Foreign Policy Research Institute
WATCH ON THE WEST
GLOBALIZATION AND THE
TRANSFORMATION OF
CHRISTIANITY
|
by Philip Jenkins Volume 3, Number 1 January 2002 |
 Dr. Jenkins |
Philip Jenkins is the Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University. His recent books include Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (Oxford, 2001) and Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (Oxford, 2000). This essay is based on a presentation to FPRI's Study Group on America and the West, chaired by Professor James Kurth.
We are currently experiencing a transforming moment in the history of religion worldwide. Over the last five centuries, Christianity's history has been inextricably bound up with that of the West. Until recently, the overwhelming majority of Christians have lived in white nations, allowing traditional theorists to speak of "European Christian" civilization. Conversely, radical writers have seen Christianity as an ideological arm of Western imperialism. The stereotype has been that Christianity is the religion of the West, or the global North. It has been seen as the religion of the affluent, older, white "haves." If that were true, then the growing secularization of the West could only mean that Christianity is in its dying days and that, globally, the faith of the future must be Islam.
CHRISTIANITY MOVES SOUTH
Over the last century, however, the Christian world's center of gravity has been shifting inexorably southwards, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today the largest Christian communities on the planet are to be found in Africa and Latin America. A "typical" contemporary Christian may be a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela. Christianity is doing very well indeed in the global South.
Over the last century, however, the Christian world's center of gravity has been shifting inexorably southwards, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today the largest Christian communities on the planet are to be found in Africa and Latin America. A "typical" contemporary Christian may be a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela. Christianity is doing very well indeed in the global South
This trend will continue apace in coming years. Many of the fastest growing countries in the world are predominantly Christian or have sizable Christian minorities. Even if Christians just maintain their present share of the population in countries like Nigeria and Kenya, Mexico and Ethiopia, Brazil and the Philippines, there will soon be several hundred million more Christians in those nations alone. Moreover, conversions will swell the Christian share of world population. Christianity should enjoy a worldwide boom in the new century, but the vast majority of believers won't be white, European, or Euro-American. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, there are some two billion Christians today, about a third of the world's population. Europe still has the largest single bloc, some 560 million people. Latin America, though, is close behind with 480 million, Africa has 360 million, and Asia 313 million. North America claims about 260 million Christians. Extrapolating these figures to the year 2025, and assuming no great gains or losses through conversion, there would be some 2.6 billion Christians, 633 million in Africa, 640 million in Latin America, and 460 million in Asia. Europe, with 555 million, would have slipped to third place. Africa and Latin America would tie for the most Christian continent. These two continents will by 2005 account for half the Christians on the planet. By 2050, only about one-fifth of the world's three billion Christians will be non-Latino whites.
A NEW CHRISTENDOM?
We have only begun to imagine the global consequences of this New Christendom. This is a very loaded term, recalling the complex transnational order that existed in the Middle Ages, which was supplanted by the rise of secular nationalism. Later Christian scholars have struggled to live in this new age of "post-Christendom," when one could no longer assume any connection between religion and political order. By the start of the twenty-first century, however, the whole concept of the nation-state was itself under challenge. Partly, the changes reflected new technologies. According to a report by the U.S. intelligence community, in the coming decades, "governments will have less and less control over flows of information, technology, diseases, migrants, arms, and financial transactions, whether legal or illegal, across their borders. . . . The very concept of 'belonging' to a particular state will probably erode." To use Benedict Anderson's famous phrase, nation-states are "imagined communities" of relatively recent date. In recent years, many of these communities have begun to reimagine themselves substantially, even to unimagine themselves out of existence. In Europe, loyalties to the nation as such are being replaced by newer forms of adherence, whether to larger (Europe itself) or smaller (regions or ethnic groups) entities. It remains to be seen whether the nation-state will outlive the printed book, that other renaissance inven-tion that may also fade away in the coming decades.
For the past quarter century, social scientists have been analyzing the decline of states in the face of globalization and noting parallels with the cosmopolitan world of the Middle Ages. Some scholars have even postulated the emergence of some movement or ideology that could create what political scientist Hedley Bull called "a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organiza-tion that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages." The new ideological force might be envi-ronmentalism, perhaps with a New Age twist. Yet the more we look at the southern hemisphere in par-ticular, the more we see that while universal and supranational ideas are flourishing, they are not at all secular. The centers of gravest state weakness are often the regions in which political loyalties are secon-dary to religious beliefs, either Muslim or Christian, and these are the terms in which people define their identities. The new Christian world of the south could find unity in common religious beliefs.
