Christo notices that I suck at math. Or at least, the statistics I was given—and the charts I put up—might be a little misleading. What you might infer, looking at those charts alone, is that Christianity in the West is declining rapidly, losing adherents, while in Asia and Africa and Latin America Christianity are gaining lots of converts. What I forgot to do was control for population growth. Once you do that, and work the numbers to show Christian growth relative to the growth of the total population, the trend looks a little bit different:
A lower number on the y-axis indicates less percent of the world’s Christian population (data from the pie charts in this earlier post) relative to the percent of the total world population (according to Wikipedia). Thus, although Asia will have a significant amount of the world’s Christians by 2050, its massive population keep the line pretty low.
(If you want to know my calculations, all I did was divide a given continent’s percentage of the world’s Christian population by its percentage of the world’s total population. That’s what the numbers on the y-axis indicate. Since I’m playing with percents and not raw numbers, the actual numbers on the y-axis don’t really mean much, but the graph should do a pretty good job of controlling for shifting population trends in all of this mess—I think. Hopefully.)
What this graph shows (assuming I did my math right) is that once you control for total population European Christianity’s ‘decline’ isn’t really as drastic as the previous charts had made it appear—though there does seem to be some decline in terms of raw numbers as well, though that isn’t clearly demonstrated by this chart. What this chart does show is that the number of Christians in Africa, even once you control for population growth, has absolutely exploded. Asia’s is growing too, though perhaps not as much. And Europe, North America and Oceania are slightly, though not dramatically, in decline.
By the way, if anyone can spot some mistakes in my logic, I’d appreciate it. I’d like to provide graphs and charts that actually, you know, reflect reality.
Two things.
First, if Christians had looked at this chart in 1900 I think they would have balked at the figures for Africa. No one would be expecting that kind of growth, but it happened anyway. Will a similar thing happen in Asia this century? Underground Christianity in China has been taking off for some time now—what will those figures look like in 50 years?
Second, it’s important to remember that these charts and graphs and whatnot can only give us numbers, not a picture of how devout or orthodox or vibrant the Christianity in any given region is. Some of the recent expansion in the global south owes much to Pentecostal/charismatic revival movements, but it remains to be seen whether the Christianity that has taken root in this kind of movement is sustainable enough to last fifty years. So some of this is kind of up for grabs.
But it is compelling data, isn’t it?
(Update: Now, what I’d really like is some raw numbers to work with. If I could get my hands on the total Christian populations residing on each continent in 1900 and 2008, and a projection for 2050, I could start to understand this stuff a lot better. So, if anyone knows where to find that information, I’d be much obliged . . . )
Judith Shulevitz, writing at Tablet, examines the New Perspective from the Jewish standpoint. Money quote:
Paul didn’t nullify Jewish law, nor did he, as Luther would claim later, place grace above works (that is, to paraphrase crudely, the acceptance of Jesus over the performance of mitzvot), or justification by faith above justification by law (being seen as righteous by God by virtue of your belief, rather than by virtue of your good deeds). Or rather, Paul did do those things—a less Lutheran version of them, anyway—but he didn’t mean for the whole world to do them, too. He attacked Jewish law only in the context of a very narrow debate raging in the earliest decades of the Jesus movement. Some Jewish Jesus-movement activists said that their pagan acolytes had to convert to Judaism before they could join the movement. Paul disagreed in the strongest possible terms (he did everything in the strongest possible terms). He maintained that these gentiles had to follow only the pre-rabbinic equivalent of the Noahide laws—the seven edicts against idolatry, adultery, etc., that all non-Jews are expected to follow. After hearing Jesus’ call—the first and still greatest revisionist, Krister Stendahl, insists that Paul experienced a call, in the manner of a Protestant minister, not a conversion—Paul took it upon himself to roam Asia Minor and preach the gospel to gentiles, and he so opposed their becoming Torah Jews that he devoted most of his letters to assaulting all the other evangelists who thought they should. These, one deduces, had been following him from city to city and telling his congregants that he was wrong about Judaism, which naturally enraged him.
If all this is true, it follows that when Paul condemns Jews, he is aiming his barbs at my meddling fellow Jewish missionaries of Christ, not the Jews, a people I harshly reject. And when he speaks of Judaism having been superseded, he means Judaism as a lifestyle to be aspired to by pagans, not Judaism as practiced by Jews.
I don’t agree with everything in the piece, naturally, but this is the first time I’ve encountered a Jewish reaction to the New Perspective on Paul, which, you’ll remember, tries to place Paul back in his 1st-century Jewish context.
