God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (14 page)

Pentecostalism has been criticized as escapist, and in most countries it continues to be associated more with the “prosperity gospel” (which says that Jesus calls us to be rich) than with the Social Gospel (which says that Jesus calls us to help the poor). The fastest growing denomination in Latin America is the Brazil-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. This church, which is now also active in the United States and the United Kingdom, preaches a “name it and claim it” theology that encourages believers to pray not only to get their souls into heaven but also to put cars in their driveways.

Though almost all U.S. Pentecostals side with Republicans on bedroom questions such as homosexuality, premarital sex, and abortion, many tilt toward the Democrats on other social and political issues. In Brazil, Pentecostals tend toward the “center left.”
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In Venezuela, they have a favorable view of socialist president Hugo Chavez.
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Inspired by Jesus’s description of the poor as “blessed” (Luke 6:20), “progressive Pentecostals” worldwide are working to fight drug abuse, provide shelter for the homeless, feed the hungry, staff day-care centers, counsel drug addicts, fight the AIDS epidemic, and provide microfinancing for entrepreneurs.
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Pentecostals also have a long history of embracing female clergy, something Catholic and Orthodox churches continue to refuse to do. Most of the kudos for ordaining women have accrued to liberal Protestant denominations such as the Episcopalians, who elevated Barbara Harris to the role of bishop in Massachusetts in 1989 and selected Katharine Jefferts Schori as its national leader in 2006. But Pentecostals have had female preachers from the start.

The unprecedented rise of this tradition of the dispossessed has many hallmarks of a second Reformation. Whereas Luther liberated Christians from what had become for many a tyranny of good works, Pentecostalism liberates Christians from the tyranny of belief, which, after the Enlightenment, has become a straitjacket for many. One of the smartest and most open-minded graduate students in my PhD program was a Pentecostal. In a seminar on great thinkers in the study of religion, he consistently surprised me by agreeing with many of the theories of Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and others. After I confessed my surprise at his openness to their critiques of traditional Christian doctrines, he told me that his faith did not hang on belief. It hung instead on the sort of intense, personal experience that cannot be denied. Another friend, just before answering the altar call at a black church in the American South, confessed to her preacher that she didn’t really believe in Jesus. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you will.” Her preacher was able to reassure her because in his congregation experience mattered more than doctrine. And experience is Pentecostalism’s bread and butter—the experience of being inhabited by the awesome power of God.

Brown Christians

Just as historic as the rise of Pentecostalism is the related story of the browning of Christendom. Europe was the homeland of the old Christendom, and white was its color. But today the overwhelming majority (63 percent) of Christians live in Asia, Africa, or Latin America.
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There are now more Catholics in the Philippines than in the homelands of the last two popes (Poland and Germany) combined.
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And though Christianity was illegal in China as recently as 1970, there may now be more people in the pews on any given Sunday in China than in all of Europe.
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The LDS Church epitomizes this global shift. Though many perceive Mormons as lily white—the faith of the pop singers the Osmonds and of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney—most Mormons live outside the United States. Roughly a third live in Latin America, and the tradition is particularly strong in the South Pacific, where Mormons claim between a third and a half of the populations of the island nations of Samoa and Tonga.
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Since colonization benefited Christian missions, you would think that the decolonization process that set in after World War II—independence for India (1947), Indonesia (1949), Ghana (1957), and Nigeria (1960)—would have hurt and perhaps even crippled Christianity. But the withdrawal of European powers from outposts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has instead bolstered Christianity. Most churches on these continents are now led not by foreign missionaries but by locals, and Bibles, prayer books, hymnals, and catechisms are all accessible in local languages.

Thanks in large measure to the global appeal of Pentecostalism, between 1900 and 2000 the portion of Christians in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, skyrocketed from 1 percent to 45 percent, while growth in South Korea was almost as dramatic—from less than 1 percent to 41 percent. Over the same period, the Christian population in Asia jumped more than tenfold—from 27 million to 278 million. This all happened while Europe was rapidly dechristianizing, suffering losses not only in Christian market share but, more important, in the fervency of faith and the frequency of churchgoing. The portion of Christians among the overall population fell between 1900 and 2000 in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, and France. Today only 52 percent of European adults profess belief in God.
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The browning of Christianity may seem to be a new departure, but it is actually a homecoming. During its earliest centuries, Christianity was nearly as multicultural as Los Angeles today. Breaking beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, the Christian movement spread in its infancy to Ethiopia and India. When Christianity gained insider status under Constantine, only one of its five church centers was in Europe (Rome). The others were in Asia (Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem) and Africa (Alexandria). Many of the greatest thinkers in the early church were Africans, not least Saint Augustine (354–430), the author of the world’s first autobiography, the
Confessions
, and the most influential Christian thinker between Paul and Martin Luther. In 500
C.E.
, two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in either Africa or Asia. Not until medieval times would the church come to be largely European.
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The “next Christendom” is making its home in Anglican churches in Uganda, Pentecostal churches in Korea, Catholic churches in Brazil, and Han house churches in China.
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It is also visible in African independent churches, Spirit-filled congregations untainted by affiliations with the traditional denominations that cozied up to colonial regimes. Christianity is even browning in its old haunts. Some of the most visible pastors in the United States are African Americans, and Western Europe’s largest congregation, the London-based Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC), is a black church run by a senior pastor of Nigerian descent.