The archaic term "Christendom" conjures potential nightmares about our imagined future. The last Christendom, in the Middle Ages, was anything but an unalloyed blessing for either Church or society. While it offered a common culture and thought-world, it was also characterized by widespread intoler-ance, symbolized at its very worst by aggressive crusades, heresy hunts, and religious pogroms. Impor-tantly, Christendom was defined in terms of what it was not, since the Christian world existed in un-happy conjunction with neighboring Muslim states. This Christian-Muslim conflict may in fact prove one of the closest analogies between the Christian world that was and the one coming into being. No less than the Christian world, the Muslim world will be transformed by the epochal demographic events of the coming decades, the shift of gravity of population to the two-thirds world. Muslim and Christian nations will expand adjacent to each other, and often Muslim and Christian communities will both grow within the same country. Based on recent experiences around the world -- in Nigeria and Indonesia, the Sudan, and the Philippines -- it is likely that population growth will be accompanied by intensified rivalry, struggles for converts, and competition to enforce moral codes by means of secular law. Whether Muslim or Christian, religious zeal can easily turn into fanaticism.
Such struggles might well provoke civil wars that could easily become international conflicts, especially when the competing ideologies are shared passionately by neighboring countries, or by an international religious-oriented alliance. Across the Muslim world, many believers have shown themselves willing to fight for the cause of international Islam with far more enthusiasm than they demonstrate for any individual nation. These different trends taken together produce a volatile mixture that could well pro-voke horrific confrontations.
Worldwide, religious trends have the potential to reshape political assumptions in a way that has not been seen since the rise of modern nationalism. While we can imagine any number of possible futures, a worst-case scenario would include a wave of religious conflicts reminiscent of the Middle Ages, a new age of Christian crusades and Muslim jihads. Imagine the world of the thirteenth century armed with nuclear warheads and anthrax. In responding to this prospect, we must ensure that our political leaders and diplomats pay as much attention to religions and sectarian frontiers as they have to date to the distribution of oilfields.
The emergence of the new global Christianity has to be seen in the context of the demographic changes that are transforming the balance between global north and south. The main change is the massive de-cline in the proportion of the world's people who live in the traditionally advanced nations. Combining the figures for Europe, North America, and the former Soviet Union, in 1900 these northern regions accounted for 32 percent of world population. Viewed over the span of world history, that may have been an atypically large proportion, reflecting the explosive demographic growth of the industrial revolution years. Over the course of the twentieth century, matters reverted to what was likely a more typical preindustrial norm, as the proportion of peoples living in the advanced nations fell, slowly at first, but then more dramatically. By 1950, the share had fallen to 29 percent; by 1970 to 25 percent; and by 2000 to around 18 percent. By 2050, the figure should be 10-12 percent.
Relative growth rates in the South have been just as impressive. Africa and Latin America combined made up only 13 percent of the world's people in 1900, but have now grown to 21 percent. Every indica-tion suggests that the rate of change is accelerating. By 2050, Africa and Latin America will probably be home to 29 percent of the world's people. In 1900, "northerners" outnumbered these "southerners" by about 2.5 to one; by 2050, the ratio will be almost exactly reversed.
RELIGIOUS INSTABILITY
Two factors threaten to create religious instability and perhaps violence. First, population growth does not observe national or religious boundaries. Matters would be less complicated in a fictitious world where countries were entirely comprised of a given ethnic or religious group. In the real world, though, there are few such countries, since most nations have minorities of varying sizes, and population change aggravates existing tensions. Since poorer or immigrant groups have higher birth rates than the better-off, their religious and cultural traditions become more influential over time, a trend which could lead to instability. An example of this process in miniature occurred in Lebanon, where a Shi'ite minority made up the traditional underclass. Over time, their high rate of population growth made Shi'ites a po-tent force indeed, and much of that nation's fifteen-year civil war (1975-90) revolved around the issue of accommodating the masses. A number of European nations face huge disparities between immigrant groups with high reproduction rates and relatively static native populations. Religious instability could easily result.
Also threatening to incite conflict is the issue of conversions. We assume here that Islam and Christianity will maintain roughly their present share of population in their respective countries. But both are successful missionary religions, and neither makes a secret of its aspiration to convert the entire globe. Both, too, have been advancing in the same parts of the world, and competition for converts is already acute in those regions of Africa that currently have the world's fastest population growth rates. Rivalry is troublesome enough when both sides are competing for converts among followers of indigenous religions, but in some situations, Christians are seeking to convert Muslims, and vice versa. Buoyed by successes across the globe, Western evangelicals are talking seriously about spreading their faith within the heartlands of Islam. To appreciate the sensitivity of such a movement, we have to remember that for a Muslim to abandon his or her faith is apostasy, an act punishable by death under Islamic law. As the maxim holds, "Islam is a one-way door. You can enter through it, but you cannot leave."
