Religion resurgent.(The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity)(Book review)

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins; Oxford University Press, 2007 (revised edition), $32.95.

WHAT IS THE MOST successful social movement of the twentieth century? Which religion has the most new members each year?

The answers are: Pentecostalism--which grew from a few adherents in 1901 to hundreds of millions by 2000--and Christianity--which is expanding every bit as fast as Islam from a bigger base.

These answers are only startling if one has a Western-centric view of Christianity. Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom clearly shows how distorted Western views of Christianity (and religion generally) typically are. I do not believe I have read a more enlightening, or more disturbing, book on the contemporary world. Monotheism--belief in the One God, the Middle East's most powerful and enduring contribution to human thought--is the most successful set of beliefs in human history. And it is still gaining strength across the globe.

Its most spectacular growth is in the form of Pentecostalism, which grew out of Methodism and stresses a deeply personal sense of religious involvement based on the infusion of the Holy Spirit as per the first (Christian) Pentecost in the Book of Acts. In Jenkins' words, "In this thought-world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith-healing, exorcism and dream visions are all basic components of religious sensibility." But the appeal of a religious movement that deliberately seeks to recreate the religious sensibility of the first Christians is simply beyond the ken of those who presume the retreat of religious feeling to be a necessary and natural part of modernity. That appeal disconcerts established churches as much as complacent secularists--in the words of a commentator on Latin America, "the Catholic Church has chosen the poor, but the poor chose the Pentecostals".

A basic mistake--as Jenkins regularly points out--is to see Christianity as a Western or European phenomenon. Thus historical Muslim religious aggression (unlike the much more minor Crusades) is not seen as problematic because we forget the history of African and Asian Christianity.

Meanwhile, Christianity has spread most dramatically in Africa since the end of Western colonialism. During the 1960s, Christians came to outnumber Muslims in Africa for the first time since probably the thirteenth century. (What Jenkins actually writes is: "Sometime in the 1960s, another historic landmark occurred, when Christians first outnumbered Muslims in Africa," which, as his own historical survey makes clear, is a bit of a howler. Christians outnumbered Muslims in Africa until some centuries after the Muslim conquest of North Africa.)