Jaws still drop in the United States over the magnificence of evangelical megachurches—Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, T. D. Jakes’s The Potter’s House in Dallas, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, California—which often feature live bands, jumbotrons, basketball courts, espresso bars, and architecture that evokes your local shopping mall more than your grandmother’s sanctuary. Neither the United States nor Europe, however, claims any of the globe’s top twenty megachurches.
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The biggest of the big congregations—all Protestant and many Pentecostal—are found in countries such as South Korea, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast.

Highlighting the fact that Christianity is now an Asian religion, South Korea has dozens of megachurches in Seoul alone. These megachurches include the planet’s largest congregation, Yoido Full Gospel Church, which occupies a prime piece of real estate facing the National Assembly, a reminder of the rising political power of Pentecostalism in Asia and worldwide. This church has over 500 pastors and 800,000 members and draws over a quarter of a million parishioners (and gawkers) on an average weekend. But not all megachurches are Pentecostal, or even Protestant. The Cave Cathedral, a sanctuary carved out of rock hard by a garbage dump in Cairo, Egypt, blasts praise, prayers, and preaching over its massive sound system every Sunday to twenty thousand or so Coptic Orthodox believers.

All this is to say that the face of Christianity is getting darker, epitomized not by Pope Benedict but by the South African Anglican archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu. Or, more precisely, by a not-so-famous woman in Brazil or China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, since, as church historian Dana Robert has observed, the typical Christian today is “no longer a European man, but a Latin American or African woman.”
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The most widely reproduced image of Jesus, Warner Sallman’s
Head of Christ
(1941), depicts Jesus as a white man with blond hair and an aquiline nose—the sort of guy who, with a haircut and minus the beard, could represent Utah in the U.S. Senate. But this marshmallow Jesus now seems as out of date as Mr. Rogers. Today artists are increasingly portraying Jesus as Asian or African, and as a woman too. Just before the turn of the last millennium, the
National Catholic Reporter
sponsored a contest called “Jesus 2000” that challenged artists to produce a twenty-first-century Jesus. The winning entry, Janet McKenzie’s
Jesus of the People
, depicted a character of indeterminate gender and race but with dark skin and thick lips suggestive of a Native-American or black Christ.

The expansion of Christianity into the Global South is not just changing the color of Christians, however. It is also changing the shape of Christianity itself. According to Harvey Cox, Christians now live in a “post-dogmatic” “Age of the Spirit” in which individual spirituality trumps institutional religion, creeds and catechisms are invoked more than they are followed, and “the experience of the divine is displacing theories about it.”
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Supernaturalism, chased out of many Global North churches by scientific theorems and philosophical arguments, is back in vogue. Faith healing, speaking in tongues, and even exorcisms are everyday occurrences in many of the world’s fastest growing denominations. This new wave of Christianity is eminently practical, addressing social problems such as poverty via something like the “preferential option for the poor” of Latin American liberation theologians. But it preaches personal salvation at least as much. According to historian Mark Noll, Christians are becoming more entrepreneurial and less deferential to tradition. The new pattern is “self-starting, self-financing and self-spreading Christianity.”
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Observers of American religion have long noted that Christians are now divided along political rather than denominational lines. People on the Catholic left have more in common with liberal Protestants than they do with traditional Catholics, and traditional Catholics have more in common with conservative Protestants than they do with liberal Catholics. Something similar can be said of global Christianity, which is divided into North and South. Christians in the Global South tend to be more theologically conservative than Christians in the Global North, where biblical criticism, evolutionary theory, and comparative religion have created a large cohort of theological liberals. Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America also tend to emphasize their faith’s experiential dimension, while those in Europe and the United States emphasize its ethical dimension. American and European Christians incline toward the Social Gospel, which views sin and salvation in collective rather than individual terms and challenges the faithful to focus on thisworldly matters such as feeding the hungry and providing shelter for the homeless. Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America tend to preach the prosperity gospel and to focus on winning a ticket to heaven. Here angels and demons are no mere metaphors, and the supernatural is alive and well and testifying to its power.

This growing gap between Global North and Global South Christianity is on display in the paroxysms besetting the Anglican Communion. The presenting problem is homosexuality, more specifically the election of an openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. But the broader issue is the authority of the Bible, which by any literal reading must be said to oppose at least male homosexuality. (Nowhere is lesbianism plainly condemned, or even contemplated.) What this controversy reveals is that Anglicans in Africa are worlds apart from Episcopalians in the United States. Of course there are liberals in the Global South, and conservatives in the Global North. In response to Robinson’s election, about 100,000 U.S. conservatives left the Episcopal Church in 2009 to form the Anglican Church in North America. Nonetheless, the story of contemporary Christianity is turning into a tale of two churches, with the Global North yielding influence as rapidly as the Global South is seizing it.

Driving this browning of Christianity are two classic engines of religious change: births and conversions. The fastest growing churches are, not surprisingly, eagerly evangelistic, and their efforts are being augmented by family sizes in the Global South that dwarf those in the North. Much has been made of high birth rates in the Muslim world, but Christians are having children at similarly staggering rates in the Global South, especially in Africa. There is no way that Christianity can keep up the growth it posted in Africa in the twentieth century—from 9 million souls in 1900 to 355 million in 2000—but thanks to a combination of that old-time revivalism and old-fashioned population growth, Africa and Latin America alike should bypass Europe by 2025 in terms of professing Christians.
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