If you want a good idea of some “cutting edge” theology going on right now, a good thing to start reading about is the debate between N.T. Wright, the current Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, and John Piper, American preacher and Reformed theologian, over the nature of justification. Wright is part of a movement called the “New Perspective on Paul”, an attempt to understand and re-interpret Paul based on his 1st-century Jewish context over and against the Lutheran/Calvinist interpretations of the Protestant Reformation.
That’s quite the mouthful.
Anyway, Wright is one of the popularizers of this New Perspective and has published, in the last decade or so, a number of differentbooks (the man’s pen never stops moving, I think), not to mention a commentary on Romans which have sparked a pretty heated debate, especially in evangelical circles, where Wright is beginning to gain a lot of influence. One of those evangelicals is John Piper, who came out with a book two years ago called The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright. Wright responded himself with another book (a nice email couldn’t have sufficed?) called Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.
Sounds pretty intense. I can’t believe the way these theologian people just write books at each other all day. But. I’m really excited about it, and my friend Ben and I stumbled across a recent series of interviews with Piper over at his ministry’s website, desiringgod.org. The interview starts here (there’s seven short segments total), but I wanted to just pull out some key quotes on one of the central issues surrounding the debate. It all starts after the jump.
Go on. Hit this link. I dare you – - – - – -> Keep reading →
I asked the question in my previous post, and wrote this big long answer which, I decided, worked much better as a completely separate post. So here it is.
There have been a number of different guesses. The best one I’ve read thus far, concerning the evangelical movement in particular, is Michael Spencer’s article “The Coming Evangelical Collapse“, based on a series of blog posts he did, which start here. Most evangelicals these days—and this is definitely true of the conference I attended today—argue that the problem is in the medium through which we communicate isn’t good enough: that is, that the problem is style, not content. The prescription for that disease is better music, better speaking, better art, etc. Christians shouldn’t be constantly catching up with the culture, but on the cutting edge of it instead.
And I’d agree with that, at least in part. But my sense is that there is something much more fundamentally wrong here than simply the way we are presenting what we believe. My suggestion is that the content of what we believe is no longer adequate. It isn’t only how we communicate that must change, but what we are communicating: not only form, but content as well. Western Christianity, by and large, has failed to provide meaningful answers to the questions modern people are asking.
It’s not that we’re not launching an edgy-enough marketing campaign. It’s that we’re selling a product that no one wants or needs. The world wants answers to the deep questions of human life, and we offer them petty moralisms and mediocre parenting advice. The world wants hope and redemption and light in the darkness, and we offer them a bunker to hide in.
Let me put it this way: if you take a hard look at what most American Christians actually believe, that is, the convictions that order their lives, and then look at the world around, is it any wonder that no one’s really interested?
I’m sure that that could use some clarification, but I’ve been blogging for a good hour-and-a-half now (those charts took forever) and that will just have to wait.
I went to a conference today at Quest Church on Race & Faith. The keynote speaker was Soong Chan Rah (I hope I’m spelling that right), professor of evangelism and church growth at North Park Theological Seminary (hope I got that right too!).
Dr. Rah (his blog here) spoke at length on the rapidly changing ethnic makeup of Christianity. I managed to scribble down some of the statistics he provided, which I will graciously reproduce for you. This chart—and I suspect there may be better ways to organize this information, but hey, whatever—shows percent of world Christians (100% being all Christians in the world) by region in the year 1900:
(Just to clarify: the chart depicts percent of the world’s Christians by region, not percent of a region that is Christian. Thus, the red slice of the pie shows that European Christians made up 68% of all the world’s Christians, not that 68% of Europeans were Christians.)
Note the domination of the chart by Europe: they make up fully 68% of all Christians in the world 100 years ago. Combine that with North America and you have a Christendom that is, more or less, more than 80% white.
Now check out this next chart, which represents the statistics from 2005, only four years ago:
The most obvious thing to notice is the drastic reduction of the percent of the world’s Christians who reside in Europe: from 68% a century ago to merely 26% today. But the other thing to note is how much more evenly the Christian population is distributed across the world. Asian, African, and Latin American Christianity exploded in the 20th century, “the mission century”. Africa: from 2 to 19 percent. Asia: from 4 to 17 percent. Latin America: from 11 to 24 percent. (North America, by the way, is “holding strong” at 13%).
