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The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South
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October 11, 2006
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| The New Faces of Christianity |
Introduction
Remarks
Questions and Answers
IntroductionJOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers,
Director of Public Affairs Programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I
would like to welcome our members and guests and to thank you for joining us
this morning.
We are delighted to have as our guest Philip Jenkins, who
will be discussing The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global
South, and this book will be available for you to purchase at the end of
the hour.
Today's program is part of the Carnegie Council's ongoing
series on religion and politics. Although the Carnegie Council has a long
tradition of examining religious issues, we officially began this series about a
year ago. Since that time, we have been looking at various religious
developments as they unfold around the world, emphasizing different religions
and their impact on social, cultural, economic, and political realities of the
21st century. Today's session will focus on new developments in
Christianity.
If you read the paper or listen to the news, you can't help
but be aware of the fact that religious fervor is gaining momentum, reshaping
the identities and actions of an increasingly large number of people on many
continents. Although we so often hear about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism,
it is Christianity, with more than 2 billion adherents worldwide, that is both
the world's largest—and in some regions the fastest-growing—religion. And most
of that expansion is taking place in the developing world. In parts of Africa
and Asia, the flowering of Pentecostal, evangelical, and indigenous forms of
Christianity is bringing believers into contact—and often into conflict—with
Muslims. This latest development has far-reaching consequences for world
politics, especially in Africa, and particularly in the Sudan, Somalia, and
Nigeria.
In The New Faces of Christianity, Professor Jenkins talks
about these subjects and also raises several other interesting points. For
example, he notes that with the translation of the Scriptures into provincial
dialects, the local people often find ideas in their newly translated Bibles
that the missionaries did not want them to see. Although some of their
conclusions are distinctly fundamentalist, Professor Jenkins finds that some of
their observations are paradoxically intriguing, for as they read the Bible with
fresh eyes, these new believers are coming away with sometimes startling
interpretations, especially with respect to women's rights. And he finds that
across Africa, Asia, and Latin America such Christians are becoming social
activists in the forefront of a wide range of liberation
movements.
Professor Jenkins writes that "As these beliefs take hold,
recent converts will push theologians to address issues, such as faith and
poverty, social injustice, political violence and corruption, and the meltdown
of law and order, with far-reaching moral and social implications. Accordingly,
we might ask: What does this portend for global politics?"
Philips
Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at
Pennsylvania State University. He has published widely on contemporary religious
phenomena, but is best known for the highly acclaimed The Next Christendom:
The Coming of Global Christianity, which he discussed earlier here at the
Carnegie Council, and the transcript can be found on our website.
In this
work, which was named one of the Top Religion Books of 2002 by USA Today,
Professor Jenkins called the world's attention to the fact that Christianity's
center of gravity was moving inexorably southward, and noted that Africa may
soon be home to the world's largest Christian population. Now, in this sequel,
he attempts to explain this development.
Our speaker was born in Wales
and educated in England, where he received a Ph.D. from Cambridge. He has
written over fifteen books and many articles on contemporary religious issues
and controversies.
Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to our
speaker today, Philip Jenkins.
RemarksPHILIP JENKINS: Since we are dealing with a religious
theme, I thought I would begin by a prophecy, and a prophecy of the sort that is
empirically verifiable. Back in the year 1640, a great Catholic saint, Saint Vincent de
Paul, made a prophecy. He was writing at one of the worst times in European
history. 1640 was probably the worst year in Europe before 1940; it was the year
in which Protestants were killing Catholics, Catholics were killing Protestants,
Christians were killing Jews, and so on. Many wondered if Europe could
survive.
What Saint Vincent remarked was, "Jesus said his church would
last until the end of time, but he never mentioned the word Europe." "The church
of the future," he said in 1640, "will be the church of Africa, of South
America, of China and Japan."
We can argue about Japan, though one of the
greatest Christian writers of the 20th century was the Japanese Catholic
novelist Shusaku Endo, but otherwise I suggest to you that that is an
example of an empirically verifiable prophecy, because that is exactly what is
happening. Today, if you look around the world, there are about 2 billion
Christians. The largest contingent of those is still in Europe, with around 510
million, and Latin America second.
As we move towards the year 2025,
Africa and Latin America should be in competition for the title of the continent
with the largest number of Christians. But in the long run, as we move towards
2050, Africa wins; Christianity becomes predominantly a religion of Africa and
the African Diaspora in North and South America and the Caribbean.
In
fact, if you want to project the countries in the world that will have the
largest numbers of Christians by 2050, here's one projection. At the head of the
list would still be the United States, followed, in no particular order, by
Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, the Congo, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and China. Let me
give you a list of the countries that were not included in that list: Britain,
France, Spain, Italy. Is anyone here old enough to remember something called
"Western Christianity?"
I could deluge you with statistics, and I don't
want to do that, but some of them do really call out for citation.
