A Prophetic Portrait of Christian Faith
by J. Peter Pham

THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM: THE COMING OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY (Revised and Expanded Edition) by Philip Jenkins. Oxford University Press, 2007

THE NEW FACES OF CHRISTIANITY: BELIEVING THE BIBLE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH by Philip Jenkins. Oxford University Press, 2006

GOD'S CONTINENT: CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM, AND EUROPE'S RELIGIOUS CRISIS by Philip Jenkins. Oxford University Press, 2007

Two recent, but seemingly unconnected, developments underscore the changing dynamics of religious identity and their influence on world affairs.

At the beginning of September, in the wake of the foiled plot to launch massive attacks on American installations in Germany and the revelation that two of the conspirators were native-born, ethnic Germans from middle-class backgrounds whose only apparent commonality with the other members of their cell of the Pakistan-based Islamic Jihad Union was their Muslim faith, Bavarian interior minister (and designated minister-president) Guenther Beckstein suggested that "Germans converting to Islam should be watched because they show particular fanaticism in order to prove worthy of their new religion." Irrespective of whether or not such surveillance would be an efficient use of police resources, the firestorm caused by Beckstein -- whose 1975 doctoral dissertation at the University of Nuremberg was, interestingly enough, on "Conscience in Criminal Law and Criminal Proceedings" -- clearly showed that public acknowledgment of religious linkages to terrorist or other political actions remains verboten, at least among European opinion leaders.

At its meeting in New Orleans during the last week of September, the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops passed a resolution promising "to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion" and pledging as a body "not to authorize public rites for the blessing of same-sex unions." The move came in response to questions posed to the United States branch of their communion by Anglican primates at a meeting in Dar es Salaam earlier in the year and for which they sought a reply by a September 30 deadline. Regardless of whether the leaders of the worldwide body ultimately deem the resolution to have sufficiently addressed their concerns -- the follow-up report to the Archbishop of Canterbury by a majority of the Joint Standing Committee indicated it had, although Bishop Mouneer Hanna Anis, Primate of Jerusalem and the Middle East, issued a strongly worded dissent -- the mere fact that the U.S. church was queried by and felt itself obliged to respond to its sister churches in the global South is unprecedented in the five-hundred-year history of the Anglican Communion.

One person who was likely not surprised by the events is Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author of numerous books and articles on religion and society. With the recent publication of GOD'S CONTINENT: CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM, AND EUROPE'S RELIGIOUS CRISIS, Jenkins completes a monumental trilogy that not only depicts the changing face of Christianity, but also sketches out the future of religion in Europe and, ultimately, North America.

In the opening paragraph of the first book in the trilogy, THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM: THE COMING OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY (2002), Jenkins lamented that religious matters had been given short shrift in the end of the twentieth-century retrospectives of the millennium and ventured a very contrarian prediction that would prove eerily prescient:

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 par with a review of the eighteenth century that managed to miss the French Revolution.

Jenkins proceeded to warn that "the lack of global ideological conflict that we have witnessed since the fall of Soviet communism could represent only a temporary respite" because "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 any number of possible outcomes could be imagined, "a worst-case scenario would include a wave of religious conflicts reminiscent of the Middle Ages, a new age of Christian crusades and Muslims jihads," "the world of the thirteenth century armed with nuclear warheads and anthrax."

In the revised and considerably expanded new edition of THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM published earlier this year -- and in which the preceding passages are omitted because they are "not points that need much stressing these days" -- Jenkins reveals that he had returned the proofs of the first edition on "the last day of the old world -- arguably the last day of the twentieth century -- namely September 10, 2001." In the aftermath of the events of the following day, Jenkins's call for a greater appreciation of religious influences in world politics, especially the danger of conflicts driven or inspired by religion, attracted considerable attention. The book served as the basis for a highly publicized cover story by Jenkins in the Atlantic Monthly that was widely discussed in policy circles.

While the new edition of the book is an admirably thorough revision that engages the nowadays ever growing body of scholarly and other literature the field of religion and politics has attracted since 9/11, its basic thesis remains the same: whereas for most of the second millennium of the Christian era the story of Christianity has been bound up with that of the global North or the Western world -- in any event, Europe and European-derived civilization, especially in North America -- now "the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa and Latin America." To cite just one of the data sets in the work and the projections forward that its author makes, by 2025 Africans and Latin Americans combined will make up about 60 percent of Roman Catholics, a number that will increase to 66 percent by 2050. Jenkins observes:

European and Euro-American Catholics will by that point be a small fragment of a church dominated by Filipinos and Mexicans, Vietnamese and Congolese (though of course, the North still provides a hugely disproportionate share of church finances). According to sociologist Rogelio Saenz, "From 2004 to 2050, Catholic populations are projected to increase by 146 percent in Africa, 63 percent in Asia, 42 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 38 percent in North America. Meanwhile, Europe will experience a 6 percent decline in its Catholic population between 2004 and 2050." The number of Catholics in Africa will exceed that in Europe some time in the 2030s, and, by 2050, the Asian Catholic population will be approaching Europe's.

