Philip Jenkins: The Next Christendom (Book Review)

Philip Jenkins' book 'The Next Christendom' (2011 edition) is about an ongoing revolution in global Christianity. The next Christendom, according to Jenkins, will arise in the global south rather than in the north, and this will upend the church and effect everything about our theology, ethics, and worship. At the same time, this revolution is also a reunion of our religion with its ancient homelands outside the traditional core of Western civilization. Relying primarily on demographic projections, Jenkins demonstrates that it's nearly inevitable that Christianity will become darker in complexion, economically poorer, and more Pentecostal and charismatic. This revolution will not be smooth. The emerging Christendom will face huge challenges, including a rapidly rising Islamic world that's currently in the midst of three decades of reactionary revival.

Jenkins spends most of the book talking about demographics. Europe, the old heart of Christendom, is shrinking and aging. Increasingly, southern Christians outnumber northern white Christians by overwhelming proportions. Africa is the center of this demographic revolution, and numerous obscure countries like Ethiopia now have far more Christians than traditional bastions like England. Latin America, Africa, and Asia are experiencing many conversions to Christ, and they have the fertility rates to continue producing new Christians outside of conversion. Europe, meanwhile, is secularizing with low fertility rates. The United States is unique because, while it's arguably the most developed and modernized country on earth, its religious and demographic profile often trends closer to the global south. Despite the decline of Europe, the United States will remain the largest Christian country in 2050.

The charismatic Christianity that first emerged in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century is now taking the world by storm. Global south churches look more and more like Pentecostal congregations, and even the Catholic Church in far off regions like the Philippines is being inundated with charismatic theology and practice among its lay members. Catholic strongholds like Brazil are facing shortages of priests, and charismatic preachers are rising to fill the void and siphon off converts. This new charismatic emphasis is especially strong in Africa, and Africans are the rising power in Christendom. A vast diaspora of African migrants is pouring into the global north and starting charismatic churches all over cities like London and Paris. The church of the future will be increasingly charismatic, and that means more emotion, miracles, prophesy, speaking in tongues, divine healings, and dancing.

Many of the fastest growing regions in the world, however, are split evenly between Christian and Islamic populations. This has already led to great violence as Muslims, caught up in a global fundamentalist revival, increasingly look to enforce Sharia law on every country they inhabit. In the last century, and especially since the 1980s, large Christian communities that have existed side by side with Islam for centuries have been decimated to the point of extinction. As recently as 1900, around a third of the Ottoman Empire was Christian. Since then, and especially since the Armenian Genocide (1914-18), Christian populations have been brutally attacked. This persecution has largely succeeded in uprooting Christian communities. Many of the refugees have made their way to the United States, but their safety in the new world means the end of millennia of Christianity in the Middle East. Jenkins predicts more religious wars in the future as resources become scarcer and violence more necessary in an increasingly zero-sum race for survival. Nigeria is a perfect example of the present and future of Christianity. A region torn apart by religious and ethnic violence caused by all of the above-mentioned factors; and yet, Nigeria represents the future of Christendom more than stable prosperous secular places like Europe.

Jenkins repeatedly highlights the fundamentalist tendencies of southern Christianity. Southern churches tend to be more conservative and take the Bible literally, even the Old Testament. Where northern white Christians read about demon possession and feel embarrassed, southern Christians read the same biblical narratives and recognize direct real-life connections with supernational events occurring in their own societies. Prophesy is not a long-lost historical event to southern Christians, but rather a present-day aspect of their experiences. In Africa, especially, the world of the Bible lives on in people's contemporary lives. Battles against demons, feuds over wells and pastureland, prophetic utterances, roaming thieves and robbers, exile and famine are all parts of people's lives. In this sense, the rise of southern Christianity is the return of the first centuries after Christ. As strange and alien as southern theology and praxis might seem to northern Christians, we must accept that what we're now witnessing are new Christian nations passing through the same messy inculturation processes that European Christians went through during the early Middle Ages.

Jenkins concludes by asking why churches in the global north aren't investing more resources into winning converts in these rapidly growing yet economically backward population centers in the south. Why, if we already know which parts of the world are going to expand and which are going to contract, are we not putting resources and manpower where they would help the most souls? Jenkins suggests this misallocation is partially the result of misplaced anxiety about missionary efforts being a form of neo-colonialism. Are we just forcing our Western culture on the brown masses? Jenkins dismisses this guilt as largely unfounded, or at least not significant enough to stop mission efforts. He points out that southern Christians often have deeply positive associations with missionaries from the past. Missionaries are among the few things about old colonial empires that remain highly popular with locals. Missionaries accomplished untold good around the world, and we should continue building on their work in the twenty first century.

Most conservative Church of Christ members will likely find Jenkins' book disturbing. His predictions include the continuing rise of two mammoths that we've traditionally opposed: charismatic Pentecostalism and the Roman Catholic Church. Both will continue to grow rapidly and exert profound influence. The Church of Christ, by contrast, is mostly a global north phenomenon centered in a specific region of the United States. Our normally unemotional worship services and belief in the cessation of miracles are unlikely to win us a prominent place in the next Christendom.

Jenkins' book resonated with my personal experiences here in China. Our international church here includes people from all over the world, and many of our young members are from Africa. They often demonstrate deep devotion to God and a knowledge and concern for the traditional meanings of scripture. I have no doubt that charismaticism is rising in the church, and I've even seen numerous examples of its influence in the Churches of Christ. I also have several close Muslim friends with whom I've dialogued about their relationships with religion and the experiences of revival currently sweeping the Islamic world and pushing them towards a more fundamentalist interpretation of their faith.

Christianity is actively persecuted here in China, and yet I find myself bumping into Christians in the most unexpected places. Among the most interesting parts of this book was Jenkins' discussion of the close association much of the world makes between the Chinese diaspora and Christianity. So many Chinese people have converted to Christianity around Southeast Asia that anti-Chinese violence goes hand in hand with vandalizing churches. Nationalists can't distinguish between Chinese people and Christians. 

In the book's conclusion, Jenkins makes an interesting point about the skewed view westerners have about Christianity being a white Western phenomenon. In the West, religious "diversity" is often portrayed as a cross-faith issue involving animists, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Bahai, Sikh's, etc. Jenkins argues that this view is distorted. World religion is now largely bifurcated into just two categories: Christianity and Islam. There's now more population diversity in Christianity than in the rest of the world's religions combined. Christianity is not fading away; on the contrary, it's increasingly everywhere and in new forms. In Asia, the competition for souls no longer primarily involves Buddhism or Taoism but is simply a rivalry between Christianity and Islam. Christianity is the dominant religion of Korea, for example, and I've long argued that it's also China's largest organized religion (despite the government's increasingly desperate claims that it's not). If you really want to learn about modern Asian religion, it's far more relevant to study Asian churches than ancient Confucianism. Christianity is slowly conquering the world and incorporating its diversity into itself. Jenkins cites one historian as saying that the history of mankind is the history of religion. Increasingly, the history of mankind is the history of Christendom.