Now, here’s the shocker. The chart after the jump represents the projected figures for 2050, 41 years from now: Keep reading →
It is the time of year for which this little blog is named.
I named this blog in part because of something Kierkegaard wrote in an anthology I have, a quote which I can not longer find, but which said something about how fall is his favorite season, because in the spring he looks to the ground because of all the new growth, but in autumn, he fixes his eyes on heaven.
Fall, I feel, is the most contemplative of seasons. It is a time for coffee and black tea with milk and sugar while the rain pours down outside, turning the fallen leaves to mush. It starts when the first leaves begin to turn yellow, and ends when the cold wind scampers up the sleeves and down the collar of my jacket, making my morning walk to class just a little more hurried than usual.
In the fall, everything is dying and God’s transcendence seems perfect, the way He remains above it all in the clear blue sky, undying, unchanging. In the spring, everything is being born and God’s immanence seems obvious, the way He rains Himself down and seeps up in the green beneath the dirt, dynamic, moving, alive.
God is good in these moments: in grande mochas over gigantic essays; in thunderous rain that pummels falling leaves to earth; in brisk walks downtown hunting books by the most obscure of Athenian orators; in cracked heels, dry skin, and long walks; in 2 a.m. blog posts; in revived friendships; in thunderstorms, in sunbreaks, and in the smiles of people I will never know as well as they deserve.
Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God’s people on earth.
I asked my students to consider the following. Imagine we caught a radical evangelical preacher who was at the center of a plot to blow up a government building in protest of the Obama administration. The bomb is ticking and we have to get him to confess or the bomb will detonate and kill hundreds of people. Will we, in this case, torture an American citizen and a [Christian] to find the bomb?
And what if the bomb was not in a government building but in a mosque? Or an abortion clinic?
N.T. Wright on swimming the Tiber–that is, converting to Catholicism–and Protestant-Catholic relations in general:
[The Council of] Trent, and much subsequent RC theology, has had a habit of never spring-cleaning, so you just live in a house with more and more clutter building up, lots of right answers to wrong questions (e.g. transsubstantiation) which then get in the way when you want to get something actually done.
In particular, Trent gave the wrong answer, at a deep level, to the nature/grace question, which is what’s at the root of the Marian dogmas and devotions which, despite contrary claims, are in my view neither sacramental, transformational, communal nor eschatological. Nor biblical.
The best RCs I know (some of whom would strongly disagree with the last point, some would strongly agree) are great conversation partners mainly because they have found ways of pushing the accumulated clutter quietly to one side and creating space for real life. But it’s against the grain of the Tridentine system, in my view. They aren’t allowed to say that but clearly many of them think it. Joining in is just bringing more of your own clutter to an already confused and overcrowded room . . .
To say “Wow, I want that stuff [the sacraments, etc.], I’d better go to Rome” is like someone suddenly discovering (as I’m told Americans occasionally do — sorry, cheap shot) that there are other countries in the world and so getting the first big boat he finds in New York to take him there . . . when there were plenty of planes lined up and waiting at JFK. Rome is a big, splendid, dusty old ocean liner, with lots of grand cabins, and, at present, quite a fine captain and some excellent officers — but also quite a few rooms in need of repair. Yes, it may take you places, but it’s slow and you might get seasick from time to time. And the navigators have been told that they must never acknowledge when they’ve been going in the wrong direction . . .
This seems right to me. I don’t know much about Roman Catholicism, and although I do find its–well, there’s no other word for it–catholicity and its grandeur to be attractive, it’s just such a beast of a machine. Once it gets moving, sure, good luck stopping it. But what if it goes in the wrong direction? Big theological mistakes (say, the immaculate conception, transsubstantiation, priestly celibacy) take centuries, if not millennia, to correct.
I don’t support schism and I’m a huge critic of Luther and the Protestant Reformation in general. But it seems to me that one of the virtues of a “lower” ecclesiology is the increased flexibility and mobility that comes as a result. As long as you have a Catholicism with such a heavy bureaucratic system weighing it down, you’re going to have some problems: one of those being a low tolerance for dissent (a kind of doctrinal ossification), another of being perpetually about three hundred years behind the times. These kinds of machines—Wright’s cruiseliner analogy is brilliant—have tons of momentum and power, but as a result, have a hard time changing their course.
A lower number on the y-axis indicates less percent of the world’s Christian population (data from the pie charts in this earlier post) relative to the percent of the total world population (according to Wikipedia). Thus, although Asia will have a significant amount of the world’s Christians by 2050, its massive population keep the line pretty low.