Surveying the demographic research published by Jenkins in his first edition, I noted in my 2004 book on the papacy that "a fact that many have been slow to appreciate is that these numbers represent not just a demographic shift but also one that might well have seismic repercussions for an array of ecclesiastical and theological issues." Subsequently, in the second volume in the series, THE NEW FACES OF CHRISTIANITY: BELIEVING THE BIBLE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH (2006), Jenkins focused on Christian belief, particularly how the Bible is being appropriated in the African and Asian parts of his "new Christendom" (Latin America in touched upon only in passing). While, of course, Christians of most denominations and theological orientations would agree that the truths of their faith ought not to be decided by majority vote, the numbers in the global South cannot be without their weight in the doctrinal discernment of their respective religious bodies.

Jenkins opens his study with an anecdote that, while it may be apocryphal, certainly resonates with verisimilitude:

In recent years, gatherings of the worldwide Anglican Communion have been contentious events. On one occasion, two bishops were participating in a Bible study, one an African Anglican, the other a U.S. Episcopalian. As the hours went by, tempers frayed as the African expressed his confidence in the clear words of scripture, while the American stressed the need to interpret the Bible in the light of modern scholarship and contemporary mores. Eventually, the African bishop asked in exasperation, "If you don't believe the scripture, why did you bring it to us in the first place?"

Certainly, albeit at the risk of generalizing, African and Asian Christians of all traditions -- and not just Anglicans whose theological and ecclesiastical disputes have received greater attention of late -- approach issues of gender and sexual morality more conservatively than their progressive European and North American confreres, and Jenkins is correct in narrowing this inquiry to the common themes to be found in the global South's take on the Bible, including "a much greater respect for the authority of scripture, especially in matters of morality; a willingness to accept the Bible as an inspired text and tendency to literalism; a special interest in supernatural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions, and healings; a belief in the continuing power of prophecy; and a veneration of the Old Testament, which is considered as authoritative as the New." Jenkins, while finding these beliefs especially rooted in the Pentecostal tradition, also finds similar currents among Catholics, Anglicans, and other Christians. He attributes them to a variety of factors, among them the fact that African and Asian Christian communities identify with the social and economic realities of the biblical world and thus find in the sacred text "a freshness and authenticity that adds vastly to its credibility as an authoritative source and guide for daily living." Thus the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi, who in September consecrated an American bishop for parishes now affiliated with his church, has earlier explained to readers of an American theological journal his community's faith in an essay entitled "What Is Anglicanism":

In the Church of Uganda, Anglicanism has been built on three pillars: martyrs, revival, and the historic episcopate. Yet each of these refers back to the Word of God, the ground on which all is built...The Bible cannot appear to us a cadaver, merely to be dissected, analyzed, and critiqued, as has been the practice of much modern higher biblical criticism. Certainly we engage in biblical scholarship and criticism, but what is important to us is the power of the Word of God precisely as the Word of God--written to bring transformation in our lives, our families, our communities, and our culture. For us, the Bible is "living and active, sharper than a double-edged sword, it penetrates to dividing soul and spirits, joints and marrow, it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart" (Hebrews 4:12). The transforming effect of the Bible on Ugandans has generated so much conviction and confidence that believers were martyred in the defense of the message of salvation through Jesus Christ that it brought.

When Archbishop Orombi speaks of "martyrs" he is not referring to the distant past: his predecessor, Archbishop Janani Luwum, was personally shot by the dictator Idi Amin. In contrast, many Christians in the "developed" world find the narratives of the Bible, especially the Old Testament texts, distant in both time and place from their own real-world preoccupations. Thus Jenkins concludes:

Quite probably, the story of Christianity over the coming decades will be marked by new schisms that broadly follow the North-South division, conflicts for which the present Anglican/Episcopalian rift provides sour foretaste. In fact, understanding the divergent attitudes to biblical worldviews goes far to explaining the animus on both sides. Unless both North and South, liberals and conservatives, make a heroic effort to understand the language of their opponents, and the historical and cultural values in which it is based, schisms are all but certain.

THE NEW FACES OF CHRISTIANITY, however, does offer the qualification that the religious and scriptural conservatism it documents does not necessarily translate directly into political conservatism. This point is important because it answers some of the critics of THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM who were discomfited by the fault line they perceived being drawn between Christianity in the postmodern West and its emergent expressions in the global South, a distinction that seemed drawn directly from the "clash of civilizations" theory advanced by Samuel Huntington which posits future world conflicts breaking out between societies ("civilizations") rooted in radically different world and religious views. As Jenkins clarifies in the second volume of his trilogy, it is too simplistic to ascribe purely political labels to the theological visions of emergent Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, just as it is inaccurate to fail to acknowledge the diversity of perspectives within the ecclesiastical currents he describes in general terms. The veneration in which African and Asian Christians hold the biblical text and authority in their lives, for example, does not mean that the Bible does not engender social action and reform in their churches. Archbishop Orombi's essay, for example, cites numerous instances of the authority of scripture being invoked to break down old patterns of gender and tribal discrimination. For another, Kenya's Anglican Archbishop David Mukuba Gitari, who in August 2007 presided over the consecration as bishops of two American priests who had broken with the Episcopal Church, is actually best known as one of the most outspoken critics of his country's undemocratic rulers for over three decades. Jenkins, in fact, steps back momentarily from his scholarly reserve to reveal himself an admirer of the dynamism in the global South's Christians, suggesting that "Northern-world audiences can still profit immensely from the insights of newer churches," since they "can help free biblical passages and even whole genres from the associations they have acquired from our own historical inheritance."

