Readers of the magazine Books & Culture may have relished the opportunity for an intellectual donnybrook when they saw that Philip Jenkins was reviewing a new book by Steve Bruce on secularization. After all, Jenkins's new book, The Next Christendom, whose thesis about the growth of Christianity outside the West has been widely circulated, practically contradicts Bruce's argument in God Is Dead, a book that defends at length the secularization thesis. But the fireworks never ignited. Jenkins did disagree with Bruce, both conceding that secularization may explain the weaknesses of European Christianity and countering that it fails in the case of the religious vitality of the United States. But he ignored the implications that Bruce's understanding of secularization has for interpreting the amazing growth and vitality of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity in South America, Africa, and Asia.
Jenkins's omission is unfortunate if only because these two books, The Next Christendom and God Is Dead, address the two most important developments for contemporary Christianity and do so from decidedly different scholarly outlooks. Jenkins, who teaches history and religion at Penn State University, is the most recent contributor of a number of studies examining the extraordinary growth of a highly experiential and subjective form of Protestantism in parts of the world where either Roman Catholicism or Anglicanism had been dominant or, as in the case of China, a Christian presence was meager. Bruce, a sociologist of religion, teaching at the University of Aberdeen, is one of the most provocative skeptics of contemporary Christianity, especially in its political manifestations, and his book is a bold apology for an outlook that the recent revival of religion in the United States and around the world supposedly falsifies. In effect, in these books both scholars perform cheers of a scholarly variety for the competitors in what appears to be a zero-sum contest between religion and unbelief.
At the heart of Jenkins's book is a stunning set of statistics on the number of Christians worldwide. Although western Europe (560 million) and North America (260 million) are home to about 37 percent of the 2 billion Christians currently living, Latin America (480 million), Africa (360 million), and Asia (313 million) make up not only well over half of the rest of global Christianity, but these areas account for the fastest growing churches. Jenkins extrapolates these figures out to the year 2025 and says that "there would be around 2.6 billion Christians, of whom 633 million would live in Africa, 640 million in Latin America, and 460 million in Asia" with Europe slipping to 555 million. Jenkins bases these extrapolations on churches retaining their percentage of the population, which explains the growth of Christianity outside the West where birthrates are declining. What is odd here is that the religion he believes is growing the fastest, charismatic Christianity, relies on conversion, not on patterns of inheritance, for passing on the faith. This should make projections of Christianity's future growth much less predictable. The Spirit blows where he will.
Nevertheless, Jenkins uses these statistics to show that a dramatic reversal is taking place of patterns that prevailed prior to the last third of the twentieth century when Christendom conjured up images of western civilization and Caucasians. In 1800, Jenkins explains, only 1 percent of Protestants lived outside the West, and this rose to 10 percent by 1900. In 2000, non-western churches accounted for two-thirds of all Protestants. Roman Catholic membership statistics reveal similar trends. These figures prompt Jenkins to make the following provocative assertion: "If we want to visualize a 'typical' contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela."
The Next Christendom concerns more than statistics, however. Jenkins also remarks upon the kind of Christianity that is pulling the center of gravity southward and to the East. "If there is a single key area of faith and practice that divides Northern and Southern Christians," he writes, "it is this matter of spiritual forces and their effects on everyday life." Whereas the North and the West have domesticated Christianity, healings, spiritual warfare, and communal Christianity are common in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. This observation points to a significant factor in the growth of Pentecostalism and charismatic churches throughout the world. Jenkins argues that the "conservative" nature of global Christianity is in part a function of the circumstances that many Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans confront as they endure the economic and physical hardships accompanying moves to the large urban centers. "In such settings, the most devoted and fundamentalist-oriented religious communities emerge to provide functional alternative arrangements for health, welfare and education." For reasons such as these, Jenkins discounts theories that assume the disappearance of religion with the advance of time. How can you talk about the death of Christianity when in places such as Seoul and Nairobi, churches are struggling to build facilities large enough to accommodate the 10,000 members they have added over the last five years?
Steve Bruce, for one, is convinced that the death of Christianity is a worthwhile subject of conversation. God Is Dead is the sociologist's effort to save the idea of secularization from its academic despisers, many of whom look at statistics such as those tabulated by Jenkins and conclude that social scientists had it wrong to think that religion would disappear as modernity advanced. With commonsensical calmness, Bruce points out that secularization never required the death of religion. Human history is too long, and religious influences upon the world's various cultures are too deep for technology, modern politics, cultural diversity, and global capitalism ever to wipe the religious slate clean. Instead, the basic idea behind secularization is a simple one: "a long-term decline in the power, popularity and prestige of religious beliefs and rituals." What about the popularity of Christianity throughout the world? Bruce explains that charismatic Christianity, which is the kind that appears to be thriving, is precisely the kind of faith that secularization makes plausible. First, it gives "a much higher place to personal experience than to shared doctrines." Second, the charismatic movement's claim to "offer access to divine power" is fitting with the narcissistic conception of the self that is typical of secular societies. As such, "The charismatic movement does not refute secularization; it shows how it works."
Bruce could well be wrong about charismatic Christianity, but his skepticism is a return to the kind of critical outlook the academy used to foster in the study of religion. For that reason, it is a breath of fresh air at a time when many religious scholars appear to ask few questions about the kind of faiths that are flourishing, using the existence of such religious groups to gain the upper hand with fellow academics, many of whom remain skeptical about religion and its importance. The irony is that Bruce's defense of secularization may be a better guide to global Christianity than Jenkins's cheerleading the next Christendom. For instance, Jenkins interprets charismatic Christianity as a conservative faith. He even hints that this is the kind of religion that is a repristination of the faith on display in the Bible. Bruce, in contrast, recognizes that the Protestant Reformation, like Judaism and early Christianity before it, planted seeds of secularization. The reformers distinguished radically between the secret and direct workings of God in salvation and God's providential control of secondary causes. This bracketing of natural and supernatural affairs was, as Bruce argues, an important initial component of secularization, an argument that implies conservative Protestantism is not as inimical to secular society as many contemporary believers think. It also suggests that the believers who see supernatural occurrences in everyday affairs may not be the orthodox believers that Jenkins alleges.
Perhaps the most important point about modern religion is one that neither Bruce nor Jenkins addresses: It is the possibility of being a good Christian and an engaged participant in secular society. Christ, of course, taught his disciples to be in the world and not of it. And ever since, Christians have been wrestling with the apparent double-mindedness such instruction requires. These books may help modern Christians wrestle even more thoughtfully.
