Some time ago I was behind a car plastered with three bumper stickers: “No Jesus, No Peace. Know Jesus, Know Peace … One Nation Under God … The Power of Pride,” the last one decorated with an American flag.
It took a minute for the mixed message of cheek-turning Christianity, proud nationalism and support for the war on terrorism to sink in, partly because that blend is a common sight around here.
Not so in other parts of the world, not even where the Christian faith used to dominate, according to Dr. Brian Stanley, a church historian and missions specialist at England’s Cambridge University.
“There has been a massive shift since the Second World War,” he said, one that has moved the global weight of Christianity to the south and east – to Africa and Asia – and away from the “old heartlands of Christianity” in Europe and North America.
Almost two-thirds of the world’s Christians – about 65 percent – live in Africa and Asia now. A hundred years ago, at most 10 percent of the world’s Christians lived in those regions.
But since 1945, migration, improved mass communications and waves of independence movements that freed colonies from old European powers helped to alter the world’s religious landscape.
At the same time, Christianity began declining in Europe and in parts of North America. If this is a typical weekend in Western Europe, less than 10 percent of adults will darken the door of a Christian or Jewish place of worship, a percentage closely mirrored in many urban areas on this side of the Atlantic.
The growth of Christianity in Asia and Africa “surprised a lot of people,” said Stanley, who directs the Henry Martyn Centre, an academic institute specializing in the study of Christianity around the world. In the 1950s and ’60s, experts predicted that Christian religion would evaporate after Western colonists pulled out. Just the opposite happened.
“What was once Christian in the North – or West, if you prefer – is not Christian anymore,” Stanley said. Gone are the old distinctions between so-called Christian and heathen nations. No one can easily draw a religion’s territory on a map anymore.
If the geography of Christianity has changed, so has the environment in which it operates. It is a minority religion in most cultures, just one among many faiths.
“What is emerging in the South (hemisphere) is a very different form of Christianity,” said Stanley, who lectured at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tenn., in 2004. “Very few nation-states have governments that are explicitly Christian. The majority are Islamic or secular, such as India because it is so religiously diverse.”
That kind of atmosphere is “cutting away at a lot of deadwood,” Stanley said. “People are Christians because they choose to be, sometimes at considerable cost.”
In Iraq, for example, Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, was kidnapped and killed in March, but his high-profile death came after a series of abductions, murders and church bombings aimed at Iraq’s Christian communities.
In most places, Christianity is starting to resemble the church in its earliest days, according to Stanley, when “people were more at the margins of power rather than at the center of power, and often challenging the powers that be.”
This global shift will test Christians in the United States and other Western nations, even in the so-called Bible belt. Bumper-sticker slogans won’t work well.
“Christian identity and Western or American identity are going to pull further and further apart,” Stanley said. “More and more Christians will not be in free, democratic societies. That will challenge our view of Christianity in its connection with our national identity.”
In other words, Western Christians should expect to wrestle with political and economic policies that pressure fellow believers in other countries. Christians in Palestine, for example, are baffled and angry at the strong support that American church leaders such as John Hagee give to Israeli policies, even when Palestinian church communities are destroyed as a result.
American Christians are entering unfamiliar territory, where national interests collide with spiritual kinships.
“That will challenge Christians,” says Stanley. “Where is your ultimate loyalty?”
First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 3 May 2008.