With this perspective, Jenkins returns in the third and longest book of the trilogy, GOD'S CONTINENT: CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM, AND EUROPE'S RELIGIOUS CRISIS, to the question of the future of Christianity in Europe, especially given the dynamics of its interactions with the continent's post-ancien regime secularism and newer Muslim communities. Rejecting the agenda-driven alarmism of a long list of observers from both the left and the right, Jenkins argues:

That Europe is acquiring much greater ethnic and cultural diversity is certain, but the religious implications are less clear. Visions of an Islamicized Eurabia sliding into Third World status rely upon a number of questionable assumptions not only about demography but also about the conditions of Europe's major religions, both Islam and Christianity. If these assumptions are incorrect, Christian-Muslim interactions could develop quite differently, and more benevolently. Europe could yet become the birthplace of a liberalized and modernized Islam that could in turn influence the religion worldwide.

Jenkins's insight is more than the projection of an irenic preference. As he documents in a chapter provocatively entitled "Godless Europe?", for every quantitative indicator that Christianity on the continent is in its terminal stages, there are others, like the European Values Survey, that show high levels of specific belief, even among those barely affiliated with traditional churches. It might even be argued that the election to the papacy of the current pope represents a heroic effort by the conclave to reassert the continent's Christian heritage. Just one day before his predecessor's death, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger traveled to the ancient Benedictine monastery at Subiaco to honor a speaking engagement he had accepted some time earlier and delivered a lecture on "Europe's Crisis of Culture." One little noticed phenomenon that Jenkins latches onto, however, is that many of the most active centers of Christian renewal across the continent bear little resemblance to accustomed expressions of European religiosity, but rather hail from the Christianity of the global South explored in THE NEW FACES OF CHRISTIANITY.

But the future religious portrait of Europe is not merely an intra-Christian concern. It increasingly must account for Muslim minorities. While data on religious affiliation in Europe are difficult to come by and, where available, are also often disputed, Jenkins musters evidence to support his claim that the numbers often cited have not been taken in proper perspective: "A realistic estimate, allowing for illegal immigration, is that wider Europe, from Ireland to the Carpathians, presently has about 24 million Muslims, or 4.6 percent of the overall population." Furthermore, he argues: "While sections of European Islam in recent years have acquired a strongly militant and politicized character, we have to understand this as a response to temporary circumstances; moreover, hard-line approaches still command only minority support. In the longer term, the underlying pressures making for accommodation and tolerance will prove hard to resist."

The challenge that Jenkins foresees, however, comes not so much from the newly energized adherents, Christian and Muslim, so much as from European political elites whose overwhelming view of religious phenomena is condescension, faith being something to be tolerated as long as it is held in private. The elites also have strongly held liberal views on a range of gender and morality issues that counter the strongly held convictions of Christian and Muslim religious communities. Compounding this clash is the increasing use, especially by immigrants, of the elites' cherished value of multiculturalism to demand accommodation of their traditional beliefs. Jenkins adds that recent adaptations to the new presence of Islam may have "unwittingly revived a series of issues that affect Christianity as well, demanding a rewriting of the rules of engagement between church and state," with lessons that will reverberate not only in the neighboring regions of the Africa and the Middle East, but also the United States.

Hence the insight that perhaps most distinguishes Jenkins's analysis from that of his counterparts: he actually sees the possibility of a silver lining for European Christianity as the influx of Muslim immigration forces the continent's political leaders to acknowledge religious issues:

As European states redefine their attitudes to one religion, they have no choice but to take account of the far more numerous presence of Christianity. From a grassroots level too, the immense attention paid to religious concerns and Europe's heritage in the past few years probably will drive more Europeans to take a renewed interest in their Christian roots, to rediscover what it is that so many academic experts seem to be consigning to oblivion. As mainstream Europeans rethink the religious roots of their society, some at least will be led to take that religious dimension more seriously.

In biblical history, the vocation of the prophet was less about predicting the events that will occur at some future moment in time than about describing to their audiences the circumstances of the present and how, sub specie aeternitatis, the latter might have profound implications for the life of the community. Jenkins's trilogy has been an immense undertaking in this tradition, a veritable tour de force through contemporary beliefs and aspirations out of which tomorrow's world of faith is being built amid the city of man.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Virginia, is the author of HEIRS OF THE FISHERMAN: BEHIND THE SCENES OF PAPAL DEATH AND SUCCESSION (Oxford University Press, 2006), among other works.