The Triumph of Christianity (44 page)

But it seems suggestive that while support for the extreme Left has greatly declined in Europe, the dominant churches—especially the state churches—have become progressively leftist. This has not brought them any resurgence in attendance.

Statistical Moonshine

Peter Berger is remarkable for having the flexibility of mind and the openness to evidence to renounce his long commitment to the secularization thesis. Many other social scientists have done nothing of the sort. Lacking the grasp of plausibility that Berger possesses, these folks proceed as if everything continues to support their belief that modernization and religion are utterly incompatible. Recently, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
⁴¹
brought joy to those holding this perspective by offering statistical evidence that, indeed, worldwide there is a powerful negative correlation between various measures of religiousness such as church attendance and frequency of prayer and various measures of economic development such as per capita Gross Domestic Product. The more modern the nation, the less religious! Of course, all they had demonstrated is that Europe is less religious than the rest of the world and that European nations dominate the high end of economic development. But we already knew that. Norris and Inglehart shed no light on why Europe is different, other than to reiterate the tired refrain that it is the inevitable result of modernization.

Worse yet, this is statistical moonshine. There is considerable variation in religiousness among European nations as there is in their levels of economic development. But, if one examines the relationships between measures of development and religiousness
only among
the thirty-seven nations of Europe, one finds no significant correlations at all! That is, Italy is as modern as Sweden which tells us nothing about why Italians flock to church and Swedes do not. The same is true if one examines these correlations among Muslim nations. The more developed Muslim nations should be less religious, but it isn’t so. There is no correlation between religiousness measured by mosque attendance and GNP per capita. The same finding holds for the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa. If modernization truly causes secularization, these effects must show up when other dominant cultural variations are held constant. They do not.

Conclusion

B
EHIND THE SECULARIZATION THESIS
has always lain an enormous conceit that recently has been brazenly displayed by the militant atheist and biologist Daniel Dennett when he identified himself and his antireligious confederates as “brights,” in contrast to those dullards whose minds are still infected with religious delusions.
⁴²
But there also is a barely concealed desperation behind Dennett’s arrogant pronouncements and those of the writers of the other recent aggressively atheist books. For the truth is, religion is not passing away; instead it is very obviously making a great deal of headway around the world. As will be seen in the next chapter, never before has there been such widespread and intense piety in Latin America. Not only are there now few atheists in Russia; there now are millions of Christians in China. There even are signs that religion may be making gains in Europe. In most of Europe the fertility rates have dropped far below replacement levels with the impending consequence of rapidly declining “native” populations, foretelling a Sweden without Swedes and a France without French. What has gone little noticed is that the Europeans who go to church are continuing to have children to such an extent that this factor alone could result in a far more religious Europe.
⁴³
In addition, the impact of tens of thousands of American missionaries, many of them self-financed volunteers, is beginning to result in some aggressive and competitive churches in Europe despite the regulatory barriers placed in their way.
⁴⁴
Indeed, the development of only a modest amount of religious competition in Italy seems to have played a role in producing a quite significant Italian religious revival.
⁴⁵
And so it goes.

Chapter Twenty-Two
Globalization

T
HE
A
GE OF
E
XPLORATION ALSO
was a new beginning of Christian world missions. In 1492 when Columbus sailed, there were few Christians outside of Europe, and even after Christianity had come to dominate the rapidly developing Western Hemisphere, most people on earth still had never heard of Jesus. During the 1850s, it was the consensus among European scholars that Buddhism was the largest of the great world religions,
¹
but at that very moment things began to change as serious efforts at Christian missionizing got under way.

By 1900 there were 5,278 American Protestant missionaries serving abroad as well as 5,656 from Britain and about 2,200 from Continental nations—in addition to several thousand Roman Catholic missionaries.
²
Since World War II, most Christian missionaries abroad have been Evangelical American Protestants, and today hundreds of thousands of missionaries from the United States are spread all around the globe, including large numbers at work in Europe.
³
This total does not include about 1.6 million Americans who go abroad on short-term missions every year at their own expense.
⁴
Nor does it include about five thousand missionaries sent abroad from Latin American nations. In addition, there are large numbers of Christian missionaries, perhaps more than seventy thousand, at work from non-Western nations.
⁵
As a result of all this effort, Christianity has become by far the largest religion on earth.

Faiths on Earth

S
TATISTICS ON WORLDWIDE RELIGIOUS
affiliation are only rough estimates and necessarily include very nominal “members” of all the major faiths.
⁶
Thus, for example, nearly everyone in Europe is included in the Christian total, even though many European “Christians” have never been inside a church and many others have only been there once, when they were baptized as infants. The many shortcomings in world religion statistics are not the fault of those who assembled them, but are due to a lack of more accurate information. There have been no reliable, nation-by-nation statistics to add up.

This gap now can be filled by data from the Gallup Organization’s World Poll. Beginning in 2007, Gallup has conducted annual surveys in each of 160 nations having about 97 percent of the world’s population. Except in China, all respondents were asked: “Could you tell me what your religion is?” In addition, Gallup asked: “Have you attended a place of worship or religious service within the past seven days?” Of course, these questions were carefully translated into all of the local languages. Hence, in principle, the data from these surveys can provide an accurate and far more informative portrait of the world’s religions.

However there are several unavoidable shortcomings to the revised statistics. In many nations, respondents were given the choice of affirming that they were Roman Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox Christians. But in many places, although people know the name of their local Christian church, they are unfamiliar with terms such as Protestant or Catholic. Consequently, in many countries, it was necessary to settle for the response “Christian,” without further specification. Hence, to create worldwide statistics, even those who reported being Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox must be placed in the undifferentiated category “Christian.” The same applies to Muslim respondents. For many nations there is no breakdown even for Sunnis and Shiites, and hence everyone is simply identified as a “Muslim.”