THE NORMALITY OF CONFLICT
Across Africa and Asia two critical issues, among many, are worth note. One key question is whether Christian minorities can exist indefinitely under an Islamic regime. This issue is at the root of the violence in Sudan, Egypt, and Indonesia, and in the Muslim-dominated states of Nigeria that have introduced Shari'a law. If Muslims insist that their faith demands the establishment of Islamic states, regardless of the existence of religious minorities, then violence will assuredly occur. The second issue, brought into focus by the revolts in the Philippines, is whether Muslim minorities will be content to live under Chris-tian rule or if they will demand separate states. This question is all the more difficult when ethnic or separatist concerns mesh with economic interests, above all when oil resources are present.
The most disturbing feature of contemporary Christian/Muslim conflicts is how very commonplace they have become. Though the bloodshed in countries like Nigeria and Indonesia receives some coverage in the West, violence of this sort has become almost too widespread to report, even in places like Egypt, which traditionally operated on the principle of live-and-let-live. In the last two or three years, Muslim-Christian violence has occurred in places that have long been held up as models of friendship and toleration, including among the Palestinian Arabs and in traditionally peaceful Malaysia. To quote one analyst, "Islam is becoming the defining force in politics in Malaysia and in Indonesia. . . . The pluralistic days are over in Southeast Asia." In bygone years, one of the areas most frequently cited as a model of tolerance was the Indonesian territory of Maluku, where elaborate social customs were designed to encourage respect between the faiths. It was long customary for Muslims and Christians to visit each other during their respective holiday seasons. After the slaughter of the last few years, such relationships lie in ruins.
Similar breakdowns have occurred across Africa, often in places where five or ten years ago no observer would have foreseen religious conflicts. In 2000, mob violence between Muslims and Christians broke out in Nairobi. Even in the Ivory Coast, which has always been regarded as a sophisticated and tolerant society, religious conflicts have emerged, seemingly from nowhere. The Ivory Coast is a mixed society, roughly 40 percent Muslim and 33 percent Christian, with the remainder belonging to either traditional African religions or no religion at all. This last category in itself suggests the country's nonchalance about religious activism: people have no qualms about describing themselves as atheists and secularists. Nevertheless, a coup in 1999 led to political instability, and within just a year, Muslims and Christians were killing each other in the streets. Also for the first time, the two sides were calling for a partition on religious lines, cutting the Muslim north from the Christian south. The conflict has international reper-cussions, since this Christian-ruled nation finds itself in a tense relationship with its mainly Muslim neighbors, Mali and Burkina Faso. If even the Ivory Coast could suffer like this, is any African nation immune?
EUROPE AS BATTLEGROUND?
Just how inevitable Muslim-Christian conflict is becoming is now, for the first time, a serious question in much of Europe, and not only in the Balkans. Religious rivalries have for some time played at least a marginal role in social conflicts in several Western European nations. In French inner cities, Muslim North Africans make up a large proportion of the underclass youth who have so often clashed with police in urban rioting since the 1980s. Anti-immigrant protests also have a religious tone. In the 1980s, graffiti in Berlin warned "Yesterday the Jews, tomorrow the Turks" and commemorated "Vienna 1683," the date of the decisive defeat of Turkish Muslim power in central Europe.
Such sporadic violence acquired a whole new dimension in 1989 when the Iranian regime issued its death sentence against British writer Salman Rushdie. To the astonishment of Europeans, this campaign against supposed blasphemy mobilized thousands of Muslim demonstrators in Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Some protesters carried banners with the slogan "Islam -- our religion today, your religion tomorrow." The Rushdie affair marked a whole new stage of Muslim political organization and radicalization, and its echoes continue across Europe. In 2000, protests by local Muslim groups forced a Dutch theater to withdraw an opera about Aisha, wife of the Prophet Muhammad. Recently, Italy's Muslims have been galvanized by protest over a fifteenth-century fresco of the "Last Judgment" in Bologna Cathedral. The artwork in question is clearly offensive to Muslims, since it depicts Muhammad being thrown into Hell, naked, with a snake wrapped around his body, and attended by a demon: protesters described the piece as even more offensive than the "Satanic Verses." At the same time, Italian Christians resent calls to destroy what is undoubtedly one of the city's greatest treasures. The Muslim campaign also raises the possibility that future campaigns might be mobilized against Europe's literary works, in which Muslims are so often depicted in unflattering terms. Some Muslim activists have further demanded that schools with large immigrant populations not be required to read Dante's Inferno, which likewise consigns Muhammad to deepest Hell.
