Global Christianity

Current Trends and Developments

Vebjørn L. Horsfjord, Sven Thore Kloster, Gina Lende, Ole Jakob Løland

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781725281110, 9781725281127
• eBook ISBN: 9781725281134
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Over the last few decades, Christianity's center of gravity has moved from the global north to the global south. While church buildings in Western Europe are being closed or sold, new megachurches are filled with believers in Africa and Latin America. Charismatic movements practice the Christian religion in new ways, challenging the established churches and society at large on all continents. This scholarly examination of contemporary World Christianity takes a fresh perspective on Christianity as a cultural, political, and social force in our time. It provides up-to-date regional surveys, gives ample attention to the fastest growing branch of Christianity, the Pentecostal movement, and focuses sharply on Catholicism, which with a wide margin is the world's largest denomination. Furthermore, it explores how the Christian religion accommodates as well as challenges political, social, economic, and cultural developments.

1

Introduction

A nun silently kisses an icon under the gilded ceiling of a church in Moscow, while young people break out into songs of praise and dance in a corrugated iron shed in Lagos. Some church organizations work actively to criminalize abortion, while others arrange demonstrations to demand women’s rights. The president in the USA swears an oath on the Bible, and the pope in Rome washes the feet of the prisoners in a jail. A young Indian takes monastic vows and gives away all his possessions, while a charismatic pastor in Brazil tours the continent in a private jet and proclaims the recipe for material prosperity and good health. All these are examples of Christianity in the world today. As we shall see in this book, Christianity influences cultures, societies, and individual persons’ lives in different ways throughout the world.

After the end of the Cold War, the ideological conflict between capitalism and communism was replaced by other geopolitical antagonisms. The scholar Samuel Huntington claimed that the world faced civilizational conflicts that were largely caused by religious differences.1 After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, such ideas took on an even greater resonance in the media.

Religion has entered more strongly into the global news picture as a political threat to security and as a power factor that is feared, but also as an amusing curiosity and a beloved cultural tradition. Although Islam has received much attention in western media, Christianity remains by far the largest religion in the world.2 Probably the most rapidly growing religious movement in recent years was not Muslim, but the Christian Pentecostal revival movement.3

This growth has consequences for how Christianity develops globally. Although attendance at Christian rituals is declining in Europe, Christianity is growing in many other places both in numbers and in proportion. This has led to the description of Europe as an exception in the world.4 It is indeed true that the number of Christians is declining in the Middle East too, but that is for other reasons. In North America, there is something of a stagnation,5 but the numbers of Christians are growing rapidly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.6 Taken together, these patterns of development mean that the number of Christians is increasing on the global level, while the Christian power centers are moving from the north to the south. Roughly one-third of the world’s population today are Christians, and this is also probably how things will be in a few decades from now.7 But the global south will constitute Christianity’s geographical center of gravity to an even greater degree than today.

“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, and biblical exhortations of this kind have often been interpreted in a manner that has made Christianity an expansive and missionary religion. New territories and more people must be reached.8 The zeal to expand has generated tensions and conflict, both where Christianity grows at the expense of other religions9 and where evangelism is directed towards other Christians. This occurs in many places today, for example, when Pentecostals gain members from established churches in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. At the same time, the competition also leads the traditional churches to undergo renewal, in order to keep their members.

Christianity is being changed both from the inside and from the outside. Economic, political, and societal changes in the various countries have consequences for how Christianity is expressed. For example, churches are tightly integrated into various forms of the exercise of power on the local, national, and global levels, and democratization, both on the state level and internally in the churches, has led to changes in the power relationships between state and church, as well as between the laity and the church authorities. Globalization, migration, urbanization, and new technology also help ideas, human beings, and institutions to move quickly, so that new forms of Christianity arise.10 It was often asserted in the past that the technological modernization of society would lead to less religion throughout the world. But it is precisely new technology, democratization, and globalization that have opened up new possibilities for religious actors and led to a stronger public role for religion in many places.11 There are fewer scholars today who would claim that modernization and globalization necessarily lead to secularization.12

There is, however, a considerable agreement that globalization leads to pluralism.13 Globalization strengthens networks that cross the boundaries between regions and nation states, and this leads to a greater religious variety within these states and nations. But this variety is made possible by another aspect of globalization, namely, homogenization.14 As we shall see in this book, while the processes of globalization make the variety of Christianity more visible in many places, there are also tendencies to uniformization on the global level.

Our intention with this book is to show how Christianity is practiced and expressed in many varied ways and in different places in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But in order to do so, we must first ask a question that is both fundamental and difficult: What is Christianity?

What is Christianity?

In the past, the study of religion in the West was dominated by studies of texts, and tended to be separated from other academic disciplines. Today, we look at religion as a dynamic and integrated part of society and culture.15 This also colors our approach to Christianity in this book and leads us to study it in the interplay with cultural processes, the economy, politics, and societal circumstances. We also presuppose that Christianity, like any other religion, is a hybrid phenomenon. In many places in the world, for example, Christianity is marked by the fact that it was disseminated in a colonial context. Where Christianity has taken root, changes have taken place both in Christianity itself and in the contexts that are involved. New realities are created in such encounters. Religion takes on color from the environment in which it occurs and of which it becomes a part; at the same time, it imparts color to this environment. It is not only the colonized who is changed, but also the colonizer. This has made it easier to see that it is not only Christianity outside the West that is hybrid: traditional western Christianity too is, and has always been, hybrid.

In order to operationalize our analysis of how Christianity occurs in the world today, we have chosen to approach Christianity as discourse, as practices, as a fellowship of identity, and as an institution.16 These are not isolated realities, but overlap and influence each other. For example, the content of the Christian faith gives form to Christian practices, while the content of the faith in turn is affected by the same practices.

Christianity occurs in both organized and unorganized forms. Christianity occurs from below, through what people do, believe, and say, and from above, through what institutions, church leaders, or other public persons declare. In other words, it is not only institutions that regulate the discourses, the practices, and the fellowship; it is just as much the practices and the fellowships that regulate both the institutions and each other. By looking at all these relationships, we bring to light an important concern, namely, power. When we study how Christianity finds expression and occurs in various contexts in the world, we are interested in shifting power perspectives with regard to the question of who regulates whom, how Christianity affects society, and who tri...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Africa
• Chapter 3: Latin America
• Chapter 4: North America
• Chapter 5: The Middle East
• Chapter 6: Asia
• Chapter 7: Oceania
• Chapter 8: Eastern Europe
• Chapter 9: Western and Central Europe
• Chapter 10: The Globalization of Christianity
• Bibliography