“By the year 2025, Christianity will be non-white, non-western and non-rich.” This was one of the many interesting claims made by Phillip Jenkins at his talk last week on the globalization and spread of Christianity.
Jenkins is a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University, and has published multiple books on topics like cultic religions and globalization. His speech was informative and utterly fascinating, bringing to light many ideas and suppositions which I had never considered.
While I consider myself a spiritual person, I do not consider myself a religious one. That being said, I find the study of Christianity and other religions extremely intriguing. The different tenets, psychologies and morals in each religion are interesting topics that have many more similarities than one would suspect.
Jenkins’ talk addressed the state of Christianity in the world today-where it has been, where it is going, how is it getting there and when we can expect to see these changes. His predictions and statistics provided an image of the future religious world that most of us uneducated on the subject would be shocked to hear.
Some statistics Jenkins provided are as follows. Today the largest Christian communities are in Africa and Latin America. In 1900, Africa and Latin America held 13 percent of the world’s population; by 2050, they will hold 29 percent, outnumbering global Northerners 2.5 to 1. Christians comprise a third of the world’s population today and will stay about the same in the future. By 2050, though, only one-fifth of the world’s 3 billion Christians will be white.
Although these statistics are futuristic and of little concern to us, it is very important for people of any faith, or no faith at all, to study and realize. It helps us to understand the world in which we live. It provides a larger worldview that we so desperately need.
The thought that “we may not be the majority anymore” is humbling. It helps us understand people like Africans, who we, without this knowledge, wouldn’t be able to understand. It draws an important similarity between poor African-Christians and modern American-Christians. They are the same, only one is a thousand years ahead of the other. Africans believe a primitive, fundamental Christianity that American-Christians have largely left.
This calls to mind questions about the role faith plays, why we have it and the uses of religion. Europeans now seem to be evolving beyond a need for religion. America, though becoming increasingly secular, is still largely Christian because of the amount of Latin-American, Asian and African immigrants, which are constantly increasing the percentage. Africa, with a great need for religion, is finding it and latching onto it.
Religion here represents a promise of hope. American-Christians may see the Christianization of Africa and Asia as a miracle that, as one woman at the talk chose to observe, “God is showing Jesus to other nations,” but what people like her ignore is why they are becoming Christian.
To people without food, the Bible provides images of the hungry being fed in abundance. To people without medicine, the Bible provides stories of miraculous healings. To people who only live to be 30, the Bible provides the promise of a beautiful afterlife. The American-Christian attitude that the woman provided is another example of the inability to see through someone else’s eyes, or perhaps simply the refusal to see that it is merely desperation “bringing people to God,” not some heaven-sent conversion.
The observance that by 2025, Christianity will be “non-white, non-western and non-rich,” and also the claim by Jenkins of Christianity becoming a “third-world” religion, speaks volumes to me, and I wonder if the claim holds such gravity to anyone else.
Another “non-” which can logically be added to the list, though Jenkins didn’t, is non-educated. I am not saying Christians are uneducated, but the new, huge Christian populations in places like Africa are largely uneducated.
Jenkins said eventually it will be the global South sending missionaries to the global North, and that the next wave of Christianity (for it is a cyclical thing) will be from the south to the north. He said the main issue we will face is trying to find a peaceful coexistence of religions, such as Islam and Christianity, and the struggle to do so will likely provoke wars and political problems for a long time.
It all returns to the necessity for people to be able to get into another’s skin, to see how another person believes. When one is able to look at religion objectively, one is able to understand the beliefs of another person, and an important bond is formed.
People don’t need to take the claim, “Christianity is spreading around the world,” at face value. People need to ask why, and upon finding out why, a whole new world of perspective will be introduced.