eastern and Western churches of historical times. Walls sees the faith in Africa as a distinctive new tradition of Christianity comparable to Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy. When, in 1998, the World Council of Churches commemorated the 50th anniversary of its founding, it decided to meet in Zimbabwe, as an explicit recognition of the growing significance of Africa in world Christianity. Yet outside the ranks of scholars and church bureaucrats, few commentators have paid serious attention to these trends, to what I will describe as the creation of a new Christendom that, for better or worse, may play a critical role in world affairs. In the catalogs of North American religious publishers, materials either from or about Africa or Asia are rarely in evidence. That does not mean that publishers willfully refuse to present the information for sinister motives, but that they know from experience that Third World topics rarely attract a general audience of the sort that would make a new title profitable. For whatever reason, Southern churches remain almost invisible to Northern observers. When in 2000, the popular evangelical magazine Christian History listed the "hundred most important events in Church history," the only mention of Africa, Asia, or Latin America involved the British abolition of the slave trade. An evangelical-oriented survey of 100 Christian Books That Changed the Century featured three or four books about missions in Africa and Asia, but scarcely a word about Latin America. The only work actually by a Southern writer was Cry the Beloved Country, by the white South African Alan Paton. The imbalance is just as evident in the Western academic world, in which published studies of Third World religion represent only a tiny fraction of scholarship on Christianity. At the same time, the volume of academic studies coming out of Africa and Latin America has shrunk as universities in those regions have been crippled by a lack of resources. Some excellent books are now available on Southern religion, notably Harvey Cox's influential Fire from Heaven (1995), and we have some fine studies on Latin American Pentecostalism. But the general observation about what most Western religious-studies scholars actually work on is still applicable. If most writers are neglecting the present-day realities of Christianity, they are still worse on projecting the future. In North America, at least, most visions of the coming century are based firmly on extrapolating familiar domestic conditions. The imagined future looks a lot like the American present, only with Western liberalism ever more in the ascendant. Robert Wuthnow's 1993 Christianity in the 21st Century has basically nothing to say about conditions in the Third World. There is only a little more in a 1997 book with the promising title Toward 2015: A Church Odyssey, by Richard Kew and Roger White, although one of its co-authors is an Episcopal bishop. Not even Anglicans and Episcopalians are looking South, although that is where virtually all of the growth is occurring in their communion. Nobody has asked the crucial question of just what Western civilization means when what were once its critical religious aspects are now primarily upheld outside the West. One key exception is Samuel P. Huntington's 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, one of the most widely read analyses of current global trends, which does pay serious attention to changing religious patterns. Even Huntington, though, understates the rising force of Christianity. He believes that the relative Christian share of global population will fall steeply in the new century, and that Christianity will be supplanted by Islam. But far from Islam being the world's largest religion by 2020 or so, as Huntington suggests, Christianity will still have a massive lead, and will maintain its position into the foreseeable future. By 2050, there should still be about three Christians for every two Muslims worldwide. Some 34 percent of the world's people will then be Christian, roughly what the figure was at the height of European world hegemony in 1900. If we look at the nations with the fastest population growth and the youngest populations, they are evenly distributed between Christianand Muslim-dominated societies. I dispute Huntington's assertion that "Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction." Huntington's lack of interest in the epoch-making Christian growth in Africa is odd because elsewhere he has written so knowledgeably about the role of the Catholic Church in promoting democratic movements across the continent. Throughout his Clash of Civilizations, though, he refers to "Western Christianity" as if there could be no other species. The same kind of tunnel vision affects another work on global megatrends, Benjamin Barber's 1995 Jihad vs. McWorld. For Barber, Third World religion is discussed chiefly in terms of Islam, and Christianity just means North American fundamentalism. There is no recognition that the gravest challenge to "McWorld" might not come from jihad, but rather from what we might call the forces of Crusade, from the Christian Third World. The numerical changes in Christianity are striking enough, but beyond the simple demographic transition, there are countless implications for theology and religious practice. To take a historical parallel, Christianity changed thoroughly when a movement founded in a Jewish and Hellenistic context moved into the Germanic lands of Western Europe during the early Middle Ages. In art and popular thought, Jesus became a blond Aryan, often with the appropriate warrior attributes, and Christian theology was reshaped by West European notions of law and feudalism. European Christians reinterpreted the faith through their own concepts of social and gender relations, and then imagined that their culturally specific synthesis was the only correct version of Christian truth. As Christianity moves southward, the religion will be comparably changed by immersion in the prevailing cultures of its host societies. But what will this new Christian synthesis look like? One obvious fact is that, at least for the foreseeable future, members of a Southern-dominated church are likely to be among the poorer people on the planet, in