The New Faces of Christianity:Believing the Bible in the Global South

by Philip Jenkins

In the lands that would become Nigeria, for instance, just between 1900 and 1970, the Christian share of the population grew from roughly 1 percent to around 44 percent, and overwhelmingly, those new converts came from peoples who had earlier been animists or ethnoreligionists. For Africa as a whole, the religious shift during the twentieth century meant that around one-third of the continental population transferred its allegiance away from native religions or animism to different shades of Christianity. Most African Christians are second- or third-generation members of the faith, so that a lively animist presence is always in evidence.