The new Christians

Webmaster | 28 June 2006

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Christians are facing a shrinking population in the liberal West and a growing majority of the traditional Rest, writes PHILIP JENKINS.

During the past half century the critical centres of the Christian world have moved decisively to Africa, to Latin America and to Asia. The balance will never shift back.

The growth in Africa has been relentless. In 1900 Africa had just 10 million Christians out of a continental population of 107 million – about nine per cent. Today the Christian total stands at 360 million out of 784 million, or 46 per cent. And that percentage is likely to continue rising, because Christian African countries have some of the world’s most dramatic rates of population growth. Meanwhile, the advanced industrial countries are experiencing a dramatic birth dearth. Within the next 25 years the population of the world’s Christians is expected to grow to 2.6 billion (making Christianity by far the world’s largest faith). And 50 per cent of Christians will be in Africa and Latin America, and another 17 per cent will be in Asia.

The demographic changes within Christianity have many implications for theology and for global society and politics. The most significant point is that in terms of both theology and moral teaching, Southern Christianity is more conservative than the Northern – especially the American –version. Northern reformers, even if otherwise sympathetic to the indigenous cultures of non-Northern peoples, obviously do not like this fact. The liberal Catholic writer James Carroll has complained that ‘world Christianity [is falling] increasingly under the sway of anti-intellectual fundamentalism’.

Neatly illustrating the cultural gulf that separates Northern and Southern churches is an incident involving Moses Tay, the [former] Anglican archbishop of South-East Asia, who is based in Singapore. In the early 1990s Tay travelled to Vancouver, where he encountered the totem poles that are a local tourist attraction. To him, they were idols possessed by evil spirits, and he concluded that they required handling by prayer and exorcism.

This horrified the local Anglican Church, which was committed to building good relationships with local Native American communities, and which regarded exorcism as absurd superstition.

The Canadians, like other good liberal Christians throughout the North, were long past dismissing alien religions as diabolically inspired. It’s difficult not to feel some sympathy with the archbishop, however. He was quite correct to see the totems as authentic religious symbols. On that occasion Tay personified the global Christian confrontation.

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