marked contrast to the older Western-dominated world. For that reason, some Western Christians have since the 1960s expected that the religion of their Third World brethren would be fervently liberal, activist, and even revolutionary, the model represented by liberation theology. All too often, though, those hopes have proved illusory. Frequently, the liberationist voices emanating from the Third World have proved to derive from clerics trained in Europe and North America, and their ideas have won only limited local appeal. At present, the most immediately apparent difference between the older and newer churches is that Southern Christians are far more conservative in terms of both beliefs and moral teaching. The denominations that are triumphing all across the global South are stalwartly traditional or even reactionary by the standards of the economically advanced nations. Indeed, that conservatism may go far toward explaining the common neglect of Southern Christianity in North America and Europe. Western experts rarely find the ideological tone of the new churches much to their taste. Southern Christians retain a very strong supernatural orientation, and are by and large far more interested in personal salvation than in radical politics. In addition, rapid growth is occurring in nontraditional denominations that adapt Christian belief to local tradition, groups that are categorized by titles like "African indigenous churches." Within a few decades, such denominations will represent a far larger segment of global Christianity, and just conceivably a majority. The newer churches preach deep personal faith and communal orthodoxy, mysticism and puritanism, all founded on clear scriptural authority. For better or worse, the dominant churches of the future could have much in common with those of medieval or early modern European times. In describing the rising neo-orthodox world, I have spoken of a "new Christendom." The phrase evokes a medieval European age of faith, one of passionate spirituality and a pervasive Christian culture. Medieval people spoke readily of "Christendom," the Res Publica Christiana, as a true overarching unity and a focus of loyalty transcending mere kingdoms or empires. Kingdoms like Burgundy, Wessex, or Saxony might last for only a century or two before they were replaced by new states and dynasties, but any rational person knew that Christendom simply endured. That perception had political consequences. While the laws of individual nations lasted only as long as the nations themselves, Christendom offered a higher set of standards and mores that alone could claim to be universal. Although it rarely possessed any potential for common political action, Christendom was a primary form of cultural reference. Ultimately, Christendom collapsed in the face of the overwhelming power of secular nationalism. Later, Christian scholars struggled to live in this new age of "post-Christendom," when one could no longer assume any connection between religion and political order. By the start of the 21st century, however, the whole concept of the nation-state was itself under challenge. Partly, the changes reflected new technologies. According to a report by the U.S. intelligence community, in the coming decades "governments will have less and less control over flows of information, technology, diseases, migrants, arms, and financial transactions, whether legal or illegal, across their borders. ... The very concept of 'belonging' to a particular state will probably erode." To borrow Benedict Anderson's famous phrase, nation-states are imagined communities of relatively recent date, rather than eternal or inevitable realities. In recent years, many of these communities have begun to reimagine themselves substantially, even to unimagine themselves out of existence. In Europe, loyalties to the nation as such are being replaced by newer forms of adherence, whether to larger entities (Europe itself) or to smaller (regions or ethnic groups). It remains to be seen whether the nation-state will outlive the printed book, that other Renaissance invention that may also fade away in the coming decades. If even once unquestioned constructs like Great Britain are under threat, it is not surprising that people are questioning the existence of newer and still more artificial entities in Africa or Asia, with their flimsy national frontiers dreamed up so recently by imperial bureaucrats. For a quarter of a century, social scientists have been analyzing the decline of states in the face of globalization and have noted parallels with the cosmopolitan world of the Middle Ages. Some scholars have postulated the future emergence of some movement or ideology that could, in a sense, create something like a new Christendom. That would be what political scientist Hedley Bull called "a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organization that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages." Might the new ideological force be environmentalism, perhaps with a mystical New Age twist? Yet the more we look at the Southern Hemisphere in particular, the more we see that while universal and supranational ideas are flourishing, they are not secular in the least. The centers of gravest state weakness are often the regions in which political loyalties are secondary to religious beliefs, either Muslim or Christian, and those are the terms in which people define their identities. The new Christian world of the South could find unity in common religious beliefs. That many Southern societies will develop a powerful Christian identity in culture and politics is beyond doubt. Less obvious is whether, and when, they will aspire to any kind of global unity. In that matter, the Atlantic Ocean initially seems to offer a barrier quite as overwhelming as it was before Columbus. Very soon, the two main centers of Christianity will be Africa and Latin America, and, within each region, there is at least some sense of unity. Latin American ecclesiastics meet periodically, scholars treat the region as a whole (albeit a diverse one), and a canon of authors is read widely. The same can be said of Africa in its own way. However, next to no common sense of identity currently unites the churches and believers of the two regions. Even in