God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (13 page)

Mormons, as LDS Church members are popularly known, share affinities with Protestant groups, but they do not see themselves as Protestants, and many Protestants return the favor by refusing to see Mormons as Christians. While Mormons assert their bona fides as Christians by affirming their love of Jesus, many born-again Christians (in keeping with the Christian preoccupation with doctrine) claim that Mormonism veers too far away from traditional Christian creeds to qualify as Christian. Mormons often claim, for example, that God has a body, and that humans can become gods. At least until the 1890s, they saw Old Testament practices of polygamy and theocracy as a warrant for them to go and do likewise. Though Mormons view the Bible (“as far as it is translated correctly”) as the Word of God, they also recognize three extrabiblical books as scripture: the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants. Finally, Mormons believe in ongoing revelation, which allows their presidents to modify beliefs and practices via prophecy.

Widely persecuted from the start, the Mormons are a reminder that freedom of religion is a hope rather than a reality, even in the United States. In response to anti-Mormon bigotry and hostility, the Mormons moved westward from New York to Ohio and Missouri before settling in Illinois, where Smith was arrested, jailed, and then killed by a mob in 1844. Mormons migrated to their current home in Salt Lake City, Utah, under the direction of their “American Moses” Brigham Young (1801–77). Though long seen as dangerously un-American, Mormons are now widely viewed as quintessentially American. The most popular American novelist of the early twenty-first century—Stephenie Meyer of
Twilight
series fame—is a Mormon. The HBO show
Big Love
features a Mormon family. And LDS members such as David Archuleta of
American Idol
are so inescapable on reality shows that some critics are starting to complain that Mormons have “colonized reality television.”
¹⁷
Yet most of the 14 million members of the LDS Church now live outside the United States, and about a third of that figure call Latin America home—an extraordinary achievement given that the Mormons’ dietary code (the Word of Wisdom) prohibits the drinking of coffee.
¹⁸

The Evangelical Century

After the Reformation, the next great event in Christian history was the rise of evangelicalism in the nineteenth century and the rapid evangelization of what came to be known as the Christian West. In 1822, U.S. president Thomas Jefferson prophesied that Unitarianism—a form of Christianity that rejects the Trinity, viewing Jesus as a great moral teacher but not divine—would overtake the United States.
¹⁹
He was wrong. This task was allotted instead to evangelicals, who set out over the course of this “evangelical century” to Christianize both the United States and the world.

Historian David Bebbington has defined evangelicalism in terms of four distinguishing marks: Biblicism (an emphasis on the Bible as the inspired Word of God); crucicentrism (an emphasis on Jesus’s redemptive death on the cross); conversionism (an emphasis on the experience of the “new birth”); and activism (an emphasis on preaching and performing the gospel).
²⁰
In the early nineteenth century these characteristics coalesced into a movement. Thanks to great revivals in England and the United States, and to the heroic missionary efforts of Methodist circuit riders and Baptist farmer-preachers, Anglo-America was rapidly missionized, and evangelicalism became the dominant religious impulse in the Protestant world.

Christianity is a missionary religion. Unlike Jews and Hindus, who do not typically seek to make converts, Christians have long heeded Jesus’s “Great Commission” to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19,
NIV
). Christianity started as a movement of Jewish reformers. Jesus was Jewish, as were His disciples, who came to affirm that He was the Messiah long awaited by the Jews. But Paul, a convert from Judaism, decided to preach his message of sin and salvation to Jews and Greeks alike. It was not necessary, he decided, for converts to Christianity to become Jewish. Christian men did not need to be circumcised, and Christian families could eat pork without shame. So the Christian movement set up outposts among Greek speakers in the places Paul’s biblical letters would make famous (Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, and Thessalonica).

