Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity

Elizabeth A. Foster, Udi Greenberg

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781512824964
• eBook ISBN:
  9781512824971
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: World History

In the decades following the era of decolonization, global Christianity experienced a seismic shift. While Catholicism and Protestantism have declined in their historic European strongholds, they have sustained explosive growth in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. This demographic change has established Christians from the Global South as an increasingly dominant presence in modern Christian thought, culture, and politics. Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity unearths the roots of this development, charting the metamorphosis of Christian practice and institutions across five continents throughout the pivotal years of decolonization. The essays in this collection illustrate the diverse new ideas, rituals, and organizations created in the wake of Western imperialism's formal collapse and investigate how religious leaders, politicians, theologians, and lay people debated and shaped a new Christianity for a postcolonial world.Contributors argue that the collapse of colonialism and broader cultural challenges to Western power fostered new organizations, theologies, and political engagements across the world, ultimately setting Christianity on its current trajectory away from its colonial heritage. These essays interrogate decolonization's varied and conflicting impacts on global Christianity, while also providing a novel framework for rethinking decolonization's modern legacies. Taken together, this book charts the relationship between decolonization and Christianity on a truly global scale.Contributors: Joel Cabrita, Darcie Fontaine, Elizabeth A. Foster, Udi Greenberg, David Kirkpatrick, Eric Morier-Genoud, Phi-Vân Nguyen, Justin Reynolds, Sarah Shortall, Lydia Walker, Charlotte Walker-Said, Albert Wu, Gene Zubovich.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Apostles of Secularization: The Ecumenical Movement and the Making of Postcolonial Protestantism in the 1950s and 1960s
• 2. From Order to Revolution: American Ecumenical Protestants and the Colonial World, 1900–1970
• 3. Vietnamese Catholics’ Search for Independence, 1941–1963
• 4. Jin Luxian, Chinese Catholicism, and the Horizontal Networks of Decolonization
• 5. Decolonizing Global Evangelicalism: The Latin American Evangelical Left in the Shadow of the Cold War
• 6. At the Crossroads of East and West: Christianity and the Legacy of Colonialism in North Africa
• 7. Church and State in the Struggle for Human Rights and Economic Dignity in Central Africa at the End of Empire
• 8. A Fractured Church: Catholicism and Decolonization in Mozambique
• 9. Contesting Christian Nationalisms in Pre-Independence Swaziland
• 10. “International Law as God’s Law”: The Promise and Limits of Christian-Suffused Nationalisms After Empire
• 11. Decolonizing Theology: EATWOT and the Rise of Third World Theologies
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments