The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South.(Book review)

The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. By Philip Jenkins. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 252. $26.00 hardback; $15.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-195-36851-2.)

This volume is a historian's witty, erudite, and provocative reflection on popular (as opposed to academic) biblical interpretation focusing mainly on Africa, although the terminology of "the Global South" is much more ambitious (and, indeed, the book-jacket photograph is taken from a location in Brazil). It relates to a specifically North American discussion: in The New Faces of Christianity Jenkins continues pushing a narrative he had begun in his controversial The Next Christendom (New York, 2002) and concluded in his analysis of the "religious crisis" in Europe, God's Continent (New York, 2007).The argument of this well-researched trilogy on the global religious situation is not only that Christianity has moved south but also that a massive schism of historical proportions is in the making between the liberal North Atlantic minority and the more fundamentalist ("primitive") variants of Christianity in the Global South. For the foreseeable future, Jenkins thinks, the big battalions will be with the crusading South and make life pretty uncom-fortable for a northern Christianity that has made its peace with liberalism and secularism. Moribund and, at best, part of a creative minority in Europe, liberal Christianity's role in the future of humankind will be limited, in particular with regard to the conflict between Christianity and Islam--perhaps a clear indication for the United States to search somewhere else for allies: the Christian South.

The main hypothesis of The New Faces means more bad news for liberal Bible ...