In the nineteenth century, Christianity made a similar advance among English speakers, expanding even more rapidly than it had in the first Christian centuries. In 1800, less than one-quarter (23 percent) of the world’s population was Christian. By 1900, that figure had jumped to more than one-third (34 percent). The most extraordinary growth came in North America, which saw the total number of Christians jump tenfold between 1815 and 1915. In the process, the portion of Christians among the overall U.S. population expanded from about 25 percent to about 40 percent. In Canada, the advance of Christianity was even more dramatic—from roughly one-fifth of the overall population to roughly one-half.
²¹

But evangelicalism did not just change the quantity of Christians; it changed the quality of Christianity. As evangelicalism expanded its footprint, experience and the emotions trumped doctrine and the intellect. Though more Christians came to see the Bible as the inspired Word of God, fewer seemed interested in knowing what God had to say. Anti-intellectuals such as Methodist revivalist Peter Cartwright and “baseball evangelist” Billy Sunday boasted of their homespun ignorance, and Christians embraced a Scarecrow faith, their hearts overpowering their brains. If Positivism was, in French philosopher August Comte’s words, an “insurrection of the mind against the heart,” evangelicalism was an insurrection of the heart against the mind.
²²

Evangelicalism is often confused with fundamentalism, and though each stresses conversion and champions “family values,” they are actually quite different. While both call the Bible the Word of God, evangelicals tend to speak of its inspiration rather than its infallibility, so they do not join fundamentalists in reading it as a geological or historical textbook. Historian George Marsden has famously defined the fundamentalist as “an evangelical who is angry at something,” and what fundamentalists are angry at is modernity.
²³
Evangelicals are both more friendly to modernity and less shrill. They were early and ingenious adopters of many new communication technologies, from the radio to television to the Internet.

Today evangelicalism is visible in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, World Vision, and other voluntary associations that cut across old denominational lines. Though U.S. evangelicals are widely associated with figures on the Religious Right such as James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, nineteenth-century American evangelicals were politically progressive, spearheading movements to abolish slavery and to give women the vote. Today a typical evangelical in the United States is opposed to abortion and gay marriage but tilts to the center and even the left on many other public-policy issues, including poverty and the environment. The Evangelical Left is represented most eloquently by Jim Wallis, who has led the Sojourners Community in Washington, DC, since its founding in the early 1970s.

The Pentecostal Century

If nineteenth-century Christianity belonged to evangelicalism, twentieth-century Christianity belonged to Pentecostalism, a Spirit-filled faith that in recent decades has steered the Christian ship away from the Greco-Roman West and in a southerly and easterly direction. Christianity continues to be seen as white and Western, and as of 1900 just under 80 percent of the world’s Christians were Caucasian, and just over 80 percent lived in Europe or North America.
²⁴
So when Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1920 that “The Church is Europe; and Europe is The Church,” he was more or less right.
²⁵
But sometime in the twentieth century, Christianity’s center of gravity leaped across the Strait of Gibraltar—from Spain into North Africa.
²⁶
Much of this migration can be credited to Pentecostalism, which was made in America but is now equally at home in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

A decade or so ago I suggested that American religion seemed to be moving from transcendence to immanence—from a colonial era of God the Father to a Victorian era of God the Son to a new era of God the Holy Spirit. Today this shift seems to be occurring worldwide. Pentecostalism is relocating the divine from “out there” to “in here,” and the Holy Spirit is finally getting its due.

An outgrowth of the Holiness movement within the Protestant denomination of Methodism, Pentecostalism takes its name from the story in the New Testament book of Acts in which the Holy Spirit, after Jesus’s death, descended on His disciples during the Jewish holiday of Pentecost, and “all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues” (Acts 2:4,
NIV
). Pentecostalism’s distinctive feature is baptism in the Spirit, an additional experience of grace after conversion often evidenced by ecstatic speaking in unknown tongues, or glossolalia. Pentecostal worship gives free reign to “gifts of the Spirit” such as speaking in tongues, prophecy, and faith healing. And its preachers know how to put on a good show. U.S. president Abraham Lincoln once remarked that, when he sees a man preach, he likes “to see him act as if he were fighting bees.”
²⁷
Pentecostalism is replete with bee-fighting preachers.