Given these precedents, it is quite conceivable that interreligious violence could erupt in Europe itself: we might even imagine Muslim paramilitary groups waging a religious war on French or German soil. Germany is among the states listed above with a potentially large Muslim minority, and by 2050 France's Muslim minority could approach 10 percent of the population. Even if actual violence is averted, future governments will have to tread delicately to avoid inciting religious conflict, and this should have a dramatic effect on European attitudes to external politics, above all in the Middle East. This is all the more likely since European nations rely heavily on oil supplies from Muslim Middle Eastern nations.
Interfaith controversies have subtly changed the shape of European debates over immigration, which traditionally were cast in racial terms. Recently, some conservative Europeans have argued that governments should deliberately promote Christian immigration, as a means of reducing Islamic influence. In Italy in 2000, Bologna's Cardinal Giacomo Biffi suggested that while immigrants were definitely needed, preference should be given to people of Catholic background. "And there are many," he said, "Latin Americans, Filipinos and Eritreans." Though Biffi's ideas reflect familiar concerns about defending traditional notions of European culture, they are far removed from any traditional racist rhetoric. Issues of cross and crescent may in future become ever more important in European political discourse.
THE NEXT CRUSADE
If we look at the most populous and fastest growing states across the South, we often find Christian and Muslim states standing next to each other, and close to other countries sharply split between the two faiths. Curiously, too, religious minorities are disproportionately likely to reside in areas of rich natural resources. The fact that minorities are so preferentially located may seem like an odd manifestation of God's sense of humor, but the phenomenon has a sound historical basis. In bygone centuries, religious dissidents were commonly forced to live far removed from the centers of political power located in the more fertile agricultural areas. In order to survive, minorities resorted to remote and marginal lands, which were relatively poor according to the standards of traditional economies. As oil exploration and other extractive industries developed in modern times, these marginal lands often proved to be immensely rich, leaving the minorities in a position of unprecedented influence. This history explains why, for instance, Shi'ite Muslim minorities in the Arab world are so regularly found in oil-rich regions. It also suggests why, religious zeal apart, it is so tempting for a nation to intervene on the behalf of co-religionists who represent a persecuted minority in some neighboring country.
Currently, most of the rising states of Africa and Asia are strictly limited in their capacity to undertake international military operations: witness the disastrous failure of regional African coalitions seeking to end the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. But this weakness will not continue indefinitely, and African and Asian countries will develop significant military capacities, perhaps based on chemical or biological weapons. If that ever occurred, then regional powers would be under heavy pressure not to stand idly by if co-religionists in nearby countries are threatened with persecution and massacre. We recall the internationalization of the war in former Yugoslavia.
We can imagine a future in which Muslim and Christian alliances blunder into conflict, rather as the dual networks of European states reached the point of war in 1914. Several plausible African scenarios should cause strategic planners sleepless nights. Few sub-Saharan states have boundaries that coincide neatly with either ethnic or natural realities. Many ethnic and tribal groupings are scattered over two or more states, though they retain close cultural and religious links, and an insult against one faction can have international ramifications. The massacres in the small nation of Rwanda in 1994 detonated a series of wars and interventions that spilled over into the huge territory of the Congo (then Zaire). To date, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Uganda, and Rwanda have all become directly involved in what has been described as Africa's equivalent of the First World War, and several more nations are watching nerv-ously. Perhaps two million Congolese have died in the conflict. Even so, few Westerners know or care about the slaughter, because it occurs so far from centers of media activity, and because there is little risk of superpower involvement, no danger that weapons of mass destruction will be employed. The Congo thus becomes a perpetual war-zone reminiscent of Germany during the Thirty Years War.
It is conceivable that within a few decades the two faiths will have agreed on amicable terms of coexis-tence, but looking at matters as they stand at the start of the twenty-first century, that happy consumma-tion seems highly unlikely. Issues of theocracy and religious law, toleration and minority rights, conver-sion and apostasy, will be among the most divisive in domestic and international politics for decades to come. It is quite possible to imagine a future Christendom not too different from the old, defined less by any ideological harmony than by its unity against a common outside threat. We must hope that the new Res Publica Christiana does not confront an equally militant Muslim world, Dar al-Islam, lest we go full circle back to the worst features of the thirteenth century.
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