One of
my favorites is the figure for Christians in Africa. Back in 1900, there were 10
million Christians in Africa, representing about 10 percent of the population.
By 2000, that had grown to 360 million, a little under half the population,
which is quantitatively the largest religious change of any kind that has ever
occurred anywhere. John Allen, the
well-known Catholic journalist, has argued that the number of Catholics in
Africa grows in the 20th century by 6,700 percent—which, as I tell my students,
"For those of you with a humanities background, that's more than double." It's a
substantial increase.
Last year, there were more Catholic baptisms in the
Philippines than in France, Spain, Italy, and Poland combined. When you look at
those demographics, you begin to understand why if you go to Ireland these days
you will see African priests in Ireland.
Well, if this was just a change
of geography, a change of ethnicity, then it would be interesting. But I'm
suggesting that it is rather more than that, because the kinds of Christianity
that are growing in the Global South—a term by which I mean Africa, Asia, Latin
America—are different from what we are used to in the Global North. They are
much more enthusiastic; they are much more supernatural-oriented; they have much
more of a belief in trans-stream vision, prophecy.
Now, you may say at
this point, "But we could go not more than a mile from where we are right now
and find churches like that," and you are absolutely right. But I'm talking
about what is the mainstream. Whatever denomination you look at in the Global
South—whether it's Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran—it has this kind of
character.
If you go to Tanzania, for example, one of the leading
religious figures in that nation is a man who is famous as a prophet and a
healer. He is also a Lutheran bishop. This is not the Lutheranism of Garrison
Keillor. This is a different kind of religious tradition.
In fact, in
many ways—and I'll come back to this in a second—the kind of Christianity we are
seeing looks a great deal like the Islam of the Global South. By Islam, I do not
mean the terrorist extremism of popular nightmare; I mean the ordinary, lived
religion of hundreds of millions of Muslims.
There are actually quite
close analogies there, but in Africa and Asia the two religions tend to
influence each other. Christians in Africa, for example, are aware of the very
high veneration that Muslims hold for the Qur'an, and they can have no less a
veneration for their own sacred text.
There are also analogies. The Bible
in the Global South is a book which often is not read; it is heard and recited,
which actually takes us back to the oldest days of Christianity. Look at the New
Testament and look how often you read the word "hear": "blessed is he who
hears," not "he who reads." Many people would argue that when you hear a
message, as opposed to reading it, it appeals to different parts of the brain,
it registers more, it carries more conviction.
Well, we've seen some very
striking conflicts emerging between northern and southern Christianity, most
tellingly in the Anglican Communion. As I'm sure you are aware, a couple of
years ago the U.S. Episcopal Church ordained a gay bishop, much to the horror of
the rest of the Anglican world in Africa and Asia, with its very rapidly growing
numbers.
The language of that debate has since become quite venomous. As
of a week or so ago, the latest statement of the Nigerian church on the subject
of the American Episcopal Church said— and I quote loosely—"when a cancerous
lump in the body has defied all treatment, the time has come for it to become
excised immediately." Some have suggested this is slightly lacking in Christian
charity, but we can discuss this.
Why do the views of Nigeria matter?
Because the Nigerian Anglican Church is now the center of the Anglican world.
The U.S. Episcopal Church has about 2 million members. The Nigerian Catholic
Church had 5 million back in 1975, it's up to 20 million today, and they are
forecasting 35 million by 2025. How long that graph goes up is anybody's guess.
It is growing very fast.
Of course, Nigeria is not the only great center
of the Anglican world. There is Uganda, there is Kenya, there are all the other
great Christian nations, a phrase I use without the slightest irony at
all.
For many American liberals looking at, for example, the statements
from Nigeria, the assumption must be that African Christianity, Asian
Christianity, must represent some kind of primitive, uneducated, superstitious
thing, maybe some kind of hangover from paganism. In fact, I want to suggest a
very different interpretation. The Bible carries so much weight partly because
it describes a world which is immediately recognizable for millions of residents
of, certainly, Africa and Asia, which is what I will be talking about
today.
If you read the Bible in such a way that you think you are getting
almost a documentary description, that makes the moral messages much more
credible and appealing. I think for many Americans, for example, reading the Old
Testament, even if seen as a believing Christian, you cannot avoid the sense
that this is a different, strange world; it is a world of nomads and polygamy
and blood sacrifice. Why should moral strictures formed in such a world be
applicable to a modern society?
If you are reading the Bible in Africa,
however, it is exactly those features that give the Old Testament much of its
appeal. I don't know how many of you have seen some of the things that go around
the Internet on this subject. One person, for example, will say, "The Book of
Leviticus says that homosexuality is a dreadful crime." Someone else will say,
"Well yes, but Leviticus says many other things. Leviticus says that you can own
slaves from neighboring nations. Why can't I own Canadians?"