terms of worldwide Christian networks, the two regions belong almost to different planets. For many Protestant Africans, the World Council of Churches offers a major institutional focus of unity, but because the Roman Catholic Church abstains from membership in the council, that forum is closed to the majority of Latin Americans. When African and Latin American church leaders and scholars do meet, all too often it is at gatherings in Europe or the United States, following agendas conceived in the global North. The resulting segregation of interests and ideas is remarkable, since the churches in Africa and Latin America share so many common experiences. They are passing through similar phases of growth, and are, independently, developing similar social and theological worldviews. Both also face similar issues -- of race, of inculturation, of just how to deal with their respective colonial heritages. All those are common hemispheric issues that fundamentally separate the experiences of Northern and Southern churches. Given the lively scholarly activity and the flourishing spirituality in both Africa and Latin America, a period of mutual discovery is inevitable. When it begins -- when, not if -- the interaction should launch a revolutionary new era in world religion. Although many see the process of globalization as yet another form of American imperialism, it would be ironic if an early consequence were a growing sense of identity among Southern Christians. Once that axis is established, we really will be speaking of a new Christendom, based in the Southern Hemisphere. The archaic term "Christendom" conjures some potential nightmares about the future we are imagining. The last Christendom, in the Middle Ages, was anything but an unmixed blessing for either church or society. While it offered a common culture and thought-world, the era was also characterized by widespread intolerance, symbolized at its very worst by aggressive Crusades, heresy hunts, and religious pogroms. Critically, Christendom was defined in terms of what it was not, since the Christian world existed in unhappy conjunction with neighboring Muslim states. That Christian-Muslim conflict may in fact prove one of the closest analogies between the Christian world that was and the one coming into being. No less than Christians, Muslims will be transformed by the epochal demographic events of the coming decades, the shift of gravity of population to the Two-Thirds World. Muslim and Christian nations will expand adjacent to each other, and, often, Muslim and Christian communities will both grow within the same country. Based on recent experiences around the world -- in Nigeria and Indonesia, Sudan and the Philippines -- we face the likelihood that population growth will be accompanied by intensified rivalry, by struggles for converts, by competing attempts to enforce moral codes by means of secular law. Whether Muslim or Christian, religious zeal can easily turn into fanaticism. Worldwide, religious trends have the potential to reshape political assumptions in a way that has not been seen since the rise of modern nationalism. While we can imagine any number of possible futures, a worst-case scenario would include a wave of religious conflicts reminiscent of the Middle Ages, a new age of Christian crusades and Muslim jihads. Imagine the world of the 13th century armed with nuclear warheads and anthrax. In responding to that prospect, we need, at a minimum, to ensure that our political leaders and diplomats pay as much attention to religions and to sectarian frontiers as they ever have to the distribution of oil fields. That scenario may well be too pessimistic, but there can be no doubt about the underlying realities, demographic and religious, that ensure that Christianity will flourish in the new century. The question is just how to respond to that fact. While political leaders must make their own agendas, current changes also pose questions for anyone interested in the state of religion. The greatest temptation -- and maybe the worst danger -- is to use future projections as a club in present-day arguments. Northerners rarely give the South anything like the attention it deserves, but when they do notice it, they tend to project onto it their own familiar realities and desires. If, in fact, the global South represents the future, then it is tempting to claim that one's own ideas are more valid, more important, because they coincide with those of the rising Third World. For the left, the rise of the South suggests that Northern Christians must commit themselves firmly to social and political activism at home, to ensuring economic justice and combating racism, to promoting cultural diversity. Conservatives, in contrast, emphasize the moral and sexual conservatism of the emerging churches and seek to enlist them as natural allies. From that point of view, the churches that are doing best in the world as a whole are the ones that stand farthest from Western liberal orthodoxies, and we should learn from their success. For both sides, the new South is useful, politically and rhetorically. The difficulty, of course, is deciding just what that vast and multifaceted entity described as the Third World actually does want or believe. As Southern churches grow and mature, they will increasingly define their own interests in ways that have little to do with the preferences and parties of Americans and Europeans. We can even imagine Southern Christians taking the initiative to the extent of evangelizing the North, in the process changing many familiar aspects of belief and practice and exporting cultural traits presently found only in Africa or Latin America. We can only speculate what that future synthesis might look like. But underlying all the possibilities is one solid reality. However partisan the interpretations of the new Christianity, however paternalistic, there can be no doubt that the emerging Christian world will be anchored in the Southern continents. Philip Jenkins is a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. This essay is adapted from his book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, just published by Oxford University Press. Copyright ©2002 by Philip Jenkins. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education