Like fundamentalism, with which it is often confused, Pentecostalism is a twentieth-century invention. Unlike fundamentalism, which accents doctrine, Pentecostalism accents experience, insisting (over fundamentalists’ fierce objections) that the miracles swirling around the early church in the book of Acts are still available to people of faith. Pentecostals also allow for direct communications from God that make fundamentalists and other scions of biblical authority queasy.

The distinguishing marks of Pentecostalism appeared around the globe—in Wales, Korea, and India—during the first few years of the twentieth century and popped up in Kansas in 1900. But Pentecostalism’s origins are typically traced to April 1906 and a small black church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. At a series of interracial revivals led by a one-eyed black Holiness preacher named William Joseph Seymour (1870–1922), Christians began to pray, sing, and speak in languages they did not recognize. Many believed that the “gifts of the Spirit” they witnessed at Azusa Street were signs that they were living in the “last days” when God had promised to “pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17,
RSV
)—a belief made compelling when San Francisco’s Great Earthquake erupted in the midst of the bedlam. The Azusa Street revival, as it is now called, went on to exhibit for years the sort of sacred power that the Yoruba refer to as
ashe
. Thanks in part to articles in the
Los Angeles Times
denouncing the goings-on as a “Weird Babel of Tongues,” people visited from across the United States and around the world, and, when they went home, they took this new form of Christian worship with them.
²⁸

Since the 1970s, Pentecostalism has boomed in the Catholic stronghold of Latin America, and many U.S. Hispanics have left Catholicism for Pentecostal churches. Pentecostalism is even growing in some of the world’s most secular societies. On a recent trip to Toronto, I learned of a professor there studying Swedish Pentecostalism. At first I thought this was a joke. “How many people does he study?” I asked. “Five?” But Pentecostalism is alive and well and living in, of all places, Sweden. Stockholm’s thriving Filadelphia Church, the first Pentecostal congregation in Sweden, was until the 1960s the largest Pentecostal church in the world. The Word of Life Church in nearby Uppsala boasts Europe’s largest Bible school.

Pentecostalism produced denominations such as the Assemblies of God (est. 1914) and “Sister Aimee” Semple McPherson’s International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (est. 1927). It found institutional expression in Oklahoma-based Oral Roberts University (est. 1965) and in the U.S. television ministries of Jim and Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Pat Robertson. Its spirit also animates many nondenominational congregations and the Charismatic Movement that energized Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and Lutherans after World War II.

From its humble birth on Azusa Street in 1906, Pentecostalism has developed into the world’s fastest growing Christian movement in part because, like the early Christian movement, it appeals powerfully to the powerless and the poor. Today over a quarter of the world’s Christians (roughly 600 million souls) are Pentecostals or Charismatics—not bad for a tradition that wasn’t even on the map at the start of the twentieth century.
²⁹
Roughly half of Brazil’s Christians are Pentecostals or Charismatics.
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Pentecostalism is also popular in the United States, and in Guatemala, where two presidents have been Pentecostals. Other pockets of Pentecostal strength include Nigeria, the Philippines, China, Chile, Ghana, South Africa, and South Korea.

One source of Pentecostalism’s success is its ability to address both thisworldly and otherworldly concerns. Another is its ability to abide simultaneously in the pragmatic present and the biblical past.
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Like evangelicals and fundamentalists, Pentecostals view the Bible as the inspired Word of God, evangelize with gusto, and respond to the challenge of death by preaching personal salvation through faith in Jesus. But Pentecostals also attend to the challenge of human flourishing by promising health and wealth here and now. Especially in the Third World, they offer deliverance from demons and witches, and their strict rules about drinking, gambling, and womanizing have improved the lives of women worldwide, while putting more disposable income in the pockets of Pentecostal families.