In Africa,
that sort of question does not arise because, even if people do not live in a
community that practices nomadism or polygamy or blood sacrifice, they know
places very nearby that do.
I would quote, for example, a South African
theologian by the name of Madipoane Masenya, who I emphasize is very much a liberal
activist and feminist thinker. She makes a remark: "If any African finds it
difficult to be at home with the Old Testament, they really need to examine
themselves to see if they might not have lost their Africanness in some way."
Could such a statement possibly be made of Europeans or Americans or Canadians?
I don't think so.
Once again, there are any number of examples of this.
But one I would focus on is the idea of sacrifice. Christianity is based on the
idea of atonement, which is a sacrificial doctrine; it is the shedding of blood
for sin. Often, in the European society and in the American context, we tend to
lose that idea. People may know about the idea of atonement, but we tend not to
think of it in concrete terms.
Now imagine reading about those ideas in a
society that is deeply familiar with blood sacrifice, where sacrifice occurs at
any major social event. The most senior archbishop in the South African Catholic
Church suggested a couple of years ago, to great controversy, that "If we really
want to talk about inculturation in Africa, we should think about including some
form of animal sacrifice as a prelude to the mass." Europe being Europe, there
was an enormous wave of protest about this—not in terms of the fact that the
ideas represented paganism or synchrotism, but of course because of the
possibility of cruelty to animals.
The books that carry weight in, again
Africa especially, are the books that speak of very familiar sacrificial images.
Very often, African writers, for instance, turn to books like the Book of
Revelation and say, "This reads like it was written for a specifically African
audience because it uses so many African concepts and images." The idea of the
throne, the altar, the lamb, the idea that the dead still exist in another world
crying out for justice—these are all very African ideas.
There is a
Ghanian theologian, called Kwame Bediako, who says that "The book of the Bible that we
Africans should turn to most is the Epistle to the Hebrews." You think: Why the
Epistle to the Hebrews, because the Epistle to the Hebrews describes the Jewish
sacrificial system of the temple and describes how Jesus is the culmination of
this and supercedes it? "Aha!" he says, "This is what Africans need to
understand, that all the blood sacrifices are now extinct, obsolete, and we have
to think of Jesus as the absolute sacrifice."
I have a very bad habit.
Whenever I meet American evangelicals who use concepts like "power in the blood"
and atonement, I tend to ask them, "So have you ever seen a blood sacrifice?
Have you ever smelled a blood sacrifice?" The answer is very rarely yes. This is
not a question that you need to ask in much of Africa.
And, by the way,
those ideas run through the hymns. Let me just say a quick word about hymns. We
are today living in the greatest ever age of Christian hymn writing, in terms of
the volume of hymns and by many standards the artistic quality of the hymns.
Most of them, however, are in languages that the great majority of us do not
have access to: they are in Zulu, they are in Ugandan, they are Swahili, they
are in Yoruba, they are in a great many different languages. These hymns are as
central to African Christianity as, for example, "Amazing Grace" is to American
Christianity and Christian culture.
One, for example, is an East African
hymn called "Tukutendereza Jesu" ["We praise you, Jesus"], which tends to
attract the most amazing stories about it. You know, you read stories where you
have Christians who are about to be martyred by the soldiers of a dictatorship
and they begin to sing; then the soldiers surrounding them begin to sing and put
down their guns and go home. These things actually do happen. It is a very
powerful thing.
Let me stress one word. When we look at the emerging
Christianity which will be such a force in the 21st century, there is one word I
stress: poverty. The average Christian in the world today is a very poor person,
inconceivably poor by American or European standards.
If you look at the
world's poorest today, then I suggest a rather surprising observation. The
largest single religion among the poorest is not Islam, it is not Hinduism. It
is Christianity. The problem of extreme poverty in the world is, above all, a
Christian issue. This radically affects the way in which people read the Bible,
a book which was written by and for a very poor community.
The Bible was,
of course, written for agricultural communities. So many of the analogies, so
many of the metaphors, make great sense for a modern audience in Africa or
Africa, who understand the agricultural metaphors, for example, in a way in
which most of us cannot.
I had an interesting example of this not long
ago. I was talking to some West Africans and saying, "What are the parts of the
Bible that really resonate with you?" They mentioned a couple of the obvious
ones—the sower of the seed, the grain of wheat—yes, yes, yes—and, of course, the
one which is most telling, Psalm 126. Now, of course, as an academic my life
depends on deceit, and so of course I made the obvious comment, "Oh yes, Psalm
126." Eventually, I gave up and said, "What are you talking about?" He said,
"Well, it's obvious. Psalm 126 is a psalm which includes the line, 'He who goes
out into the fields sowing the seed in tears will come back the following year
carrying the sheaves with joy.'" If you hear these lines— and they are quite
widely quoted—but they are lines associated with a funeral, obviously, because
they carry the idea of resurrection: you sow in tears, you reap in
joy.
