The Next Christendom Quotes

“Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta complained that “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.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Submission to a “Christian state” can easily turn into a willful refusal to acknowledge the flaws of that regime, and to connive at official corruption and violence.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes described the papacy as “no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity. —Archbishop Desmond Tutu”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“the have-nots will be inspired by the scriptures and the language of apocalyptic, rather than by the texts of Marx and Mao. In this vision, the West could be the final Babylon.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Andrew Chesnut remarks, “the Catholic Church has chosen the poor, but the poor chose the Pentecostals,”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Christianity is never as weak as it appears, nor as strong as it appears.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Attempts to forecast the future usually derive from more than just intellectual curiosity.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“If a fire is not burning, then it is no longer fire. If the Church is not evangelizing, then it is like a dead fire.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Modern Western media generally do an awful job of reporting on religious realities, even within their own societies. Despite its immense popularity in North America, evangelical and fundamentalist religion often tends to be dismissed as merely a kind of reactionary ignorance.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“As emerging Christianity becomes ever stranger to Northern eyes, it will acquire the same kind of bleak stereotypes that were in bygone years applied to Muslims. The Christian faith of the rising states, we will probably hear, is fanatical, superstitious, demagogic: it is politically reactionary and sexually repressive.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“the great political unknown of the coming decades, the most powerful international wild card, will be that mysterious non-Western ideology called Christianity.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“In 1992 Pope John Paul II warned the Latin American Bishops Conference, CELAM, about these “ravenous wolves.” He also said that evangelicals were spreading “like an oil stain” in the region, where they “threaten to pull down the structures of faith in numerous countries.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“As Protestant and Pentecostal numbers have soared over the last thirty years, Catholic authorities have become increasingly resentful.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Since they have no abiding city on earth, mestizo loyalty is neither to race nor nation, but to Christendom, the pilgrim church.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“To Christianize cannot be the same as to Westernize. —Vitalino Simalox (Maya) Ecclesia semper reformanda. —Martin Luther”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“America remains today substantially what it has always been, namely a Christian country. That observation can sound aggressively partisan or intolerant, since some extremists believe that Americans are a Christian people who require a Christian government, with all that implies about religious exercises in schools and public displays. I make no such assertion, since I believe that religion flourishes best when it is kept farthest away from any form of government intervention, even the best-intentioned.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Kenya, a land that in 1900 had a mere 1.5 million residents. Today it has 40 million, and by 2050 it could have 65 million. Today, around 80 percent of Kenyans are Christian (approximately 32 million Christians), while 4 or 5 million are Muslim. Assuming those proportions remain constant, we could expect to see 50 million Kenyan Christians by 2050.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“As the old joke holds, everyone in the American South is Baptist, even including atheists, as the God in whom they do not believe is the Baptist God. Rejecting fears of a mass conversion to Protestantism in Latin America, one Catholic responded that in that continent, “you are Catholic just by breathing the air. The Catholic faith has so permeated the life of the people—the courtroom, the kitchen, the plaza, the architect’s eye—that it would take centuries for Latin America to sweat it out.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Some churches count as members everyone baptized within that tradition, so that “Christian” becomes a default status in official surveys and virtually means “none of the above.” “You’re not a Catholic? Not a Muslim? Not a Jew? Fine, I’ll put you down as a Lutheran”—or an Anglican, or some other group, depending on the country in question. This tactic accounts for the inflated numbers claimed by English Anglicans, German Evangelicals, or Italian Catholics. 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.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“charismatic people movements that seek to change their world through the translation of Christian truth and the transfer of power. These grassroots movements are a combination therefore of a spiritual factor (the Spirit of God), a people factor (the transfer of power to the marginalized), a truth factor (the application of the gospel to the pressing questions of a people group and culture) and a justice factor (a mission to change one’s world in response to the gospel).”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“The American tendency has been to see authority as self-created rather than inherited; to read the Bible for oneself rather than just to accept biblical interpretation from others; to”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity