Oxford University Press, 3rd edition

(13) PHILIP JENKINS – THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM: THE COMING OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

This book was – dare I say it? – a revelation.

That is not to say it was positive or negative, given the word revelation is often used to imply the former, but it was a dramatic paradigm shift for me. Previously, I had assumed that the world was slowly but steadily becoming more secular, with religion inexorably on the wane – perhaps with Islam as something of an outlier but particularly for Christianity, such that the world might be seen as increasingly post-Christian.

As I like to quip, I live in a Nietzschean world with a Freudian mind, so it was all too easy for my own assumption to follow the influence of Nietzsche’s pronouncement that God is dead, with increasingly fewer people showing up to the wake.

So did the revelation of this book prove that assumption to be true or false? Well…yes and no, but mostly yes.

The assumption is by and large true for the West, with some outliers – notably the United States, where there is substantial resistance to the more advanced secularization in Europe.

However, it is not true elsewhere and this book’s essential thesis is that, due to demography, the West is an increasingly smaller part of the world as a whole – waning in population in proportion to the so-called global South, certainly in relative terms and potentially even in absolute terms. And the assumption definitely does not hold for the South, where religion is booming – which looks to remain the case for the foreseeable future, until at least later in this century.

Not all religion mind you, as the book identifies three predominant religious currents booming in the global South – conservative Catholicism, fundamentalist Protestantism and Islam. The first two of course are currents within the religion of Christianity, which is the book’s primary focus. To sum up the book’s thesis in a nutshell, while Christianity West is waning, Christianity South is booming. (One was tempted to say Christianity East as well as Christianity South, particularly to connote Christianity in Asia as well as the symmetry in opposition with Christianity West, but that risked confusion with Orthodoxy).

Two interesting points stick most in my mind from this book. The first and more substantial point was that this was not some radical redirection of history, but in many ways history turning full circle to Christianity’s origin – where, for the first centuries of its existence, Christianity was predominantly an Asian and African religion, not a European one.

The second point, less substantial but more amusing as irony, is its reference to a work of SF satire, in which a future Christian Africa sends missionaries to a non-Christian Europe – a work that, as the book points out, may resemble satire less and less in the foreseeable future.

The book’s author Philip Jenkins is an American historian of religion with a focus on Christianity and has written a number of books on it, both for its future (as here) and its past. This is the only book of his that I have read so far, but hope to read more in the expectation that they prove to be as engaging as this one.

RATING: 4 STARS****
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)