Why are people sowing in tears? Once again, my West African friend
said, "Well, it's obvious. When the Psalm was composed, there was obviously a
famine. As in modern times, there is a limited amount of corn, there is a
limited amount of seed, and you have a choice. Your children are hungry, your
children are crying, and you can give them the food to eat, but if you do that
you've got nothing to sow the following year. So what you have to do is
literally take it away from your hungry children and take it into the fields to
sow, in the hope that it will come up next year."
There are parts of the
world where at particular times of the year the normal standard greeting is:
"How are you?" "My children are hungry." That is the normal conventional
exchange and expectation. Well, as my friend said, "It's obvious." It wasn't
obvious to me.
As you look at the Bible from poor eyes, from hungry eyes,
you begin to see just how much of the Bible is about food. You begin to see, for
example, that when people want to describe the reign of God, the coming of God,
the miraculous end times, you imagine a banquet at which the poor will have
enough to eat. Can you imagine such a thing? And, even better, the rich will be
sent empty away.
This is a prayer, a grace for before meals, from a
contemporary Chinese house church: "Today's food is not easy to come by. God
gives it to us. After we eat it, we will not be sick. God protects us so we can
have the next meal. He protects us so everything is prosperous and we have
peace. All our family members, from young to old, need the protection from God."
The idea there, which I think would have made very good sense in the Biblical
world, is that you cannot really rely on the next meal—it's a subjective,
conditional thing—any more than you can rely on water. When you look at a major
force in international affairs like migration, look at the importance of the
number of countries that are, as the phrase goes, water-stressed, that are
dealing with polluted water, shortages of water, and then with those eyes read
passages in the Bible which promise streams of living water. What an amazing
idea!
Most of us do not know at first hand the experience of famine,
which is such a constant theme throughout the Bible. One of the figures who
traditionally appeals in so much of global Christianity is Elijah. Elijah is the
figure who all of his stories concern a time of the most dreadful famine caused
by a water shortage. Elijah negotiates with God.
I suppose I come around
to a remark by a theologian called Musimbi
Kanyoro. She makes a remark, and you can imagine the disbelief in her voice:
"Those cultures which find it hard to identify with Biblical cultures run the
risk of reading the Bible as fiction. Can you imagine such a thing? Could
anybody do that?" Before you think, "Well, Musimbi Kanyoro must be a
fundamentalist," no. Again, she is a very liberal, feminist theologian, a great
activist. She expresses awe at the idea that anyone could possibly read the
Bible as fiction; obviously, the world it is describing is so familiar.
I
just want to talk about one book, in particular, which I think illustrates all
these ideas. That is a short epistle called the
Epistle of James. If ever a book had unsuspected depths, it is the Epistle
of James.
Oh by the way, I give you a golden rule for trying to
understand the Christianity of Africa or Asia. Look at what Martin
Luther thought, back 500 years ago, about the good and the bad bits of the
Bible. Any book that Martin Luther wanted to throw out of the Bible is at the
core of African Christianity. If Luther didn't like it, it goes down great in
Africa. It's a simple rule for you.
Luther hated James. Why? Because it
seemed to him to be a simple, moralistic kind of text. It is also a book which
speaks so absolutely to African and Asian churches that it has probably given
rise to more sermon texts than any other, and particularly one verse, in which
James says basically: "You say that tomorrow you are going to go to the city,
you're going to do some business, you're going to do these things. You fool. You
don't know that you're going to be able to do that. You could be dead tomorrow.
Your life is a vapor, your life is a mist." If I had a penny for every sermon
preached on that verse in Africa in the last few years, I'd be a very rich
man.
"What you should say," says James, "is 'if the Lord wills, I will do
this.'" James preaches a basic Christian doctrine, which is also basic to other
religions, that I think most Westerners have lost, which is the idea of
transience, the idea that individuals and societies and states are here today
but nobody exactly can be sure whether they will be here tomorrow. In the
aftermath of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, once again that text came
back again and again, particularly "your life is a mist, your life is a
vapor."
James also speaks to other religions. Interestingly, Christians
use it to try and evangelize Muslims and Muslims use it to try and evangelize
Christians. Why? Because it speaks a common language of poor societies that know
conscience, that know that people come and go, states come and go; God
remains.
It looks like a Muslim text. Why? It describes God as
compassionate and merciful. I think we've heard that before. It says that you
should accompany every action by the phrase "if God wills." Any exposure at all
to a Muslim world soon brings the phrase inshallah ("if it is God's will")—a
particularly disturbing moment when you are about to take off on an airliner
from a Muslim nation and the pilot says, "We will be reaching 30,000 feet,
inshallah."
It is the definitive text, perhaps, for the poor and for
religions formed in poor societies. The best example of this, oddly, is
Buddhism. You think about this. You think of Christians going to Asia and trying
to find parts of the Bible that they can use to communicate with local cultures.
