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April 10 - April 15, 2023
One central fact in the changing religious picture is a massive relative decline in the proportion of the world’s people who live in the traditionally advanced nations.
Populations can and do rebound from decline, while what seems like exponential growth can taper off.
United Nations demographers predict that global population will eventually level off in a hundred years or so, at a new plateau of around 10 billion.
population change is conditioned by economic circumstances.
The history of the West indicates that as a community becomes more prosperous, people tend to have fewer children, and these trends should eventually be replicated in the global South.
In the long run, feminism may be the most effective means of regulating population.
In order to keep a population stable, a nation needs an overall fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman (the rate would have to be higher in countries with worse infant mortality rates).
The world’s youngest nations are African, namely Uganda, Niger, and the Congo, countries in which the median age of the population is around sixteen. By the same measure, the oldest countries are all in Europe or Japan—forty is the median age of the people of Italy, Germany, Sweden, and Japan.
the definition of “Christian” can be controversial.
if some observers underclaim Christian numbers on grounds of theological strictness, others are just as likely to make exaggerated claims.
The Church of England claims the loyalty of 25 million baptized Anglicans, even though less than a million of those are ever seen within the precincts of a church.
certain commonsense guidelines
First, for working purposes, we cannot be too precise about defining Christianity.
I will in many cases be using official definitions of religious loyalty,
In Africa especially, experience over the last half-century indicates that the Christian share of the population will rise substantially across most of the continent, making deep inroads in the center and east. This trend is so marked that any projections offered here might be overly conservative.
About a third of the world’s Christians by 2050 will be African, and those African Christians will outnumber Europe’s by more than two to one.
These emerging churches work so well because they appeal to the very different demographics of their communities, and do best among young and displaced migrants in mushrooming cities.
The most successful new denominations target their message very directly at the have-nots, or rather, the have-nothings.
Most of the global population growth in the coming decades will be urban.
Rich pickings await any religious groups who can meet the needs of these new urbanites, anyone who can at once feed the body and nourish the soul.
Not only are there going to be far more Christians in the global South than the North, but the Southerners are also likely to be much more committed in terms of belief and practice.
Extrapolating current trends would leave English churches literally abandoned within a generation or two.
Even in the relatively secular countries, survey evidence still shows surprisingly high levels of belief, suggesting that people are believing without belonging, and a majority still characterize themselves, however indecisively, as Christians.
Looking at the spread of mosques across urban Europe, it would be easy to believe that Islam might indeed be Europe’s future religion.
As the nation grows, its ethnic character will become less European and less white, with all that implies for religious and cultural patterns.
Presently, four states (California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii) have achieved majority-minority status, in that non-Latino whites have ceased to form an absolute majority of the population, and other states will soon join the list.
America remains today substantially what it has always been, namely a Christian country.
Though Americans tend to assume that all Middle Eastern immigrants must be Muslim, perhaps three-quarters of Arab Americans are in fact Christian.
The types of Christianity that have thrived most successfully in the global South have been very different from what many Europeans and North Americans consider mainstream.
These models have been far more enthusiastic, much more centrally concerned with the immediate workings of the supernatural, through prophecy, visions, ecstatic utterances, and healing.
If in fact the bulk of the Christian population is going to be living in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, then practices that now prevail in those areas will become ever more common across the globe.
However greatly Southern types of Christianity have diverged from older orthodoxies, they have in almost all cases remained within very recognizable Christian traditions.
Another new “missionary century” may dawn, but next time, the missionaries would be traveling northward.
just what are the core beliefs of Christianity, and what are cultural accidents.
Ultimately, the church, or at least the majority party, concluded that these practices were not essential to the faith.
“If all this be true,” he asked, “how is it that God waits over 1600 years before giving us any knowledge of it; how is it that the Chinese are left out, and only the barbarians are mentioned?”
When a Christian group acclimatizes to a new society, the common assumption holds that what is traditionally done in Europe or North America is correct and authentic, and provides the gold standard by which to assess local adaptations.
Christianity became inculturated in different societies, and each in turn contributed to the larger package of Christian beliefs.
Christianity has been flexible about these adaptations, and there is no obvious reason why the age of absorption should have ceased in the fifth or tenth centuries, or indeed the twenty-fifth.
We might take these stories to indicate that Catholicism had only a tenuous hold on the native and African peoples, who carried on their ancient religions under a thin disguise.
The church made large compromises with pre-Christian practices to accomplish its goals, but no more than it had done in northern Europe a millennium before.
As Christianity becomes increasingly Southern, it cannot fail to absorb the habits and thought-worlds of the regions in which it is strongest.
There is nothing deliberately racist or exclusive about the process that traditionally made white Northern Europeans portray Jesus as one of themselves,
Perhaps the most important acts of assimilation occur in the area of language, as believers absorb the faith by translating its ideas into intelligible terms.
Where the Bible is concerned, freedom of translation is restrained by some sense of obligation to the sacred text, but liturgical texts and practices can be handled with greater freedom.
An ancient Church maxim declares, lex orandi, lex credendi, that the law of prayer is the law of belief, that how we worship shows what we believe.
In recent years, we can trace the emergence of innovative Southern theologies.
Steeped as they were in Jewish tradition, Jesus’s first Palestinian followers portrayed him as the great High Priest.
Modern Africans, in contrast, find more power and relevance in the vision of Jesus as great Ancestor, an idea that also resonates in east Asia.
“Popular religious expressions of the people” thus become “the living creed and primary sources of theology.”
