Is Christianity Going South?

I have recently begun a lecture tour that will last until mid-August, taking me around the world. In this column, during the next few months, I will attempt to describe the state of Christianity in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. I introduce this series with an analysis of what has become a popular theme in conservative religious journalism: namely, the presumed shift of the center of world Christianity from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere.

The word "shift" in this analysis may well not be the best choice, but that is the one normally employed. Christianity in Europe and in nations of European descent has fallen on difficult days statistically, while major growth is occurring in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and most spectacularly in Africa. It is not the accuracy of this data that concerns me; it is, rather, the way conservative voices, normally from the First World, interpret this data. They are the ones who have chosen the word "shift" as a part of their analysis.

I saw this interpretation first employed in the reports from conservative Western journalists covering the Lambeth Conference in the United Kingdom in 1998, a once-a-decade meeting of the world's Anglican bishops. At this conference, for the first time in Anglican history, bishops of color outnumbered bishops of English or Anglo-Saxon origins. The daughter churches of the Third World had reached a new level of strength.

These bishops of color, however, overwhelmingly reflected the evangelical background and style of the English, American, and Canadian missionaries who brought Christianity to the Third World during the past two centuries. The great majority of the African bishops, for example, appeared unaware of the past 200 years of critical biblical scholarship. They had also either not yet engaged or were resistant to new learning that had countered the old traditions on such great social issues as race and ethnicity, the emancipation of women, and the new understanding of homosexuality.

Indeed, when those issues were raised at the Lambeth Conference, the majority of the Third World bishops responded with biblical quotations designed to prohibit any further debate, just as their evangelical mentors had done generations earlier in the West. It was like listening to people caught in a time warp. They seemed not to realize that this same strategy had been used in the West to undergird slavery, segregation, and apartheid, to say nothing of protecting the divine right of kings, and asserting the flatness and centrality of the earth inside a three-tiered universe.

While I am not impressed with this response in the 21st century, I have no trouble understanding why the Third World bishops were led to adopt it. The Third World has for centuries endured colonial domination, which was used to keep the people of those nations in servile backwardness.

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