What would you use: the exalted mysticism of the Gospel of John; the moral
instruction of the Beatitudes? The one that works in practice is James, because
it teaches a very familiar set of ideas.
I can verify this in one way.
Not long ago, a British publisher had an interesting scheme. They took books of
the Bible and published them with introductions by famous actors and thinkers
and so on. Who do you think they chose to introduce the Epistle of James? The Dalai Lama, in one of his
Christian commentaries.
The Dalai Lama begins by saying basically, "I
know very little about Christianity"—come now, your Holiness, a little
modest—"but I do know about Buddhism, and this is fine Buddhism, this is great
Buddhism." He actually says, "What this actually is, is it represents a
wonderful example of a well-known Tibetan form of literature, called
lojong, which is mind training"—which, if you think about it, is a very
fine description for what Christians and Jews would call "wisdom literature." It
trains the mind. Here is a basic fact: Your life is transient, your life is
temporary; how does that affect the way you look at the world?
So I'm
suggesting a number of ways in which the world of the Bible makes
sense.
I want to talk about one rather more controversial area, and that
is the notion of supernatural evil. If there is a fundamental difference between
the world of the New Testament and the world of the modern West, it is the whole
idea of demons and healings and exorcisms.
Jim Wallace made the remark a couple of years ago that if you
take references to the poor out of the Bible, you're not left with much. He's
absolutely right. If you take references to demons, healings, and exorcisms out
of the Bible, you're left with a pretty thin pamphlet.
In Global South
churches, these ideas of demons and healings are absolutely central to
Christianity. Any kind of Christianity which does not teach and preach these
lessons is suspect.
There is a story which illustrate this. I have a
friend who is a pastor of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a sort of white,
middle-class individual, who was visiting South Africa. He wandered into a very
large, densely packed church in an area where people did not really expect to
see white faces because of the experience of the apartheid years. People were
very hospitable and asked him why he was there. They said, "Oh, wonderful news!
You're a pastor, you're an ordained pastor. What a wonderful thing!"
The
word goes up to the platform, where the minister in charge of the congregation
said, "Oh, my friends, I have wonderful news for you. Pastor Smith has come to
visit us all the way from the United States. I'm going to invite him to conduct
tonight's exorcism."
I sometimes tell that story in seminaries, and you
can see people blanch. In case you're wondering, Pastor Smith had no experience
of exorcism beyond what he had seen in the movies, but he did well.
This
is not a weird, fringe, Pentecostal thing. I'll give you another story which I
think illustrates this, a true story. Imagine a great service in a Ugandan
church where a woman reports being healed of a spinal complaint and wants to
testify. Then everyone else starts to testify—"I've been healed of this," "I've
been healed of this." Finally, the deacon in the church, wanting to get out
before next Sunday if he possibly can, says, "All right, never mind individual
testimony. A show of hands. How many people have been healed of this sort of
disease?"—fifteen, sixteen. "How many of this sort of disease?"—seventeen,
eighteen. Oh, what sort of church was this? It was, of course, a Roman Catholic
church, and the miracle occurred during the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.
These ideas that I am talking about run across denominations, across all
denominations—Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran, whatever.
I just want to
read one example from a hymn, by the way. I will draw this to an end shortly.
One example I cannot resist.
I know many people in this country in the
churches are very conscious about the survival of sexist, militarist,
patriarchal language in hymns and liturgy and they try to get a much more
representative selection of hymns that avoid these problems. Here's an example
of a contemporary West African hymn by a woman, Afua Kuma, and I think you can
hear the gentle woman's touch: "If Satan troubles us, Jesus Christ, you are the
lion of the grasslands. Your claws are sharp. You will tear out his entrails and
leave them on the ground for the flies to eat."
This is a tough
Christianity, this is a serious Christianity that takes spiritual warfare very
seriously. But—I cannot emphasize this sufficiently—it is a Christianity that
believes in deliverance from evil, but that also believes in liberation, and
that knows that those two words are the same word. There is not the division
that you familiarly find in Western Christianity between on the left you have
liberation theology, on the right you have deliverance. They are two concepts
representing one word. It is deliverance from the evil spirits that bring
sickness and poverty, disease and pollution, and substance abuse. They try to
teach and practice healing of all those complaints.
What I'm suggesting,
in short, is that the Christianity that we see in the Global South is a rounded
sort of religion, in the sense that it brings together concepts that in the
Global North perhaps we see as incompatible. I would argue that, particularly
for the traditionally excluded, marginalized groups, which in many African and
Asian societies means women, it represents a significant opportunity of a leap
forward.
I'd just like to end with the words of David Martin, a
well-known British sociologist, when he looks at Pentecostalism in Latin America
and Africa. He says that what new Christianity means is that people who
previously did not have the right or the ability to speak out, who are expected
to defer to traditional authority, suddenly acquire the license to do so—or, as
he says, "They acquire tongues of fire." That is what that is about.
