God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (51 page)

29
. Quoted in Kecia Ali, “Virtue and Danger: Sexuality and Prophetic Norms in Muslim Life and Thought,”
Interreligious Dialogue
, September 30, 2009, http://irdialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Ali-JIRD-Oct-2009.pdf. As Ali notes, a parallel Hadith states, “There is no monkery in Islam.”

30
. Coleman Barks, trans.,
The Essential Rumi
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 242, 129.

31
. Barks,
Essential Rumi
, 193.

32
. Fadiman and Frager,
Essential Sufism
, 58.

33
. Fadiman and Frager,
Essential Sufism
, 115.

34
. Jalâl al-Dîn Rûmî,
Selected Poems from the Dîv
^-
ani Shamsi Tabrîz
, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (Richmond, UK: Routledge Curzon Press, 1999), 135.

35
. Ignac Goldziher,
Mohammed and Islam
, trans. Kate Chambers Seelye (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1917), 183. Sufi scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr is equally irenic: “To have lived any religion fully is to have lived all religions” (
Ideals and Realities of Islam
, 16).

36
. William Wordsworth,
The
Poetical Works of William Wordsworth
, eds. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), 4.57.

37
. Barks,
Essential Rumi
, 178.

38
. Quoted in Naila Minai,
Women in Islam: Tradition and Transition in the Middle East
(New York: Seaview Books, 1981), 40.

39
. Mohammed El Qorchi, “Islamic Finance Gears Up,”
Finance and Development
42, no. 4 (2005), http://imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2005/12/qorchi.htm.

Chapter Two: Christianity: The Way of Salvation

1
. Harvey Cox,
The Future of Faith
(New York: HarperOne, 2009), 174.

2
. Make that 1082 languages as of December 2009, according to The Jesus Film Project web site (http://www.jesusfilm.org/film-and-media/statistics/languages-completed). On this same site, megachurch pastor Rick Warren refers to this movie as “the most effective evangelistic tool ever invented.”

3
. J. C. Hallman,
The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America’s Religious Fringe
(New York: Random House, 2006), xv.

4
. See Stephen Prothero,
American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003).

5
. David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, and Peter F. Crossing, “Missiometrics 2008: Reality Checks for Christian World Communions,”
International Bulletin of Missionary Research
32, no. 1 (2008): 29.

6
. John R. W. Stott,
Basic Christianity
, 2nd ed. (London: InterVarsity Press, 1971), 81.

7
. David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson,
World Christian Encyclopedia
, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 22.

8
. Diana L. Eck,
A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).

9
. In a seminar on the history of the Bible in the United States, I assigned
Revolve
. After reading the whole thing, one of my students concluded it was an
Onion
-style parody of evangelicalism, not an expression of evangelicalism itself. See
Revolve: The Complete New Testament
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003).

10
. John Henson,
Good as New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures
(Winchester, UK: O Books, 2004), 23, 335.

11
. Carter Lindberg,
The European Reformations
, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 64.

12
. Régis Debray,
God: An Itinerary
, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Verso, 2004), 62.

13
. George E. Ganss, ed.,
Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works
(New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 213. This was number thirteen in Ignatius’s “Rules for Thinking, Judging, and Feeling with the Church.”

14
. Mark A. Noll,
The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 191.

15
. Here Anglicans, or Episcopalians as they are known in the United States, split the difference between Protestants and Catholics, relying on a “three-legged stool” of scripture, reason, and tradition.

16
. World Christian Database, http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org. This database divides the world’s Christians into six “mega-blocs”: Anglicans, Catholics, Independents, Marginals, Orthodox, and Protestant. It defines Marginals, which include in addition to the Mormons such groups as Unitarians and Swedenborgians, as groups that revere Jesus yet reject traditional Christian creeds and councils and in some cases employ new revelation beyond the Bible. Here I have read Anglicans and Independents as Protestants. All demographic data in this chapter derives from this database, unless otherwise noted.

17
. Sally Atkinson, “America’s Next Top Mormon,”
Newsweek
, May 6, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/id/135758.

18
. Philip Jenkins,
The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 66. For a provocative argument that Mormonism is well on its way to becoming the first new world religion since Islam, see Rodney Stark,
The Rise of Mormonism
, ed. Reid L. Neilson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005). According to Stark, the LDS Church could have as many as 267 million members by 2080 (22).

19
. “There is not a young man now living in the U.S.,” wrote Jefferson in a letter to physicist Benjamin Waterhouse, “who will not die an Unitarian” (Dickinson W. Adams, ed.,
Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: The Philosophy of Jesus and the Life and Morals of Jesus
[Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983], 406).

20
. David W. Bebbington,
Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2–17.

21
. Noll,
New Shape of World Christianity
, 111.

22
. August Comte,
System of Positive Polity
, trans. John Henry Bridges (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), 1.600.

23
. George M. Marsden,
Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 1.

24
. For 1900 data on Caucasians (which includes “Caucasian, Germanic, Slav”), and on Christians in Europe (68 percent of all Christians) and North America (14 percent), see Todd M. Johnson, “Christianity in Global Context: Trends and Statistics,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, http://pewforum.org/events/051805/global-christianity.pdf.

25
. Hilaire Belloc,
Europe and the Faith
(New York: Paulist Pres, 1920), ix.

26
. Todd M. Johnson and Sun Young Chung, “Tracking Global Christianity’s Statistical Centre of Gravity,
A.D.
33–
A.D.
2100,”
International Review of Mission
93.369 (April 2004): 166–81.

27
. Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed.,
Intimate Memories of Lincoln
(Elmira, NY: Primavera Press, 1945), 243.

28
. “Weird Babel of Tongues,”
Los Angeles Daily Times
, April 18, 1906, reprinted in Judith Mitchell Buddenbaum and Debra L. Mason, eds.,
Readings on Religion as News
(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 175.

29
. “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2009,” Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, http://www.gcts.edu/sites/default/files/IBMR2009.pdf.

30
. “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 2006, http://pewforum.org/surveys/pentecostal/.

31
. On what he calls the “primitivism” and “pragmatism” of Pentecostalism, see Grant Wacker,
Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).

32
. Cox,
Future of Faith
, 204.

33
. “Moved by the Spirit: Pentecostal Power & Politics After 100 Years,” Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, April 24, 2006, http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=109.

34
. Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori,
Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007), 39–67.