A second deficiency is that even though by now there are a total of nearly four hundred thousand respondents to the World Polls, there still are too few cases to allow reliable statistics to be computed for many smaller religions, including Shinto, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and Confucianism (a statistic for Jews is possible because Israel is included in the World Polls). This made it necessary to combine these, and all other small religions, into a hodge-podge category called “Other.” In the next several years, as the size of the world sample increases it will be possible to break down the “Other” category. In addition, there are those people who said they had no religion, responded they were secular, or atheists, or agnostics. All of these respondents were collapsed into the category “Secular.” However, some of these “secular” people said they attended religious services!

A final difficulty concerns China. Unfortunately, no foreign polling firm, including Gallup, is permitted to ask questions about religion in China. Worse yet, even the results of polling about religion by Chinese firms are probably quite unreliable as there is substantial evidence that many people feel it is too risky to admit to an interviewer that they are religious. To further complicate matters, the Chinese have such a peculiar definition of religion that they grossly understate their own religiousness. For example, the Chinese Communist Party has been adamant for some years that Confucianism is merely a philosophy and definitely not a religion. However, when Anna Xiao Dong Sun
⁷
visited a number of temples in China, she observed many visitors earnestly praying to statues of Confucius for a variety of blessings and benefits—and most of these worshippers would no doubt say they have no religion. Nor would most Chinese agree that they had a religion even while they make requests and offer gifts of food to statues of the several hundred other gods found in the folk temples. In similar fashion, many Chinese do not apply the term
religion
to the devotions they conduct at their ancestral shrines. Of course, if China were an average-size nation none of this would matter much. But when one contemplates adding more than a billion people to the statistics, immense distortions enter the picture. For example, the percentage of religious people in the world would artificially be very substantially reduced, and the secular category would falsely be very inflated. Consequently, China will be treated separately later in this chapter; here the world religious statistics presented below omit China.

Nominal Members

T
ABLE 22.1 SHOWS THE
membership of the great world religions outside of China. Around the world, a total of 2.2 billion people (41 percent) give their religion as Christian, far outnumbering Muslims, who total 1.4 billion (27 percent). Hindus are the third largest religious group, with 1 billion affiliates (19 percent), followed by Buddhists with 289 million (5 percent). Jews make up only 12 million (less than 0.1 percent) and the other faiths number 119 million (2 percent). Secularists make up 240 million (5 percent).

Table 22.1: Worldwide Nominal Religious Affiliations (China Excluded)

*Less than 0.1 percent.

The major difference between these statistics and those most commonly cited has to do with the secular category. This group usually is estimated at about 16 percent of the world population, a percentage that probably is obtained only by including most Chinese as unreligious. Inflating the secular category causes a corresponding decrease in all the others, hence the proportion Christian usually is set at about 33 percent and Islam at 21. That emphasizes why it is prudent not to include China. Be that as it may, these findings are very unsatisfactory in other ways.

Active Membership

W
HAT DOES IT MEAN
to be a Christian or a Muslim or a member of any faith? Surely it implies some degree of involvement and participation. The available measure of active membership is very stringent—“Have you attended a place of worship or religious service within the past seven days?” Table 22.2 is limited to those who attended in the past week.

Table 22.2: Worldwide Active Religious Affiliations (China Excluded)

*Less than 0.1 percent.

Contrary to stereotypes that all Muslims are ardent worshippers, their numbers have been reduced almost as greatly as those for Christians when the data are limited to weekly attendees. The table also reveals that more than 23 million of those classified as Secular had attended a religious service in the past seven days! The overall finding is that nothing much has changed when only active members are examined. Christianity is still by far the largest of the religions (44 percent), followed by Islam (29 percent).

Regional Variations

C
HRISTIANITY IS NOT ONLY
the largest religion in the world, it also is the least regionalized. There are only trivial numbers of Muslims in the Western Hemisphere and in Eastern Asia, but there is no region without significant numbers of Christians—even in the Arab region of North Africa and the Middle East, 4 percent of the population are Christians. However there is a more interesting way to examine Christian regionalism, as can be seen in table 22.3.

Table 22.3: The Regional Distribution of Christians (China Excluded)

*Less than 0.5 percent.

There are some interesting surprises here. Christians are more likely to live in Europe than elsewhere (28 percent), when only nominal affiliation is considered, with Latin America second (25 percent) and North America a distant fourth (13 percent). But when the statistics are based on weekly church attendees, Europe (13 percent) falls to a distant fourth, North America (24 percent) rises to second, and Sub-Saharan Africa rises to the top (30 percent). Despite the prominence of African bishops in the squabbles going on within the Anglican Communion, few know how highly Christianized is the entire subcontinent. This is further disguised by the common tendency to treat Africa as a whole rather than to divide it into the overwhelmingly Arab North and the Black South. When treated as a united “continent,” Africa has a Muslim majority. But that is very misleading since Christians make up 66 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans, compared with 29 percent who are Muslims. Philip Jenkins has, of course, called attention to the strength of Christianity in Africa and in the entire “global south.”
⁸

Christian Africa

T
HE PRESENCE OF SO
many Christians in Africa is not easily explained. Yes, Christianity reached these African communities as a result of European Colonialism—where the colonizers went, the missionaries followed. But it was taken for granted, both by Europeans and by African nationalists, that the collapse of European empires would quickly be followed by a return to precolonial, “authentically” African cultural forms. But nothing of the sort took place, at least not in the realm of religion. Instead, African Christianity has continued to thrive to such an extent that when only Christians who attend church weekly are counted, as already noted there are more Christians in this part of Africa than anywhere else on earth.