I
can go on at great length about the evils and horrors which might be associated
with this kind of Christianity potentially, but at the moment let me end with
basically a very optimistic portrait. I will draw to a close right there and
throw it open for questions.
Questions and AnswersQUESTION: Thank you very much for this very
informative talk. Actually, when I saw the title, I thought it was the Global
South here in the United States, because when I listen to your description of
the church in Africa and Asia, I have the feeling you find the same trend here
in the United States. When you look at the statistics about the believers in
creationism, in intelligent design, or you listen on Sunday morning to the
evangelists, I really have the feeling I am in Africa—which is not bad.
A
second question is that I'm missing your point. I think it is very informative,
but what are the conclusions? What is going to happen?
PHILIP
JENKINS: Well, I did try to make that comment about you would not have to go
far, even in New York, to find churches where that is commonplace. But there is
a great distinction between what you might call the established, more mainline
denominations and ideas that exist more on the fringe.
I'd suggest a
couple of things. I'd suggest we are still at the very early stages of a
process. During the 20th century, one of the key events in African history was
that approximately 40 percent of the population of Africa moved from animism to
Christianity. So we are still dealing with a religion which is of the second
generation in most cases. This is new.
I think what we are seeing is the
potential for the transformation of attitudes to gender, to economics, to debt
and thrift, and that the churches have a potential for acting as organs of
development in a way that no secular agencies have yet done.
For example,
if you look at the very successful prosperity churches in Nigeria or West
Africa, the churches that preach health and wealth—you pray to God and great
things will come to you—this looks like a very cynical, exploitative kind of
Christianity. However, what these churches also do is they try to teach and
train their members, especially young male members, in new ways of living, ways
of coping without debt, the belief that debt is a kind of bodily
sin.
Organizing a society around families in which there is a family
responsibility. The phrase that I always like from Latin America—and I wish I
had invented this, but I did not—Elizabeth Brusco says that the great change
wrought by Pentecostalism in Latin America is "the reformation of machismo."
[See her book, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in
Colombia]. What you are seeing, and what I believe you are seeing
the very early stages of, is something like the creation of a Victorian attitude
to family and community.
I would also add one thing, which is more
concrete and more immediate. In most of Africa, the established
churches—especially the Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and others—have played a key
role in promoting democracy and human rights. In the 1980s, for example, where
you have, if you like, the second wave of African revolutions, very often it is
the churches that supervise those.
We are all familiar with people like
Desmond
Tutu in South Africa, but there are many other examples. In Zimbabwe, for
example, the only effective opposition is the Roman Catholic Church, led by Pius Ncube.
It's a miracle the man is still alive. In Kenya, under the Moi dictatorship, the
opposition was David Gitari, the Anglican archbishop.
And churches
represent potential foci of opposition, organization around human rights. So I
think we are seeing a short-term development in that way, but also a long-term
consequence. I believe the consequences are very
important.
QUESTION: How do you reconcile the clergy, whether
Christian or Muslim, with poverty, natural resources, and especially the
increased birth rate, to uplift the standard of living in these
countries?
PHILIP JENKINS: Well, as I said, I was trying to
address that in that question, which is any chance of a sustained increase in
the standard of living surely means a change of attitudes to concepts like
thrift, work, community organization, and so on. We are starting to see
that.
If I can use, if you like, a Latin American example, when
liberation theology, the base communities, faded and failed in the 1980s, there
was an enormous upsurge of Pentecostal churches, very sort of fundamentalist and
enthusiastic and so on. People originally saw that as a withdrawal from or
rejection of the world. In fact, if you look at what those churches are doing,
they are actually doing a great job of community organization, providing social
services for their people, and trying to encourage and train people to go out
and work and find jobs. So that would seem to me to be a significant
contribution to that.
QUESTIONER: The greatest increase in
standard of living has been in China, which has a limited family policy and
birth control. Is there any projection of trying to do something like that to
emulate China—not their dictatorship, but family and birth
control?
PHILIP JENKINS: As I'm sure you know, one of the most
important changes around much of the world in the last decade or so has been the
spread of sub-replacement fertility. Just to give you an example—this is not
from global Christianity—in the last twenty years, the birth rate in Iran, for
example, has fallen from six children per woman to two. So the United States now
has a higher fertility rate than Iran.
Most Muslim countries in the Near
East and North Africa are now rapidly approaching European birth rates—Tunisia,
Algeria, Morocco. All these countries are now heading basically for Spanish and
Italian rates—not just without government encouragement, but despite government
encouragement in many cases to do the opposite. The places that still have the
very high rates in the Muslim world are places like—well, you can guess—Iraq,
Afghanistan, Somalia, the Gaza Strip. So that is spreading as a global factor
right now.
The fastest changes are actually in Latin America. The oldest
country in the Western Hemisphere, in terms of the largest number of its people
over sixty-five, is Uruguay. It is not the United States.
