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A recently rediscovered religious text is making huge waves in the world today. With stunning power, it is driving the largest religious change in human history. This book is subversive, revolutionary, and transformative in its approach to good and evil; spirituality; politics; wealth and poverty; race, ethnicity, and social status; gender and sexuality; and health and healing. It also reveals long-hidden truths about Jesus of Nazareth. What is this book? Is it the Gospel of Thomas? No. How about The Da Vinci Code? Hardly.
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It's the Bible. All over the global South—in Africa, Asia, and to a large extent in Latin America as well1—people are reading, believing, and living out of the Bible in ways that make it a very different book from the one known in the North Atlantic realms. Not only that, but because of unprecedented migration, this new Christianity is close at hand in the North as well. In The New Faces of Christianity, a stunning sequel to The Next Christendom, historian Philip Jenkins sets out to take a much closer look at the Christianity of the global South. What he finds is a deeply biblical faith that understands the Scriptures in strikingly different ways than are common in the global North.
A New Christian HeartlandMany northern Christians, accustomed to assuming that Christianity's home base is their own familiar turf, have mental habits that make it difficult for them to care what their African and Asian counterparts think. To counter these assumptions, Jenkins quickly recounts the trends toward southern ascendancy that he featured in his earlier work. In 1900, 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, more than 60 percent of the world's Christians live outside those lands. While only about one million of the 28 million baptized Anglicans in Britain go to church on a Sunday, Nigeria's 18 million Anglicans pack their houses of worship to overflowing. Christianity in the United States seems to be holding its own, but largely because of its revitalization by recent immigrants. As the demographic center of Christian adherence and vitality continues to shift southward, Jenkins argues further, it will be only natural for the views from the South to gain weight. Voices and perspectives from Europe, Christianity's declining northern margin, will seem less authoritative.
Even so, with the world's great Christian institutions, their revenue streams, and powerful religious media still residing in the North, it is not easy to see signs of change. Yet the signs are there; in one ecumenical fellowship after another, for example, southern Christians are now the leaders. The head of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches is Setri Nyomi, a Ghanaian Presbyterian theologian. The new chief executive of the World Council of Churches is Samuel Kobia, a Kenyan Methodist church leader. Books & Culture readers can see the signs closer by. The dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, one of the leading evangelical seminaries in the United States, is Tite Tiénou, a theologian from Burkina Faso.
The rising clout of southern Christians and their perspectives has shown up most dramatically in the current Anglican controversy over homosexuality in the priesthood. The Anglican communion's vast majority now comes from the southern continents, and to the vast majority of southern Anglican church members and leaders, homosexual behavior is sinful. It is forbidden in Scripture and ancient church tradition, they insist, and there they rest their case. Southern influence at the 1998 Lambeth Bishops Conference derailed northern attempts to liberalize church rules about gay clergy. How much this matters is clearly reflected in the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent letter of admonition to the American Episcopal leaders. By their consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003, he said, Americans risk breaking fellowship with the worldwide communion. So bishops from Kampala and Singapore sat in judgment of their American counterparts, and the rather liberal Anglican primate in Britain backed them up—a trend that continued at the meeting of Anglican primates in Tanzania earlier this year. This is indeed a new era, and it is high time that northern Christians learned more about their fellow believers in Christianity's new southern heartlands.
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