Steeple Chase.("The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity")

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins (Oxford, 304 pp., $28)

The quasi-apocalyptic warnings are all too familiar by now. Christianity is on the way out, and the West's stranglehold on religion is going the way of the dodo (and, most of the critics add, none too soon). If the old faith of the oppressors has any hope at all, opine the advocates of obliterating "reform," it must change or die; meanwhile, the fearsome forces of Islam range unchecked across the globe, as the crescent surely and irrevocably replaces the cross. The religious landscape of this new century holds little hope for the followers of Jesus.

All of these deadly serious predictions are familiar; they also, however, happen to be laughably untrue. At present count, and with the most accuracy that demographic science can hope to achieve, there are 2 billion Christians in the world. By the year 2050, there will be 3 billion, outnumbering Muslims three to two. Christianity is anything but moribund, so whence the rumors of its imminent, whimpering death?

Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Penn State, makes the sensible case that Christianity is indeed growing quickly, just not in its old haunts -- Europe and North America -- and not in ways particularly attractive to the mainstream media. In the first place, Christianity's center of gravity is shifting south: Before the end of this century we can well expect Africa, Asia, and Latin America to be the home of the most vibrant and populous Christian nations on earth. Already fast approaching Europe's 560 million Christians (many of whom, let us admit, are only nominally so), Latin America is home to 480 million, Africa to 360 million, Asia to 313 million -- and all of these are notably larger contingents than North America's mere 260 million.

Perhaps even more striking is the kind of people who are attracted to Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere. On the whole, they are not much like their northern counterparts: They are overwhelmingly poor, displaced from rural villages into overcrowded cities in search of work. They are morally conservative, often to the point of being what northerners would call puritanical, and theologically orthodox. They adhere strictly to the word of Scripture, which commands their loyalty far more than state or society; and they expect supernatural intervention in their daily lives, be it in the form of faith healing or ecstatic prophecy. They tend to be Roman Catholics (frequently of a charismatic stripe) or Pentecostals.

Despite the West's predilection for reporting only the more syncretistic or corrupt extremes of Southern Hemisphere churches, the overwhelming majority of these churches are recognizably Christian. On the whole, the old guard in Europe and North America has simply ignored the burgeoning masses of Christians in the South. When they have noticed them, it has generally been in the service of the northern churches' polemical agendas. Northern conservatives laud the traditional morality, in particular the traditional sexual morality, found in the South, and discover therein the means to defend unpopular decisions at home. Northern liberals, on the other hand, uphold the South's tendencies towards liberation theology in order to plead for social reform and make prophetic critiques of capitalist excesses.

The churches of the South do, in fact, exhibit the qualities Northerners ascribe to them; but Jenkins argues that adopting the southern churches for northern rhetorical purposes is a dead end -- because what the North has to say about Christianity is not going to matter much as the years pass. One need only cursorily examine the relative birth and ...