So
sub-replacement fertility is a very important change which is happening. It will
have enormous consequences politically.
Africa at the moment, Christian
and Muslim, is the area that is resisting these tendencies. It will probably do
so for another ten or twenty years.
QUESTION: Thank you for being
so enlightening. I would like us to look at the perspective of the descendants
of Abraham.
Number one, I want to point out that in Jewish synagogues
today the oral law, the Torah, the Old Testament, is read in chapters. We also
read sections from the prophets. So this continuation of an oral tradition
combined with the written word is still going on. And, just recently, we
celebrated the Day of Atonement, which is certainly in the Bible, and therefore
is open to everybody, the descendants of Abraham.
Now the question. Both
Christians and Muslims consider themselves descendants of Abraham. The real
question is: Why would somebody choose Christianity above Islam or Islam above
Christianity?
PHILIP JENKINS: That's a very good
question.
QUESTIONER: Also, the sociology, the history of the
spread of religions—you mentioned the Victorians. The original source for
Christianity came from missionaries from Europe or America. How did the
transformation take place to have an indigenous set of churches? The same way in
Islam, the original impetus came from crusading Muslims often converting people
by the sword, and they would start from the north, from north Africa, the
northern part of Sudan and Uganda and so forth. Tell us more about the
competition and the evolution of the religions.
PHILIP JENKINS:
I'll try to confine myself to three hours. As I'm sure you appreciate, those are
substantial questions. Let me try to just address a couple of
things.
First of all, the transition from missionaries. Actually, the
spread of Islam across most of what is now the Muslim world—certainly into East
Asia, South Asia, North Africa—comes through the Sufis, who are both the mystics and the knights of Islam.
That is a complex story.
It does not take long historically for those
religions to establish local roots, usually in forms which the established
churches maybe don't like. So Christianity, for instance, arrives in a
particular area, and twenty years later there are people saying, "Well, you
know, not only is Christ a fine thing, but I myself am Christ." You get
movements like this.
If you want to read an account of these sort of
movements, the best account is probably the greatest Brazilian novel, The Revolt in the Backlands by Euclides de Cunha,
which is a stunning novel about a messiah in the Brazilian backwoods.
But
the transition happens quite rapidly. For example, in Africa the missionaries
spent a long time making a few converts and establishing centers.
But it
is when the empires die that Christianity begins exploding. Two things happen.
It is almost as if people are sitting around saying, "Well, thank heaven they're
gone. Now we can concentrate on doing what we really want to do." It is rather
like the fall of the Roman Empire; it's only after the fall of the Roman Empire
that you get the great conversions. It is only after the fall of the British and
the Belgian and the French and the Portuguese empires that you get the spread of
the new churches.
The other thing is that the end of colonialism
coincides with the spread of systems of modernity, forms of industrialization,
urbanization, and immigration. You think of people moving into cities, where
there are no facilities for welfare, health, and education, beyond what people
provide themselves and what they provide through, depending on the kind of area,
their mosques or their churches. Usually, the people providing those services
tend to be very indigenous groups, and also people who follow quite
fundamentalist, orthodox, traditional kinds of belief.
If you want to
look at the history of Hamas, for example, in the Muslim world, do not look at
it primarily through its military or violent activities. Look at it through its
incredible networks of social services.
I'd add one other thing. We often
tend to neglect this. Churches and religious institutions in Africa and Asia
often carry the reputation—sometimes undeserved—of being the only people who
avoid corruption. Political corruption at every level tends to be associated
with states. It was Nigeria under its military governments that gave us the word
kleptocracy. In a system like that, in the Muslim areas people turn to the
mosques, and in the Christian areas people of any talent or ability moved into
the churches.
That is a very quick summary of an answer. But it happens
very quickly.
I'll just give you one figure, which I rather like, for
Nigeria. Back in 1900, the area that would become Nigeria was 33 percent Muslim,
1 percent Christian—Muslims outnumbered Christians 33:1. By 1970, it was Muslims
45 percent, Christians 45 percent. Christians went from 1 percent to 45 percent
in basically two generations. That's an incredible growth.
If you want to
understand tension, hostility, between the two religions, you can see both
sides. But think of it from a Muslim point of view, people who have always
believed "Well, we'll take over this country eventually," and who suddenly face
the menace that "my son, my grandson, could be a Christian."
What I often
call the most feared "weapon of mass instruction" in the Muslim world is the
"Jesus" video. I don't know how many of you have ever seen or heard of the
"Jesus" video. It was made in the 1970s originally. It is basically a fairly bad
film, the story of the life of Jesus. Around the Muslim world today, people
claim that it has been responsible for 300 million conversions worldwide. I do
not know.
Very often, in an African city, someone will go up to a Muslim
and say, "Would you like to see a film I've got about the prophet Jesus?" "Oh
certainly, yes, I'd love to see this." It is an incredibly evangelistic tool and
very, very powerful. Very often, if you want to map riots, just trace the
distribution of the "Jesus" video.
