Missionary Global
Christianity
A book review by David Orton
When the missionaries came to Africa
they had the Bible and we had the land.
They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our
eyes. When we opened them we had the
Bible and they had the land.
Jomo Kenyatta, Kenyan leader,
p. 40
The Next Christendom:
The Coming of Global Christianity
by Philip
Jenkins. Oxford University Press, New York, 2002,
270 pages, hardcover,
ISBN 0-19-514616-6.
Introduction
I heard the author
of the above book, Philip Jenkins, being interviewed on the CBC radio program
"Tapestry"
not too long ago. Tapestry is an
hour-long weekly program of religion-related affairs. Jenkins is a professor
of
history and religious studies at
Penn State University in the United States. What Jenkins had to say about
a
re-birth and re-vitalization of
Christianity, and its different, more socially conservative but charismatic/evangelical/
apocalyptic and mystical doctrinal
emphases, in Africa, Latin America and Asia, aroused my interest because
of
the social implications of Christianity
as a new dynamic social movement. This was a different factor to consider
in a post September 11th world.
It motivated me to read his latest book, The Next Christendom: The Coming
of Global Christianity. I am
glad I did.
Increasing Christian influence
Jenkins argues
in this book, and I accept his basic position, for an increasing influence
of Christianity on the
world stage. But it will be a different
kind of Christianity than can be observed in North America, in Western
Europe, or in Australia and New
Zealand. For example, in southern Africa Jenkins states that:
Some independent churches have retained a wide range of traditional practices,
including polygamy,
divination, animal sacrifices, initiation rites, circumcision, and
the veneration of ancestors. p. 120
This view of increasing
influence, was interesting to me, given (a) the commonplace North American
and
European observation, that Christianity
was of declining influence in the world, with the growth of modernization
and secularization in most peoples'
lives; and (b) the fixation in the West that most of us have on the growing
influence of Islam in our world, and
the sense in contrast to this, that Christianity is somehow a "has been"
religious movement. Jenkins' book
really blows these two views out of the water. Both Islam and the new
Christianity are competing missionary
religions, with rival concepts of God, and with aspirations "to convert
the
entire globe." (p. 159)
Jenkins points out how the stakes for the individual can be high. For example:
"For a Muslim to abandon his or her faith is apostasy, an act punishable
by death under Islamic law.
As the maxim holds, 'Islam is a one way door. You can enter through it, but
you cannot leave.'" (p. 168)
This is one of
those books which helps us better understand the societies around us, necessary
for bringing about
the kind of revolutionary ecological
and social changes that deeper Greens seek. As a professor of religious studies,
the author is interested in the various
changes occurring within Christianity. He discusses what such changes mean
for religious institutions, like the
Catholic Church, where the majority of the world's Catholics now have residence
in
the global South. This concern, while
of some interest, is not the focus of my review of The Next Christendom.
Jenkins' talk fitted
into my general awareness of the increasing importance of religious values
in social affairs. He
argues that we in the West are misreading
the "state of Christianity," and that this religion is actually of growing
importance in the world in peoples'
lives. All of us are aware that some countries internally seem locked into
a very
competitive and often violent battle
between Christianity and Islam, e.g. Nigeria, Sudan, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia
and the Philippines. But Jenkins argues
it is a very different Christianity than that to which most of us in the West
are accustomed to. This is a Christianity
which is overwhelmingly non-white and non-Western. The heart of
Christianity is better seen as no
longer situated in the West but as located in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Jenkins, like Samuel
Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order, argues
that this
growth of a non-Western Christianity
is an important factor in religious identification, asserting precedence
over
adherence to nation states. Says Jenkins:
"It is precisely religious changes that are the most significant, and even
the most revolutionary, in
the contemporary world." (p. 1)
This seems to be a hard, but necessary
pill to swallow, for those of us who define ourselves as Left in some way.
Globalization, the ruthless penetration of global capitalism throughout the
world, brings in its wake not only
the commodification and subjugation
of the natural world, but immense social disruption which nation states,
particularly in the non-Western world
are overwhelmed by. It is in this breakdown of any real national social safety
net that religions like Christianity
and Islam come, so to speak, into their own. In a curious, unintended paradox,
global capitalism or "modernization"
spawns religious revivalism! That religious revivalism can, ironically in
the case
of Christianity, not only send non-white
priest 'missionaries' back to Western Europe and North America but also,
in the case of fundamentalist Islam,
send jet planes aimed at the citadels of global capital.
Daring views on Israel
For a US academic,
I find Jenkins views on Israel very daring:
"American Christians have usually followed their government in expressing
an absolute and generally
uncritical
support for the state of Israel. This fact infuriates not just the bulk of
the world's Muslims,
but also many Third World Christians (not to mention the millions of Arab
Christians). Islamic
fundamentalism
would not have enjoyed the success it has over the past thirty years if it
had not been
for the continuing provocation of the existence of Israel." (p.
181)
He sees Western
governments' pro-Israeli policies essentially grounded in Holocaust guilt.
(p. 181) Whereas I see
U.S. unwavering support linked through
(a) a cultural identity connection; and (b) seeing Israel as a strategic
beachhead in an oil-rich Middle East.
There are about one billion Moslems in the world and under 20 million Jews.
Jenkins sees Southern Christians as
identifying more with the oppression of the Palestinian people. The author
also
shows that there is a powerful Muslim
cultural influence on Southern churches, for example in retaining traditional
women's roles.
Criticism and conclusion
There is a lot
of new contemporary data in this book, which can be useful for those supporting
a radical deep
ecology world view and who are struggling
to see how to implement this. Reading this book made me think of Marx,
sitting in the British Museum in
the 19th century and reading those note books of the British factory inspectors,
which gave him the data for his account
of the destructiveness of Capital. The inspectors gave the data and Marx
supplied the analysis. So Jenkins
book is a data book, but his values and analysis, like those presumably of
the
British factory inspectors, one does
not necessarily share.
There is no ecological
dimension to this book, just the standard point of view that economic growth
is good.
There is an equating of capitalism
with democracy, brought out in the following quote:
"A growing Pentecostal community tends to create a larger public base for
the growth of democratic
capitalism
and, in the long term, perhaps for greater secularism." (p. 138)
So there is a conventional view of
the virtues of capitalism and economic growth.
I also feel that
Jenkins, presumably as practitioner of the religion in the title of his book,
leans more on Islam:
"In the world as a whole, there is no question that the threat of intolerance
and persecution chiefly
comes from the Islamic side of the equation." (p. 170)
In a strange way,
Jenkins brings a class perspective to this book, in that he shows that today
global Christianity
is flourishing where its social base
is the poor and persecuted, whereas in the wealthy countries, among the rich
and secure, it atrophies.
This book deserves
to be read. Yet its subject matter is completely anthropocentric and concerned
with the
affairs of the Christian God and Man.
Nature and non human life forms remain outside of the universe under
discussion.
March 14, 2003
Printed in the online
journal The Trumpeter, Vol. 19.2: http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/v19.2/
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