QUESTION: I'd like to ask for
your assessment on a thought that I had. In the beginning of your talk, you
talked about the impact of the African churches on the Anglican community with
respect to the ordination of a gay minister. I would like to close the loop here
and focus on the end of your remarks, where you talked about the importance of
deliverance in the Southern churches, the importance of poverty and health and
so on, and ask you for your assessment on what the impact of that particular
form of Christianity might have on some of our more conservative American
churches and their political viewpoints, which have so far, at least in an
organized way, seemed to have focused on these other aspects of Christian
worship, largely Christian belief, largely matters of sex and marriage and
abortion.
PHILIP JENKINS: Just to take an example, not an African
example, but if you look at, say, Pentecostal churches, evangelical churches, in
Brazil, they are very conservative on moral, doctrinal issues and they are
actually very radical, very liberal, on economic issues. It was the Pentecostals
who represented the left of the Lula government when that was elected. I think that is already
having quite an impact.
I look at the National Association of
Evangelicals, which is this large umbrella organization in this country. I know
the leader of that is a man called Ted Haggard. He is based in Colorado Springs. He is currently
in the process of building a new church facility which is based on a church in
Lagos. So you look to the centers of the Christian world and you draw on
those.
But much more seriously, American evangelicals I think are being
affected by the more holistic political attitude of African churches. Where you
see that most tellingly is in the activism of American evangelicals recently
over environmental issues, the sense that, "Obviously, global warming is a
threat to everyone. If we are just focused on sexual issues, that is only a very
small part of the story."
Over the last decade or so, there have been a
number of global issues. One was global debt, of course, in the late 1990s; and
more recently, issues of sex trafficking. The most direct result of this global
concern was something which I think has rather dropped off the radar. In I
forget the exact year—I think it was 2003—President Bush made a very large
financial commitment to fighting AIDS. That was, I think, a direct response to
evangelical pressures and contacts. So there is definitely this influence, the
idea that, "Okay, we're very concerned about the sexual issues, but there is
also the other thing."
The other issue, of course, would be religious
freedom. I sometimes think that over the next couple of election cycles in this
country, religious freedom issues could come ever more to the fore,
particularly, as I'm sure you know, in 2007, which is the year in which there is
to be a new federal election in Nigeria, in which probably a Muslim military
officer will be elected. The consequences could be "may you live in interesting
times."
QUESTION: Your mention of exorcism led me to think about,
not only the way in which these religions of the Global South are reviving an
earlier form of Christianity, but they are also incorporating traditional
aspects of religion. So I'm wondering to what extent does this raise, not only
policy issues around topics like homosexuality, but also doctrinal issues in
terms of theology? In other words, how Christian are these Christians? To what
extent, given the decentralization of the way these groups seem to be organized,
are they a new religion, something different, and does this present a real
theological dilemma?
PHILIP JENKINS: I can give you a couple of
examples which would confirm that.
On Easter Day, a couple of million
people turned out in St. Peter's Square in Rome and 5 million people turned out
at the headquarters of the Zion Christian Church in South Africa. In other
words, it's a much bigger event there. The Zion Christian Church certainly does
things which seem to hang over from Zulu traditional religion that give problems
to some people.
Generally speaking, though, that is unrepresentative.
First of all, if you go to an African city, most of the churches you will see
will be ones that you could see around here—they're Anglican, Catholic,
Methodist, Lutheran. A lot of the old, independent churches have given way to
global Pentecostal denominations, like the Assemblies of God, and a lot of the
older African independent denominations—in West Africa, you have these things
called the Aladura churches—have become much more mainstream American and
Pentecostal.
A great example is the Redeemed Christian Church of God, RCCG, which incidentally is
now building a North American headquarters in Texas, in a town that used to have
as its official town motto "The Blackest Land, the Whitest People"—ha, ha. The
RCCG has turned into a global missionary church, reaching out. It has parishes
within a mile of here.
So the older, if you like, more eccentric—let's
use a technical sociological word, kookiest—churches really are receding. There
are some which are weird, which do things like make their prophets equal to the
Messiah, and so on and so on. They are fading and they are really marginal. The
overwhelming majority belong to that weird, esoteric, mystical sect called the
Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, that sort of religion. So I am not
so focused on that.
There is also a sort of rhetorical need. When there
are North/South debates, people always want to make the African churches look as
alien as possible. This gives rise to very unfortunate incidents, like when
liberals in the Episcopal Church at one great meeting tried to tell conservative
Africans that they should—and I quote—"go back to the jungle you came from and
stop monkeying around with the church." Both sides tend to say a lot of unwise
things, and stereotypes can run rampant.
JOANNE MYERS: Thank you
very much. Nothing unwise about your presentation this morning. Thank you very
much for being with us.
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