Douglas Murray on the Plight of Nigeria's Northern Christians

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray, writing for The Spectator (February 4,2017), asks, "Who will protect Nigeria's northern Christians?"

For the outside world, what is happening to the Christians of northern Nigeria is both beyond our imagination and beneath our interest. These tribal-led villages, each with their own 'paramount ruler', were converted by missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. But now these Christians - from the bishop down - sense that they have become unsympathetic figures, perhaps even an embarrassment, to the West. The international community pretends that this situation is a tit-for-tat problem, rather than a one-sided slaughter. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the press fails to report or actively obscures the situation. Christians in the south of the country feel little solidarity with their co-religionists suffering from this Islamic revivalism and territorial conquest in the north. And worst of all, the plight of these people is of no interest to their own government. In fact, this ethnic and religious cleansing appears to be taking place with that government's complicity or connivance.

I don't know that Murray is right in claiming that Nigeria's southern Christians "feel little solidarity" with the northern Christians, but there may be little that the southern churches can do if the government is supporting the Muslim Fulani in 'cleansing' the north of its Christians.

Some Statistics on Religious Growth and Decline

Statistics on Religion
Christianity Today

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra tells us that "Here's the Best Prediction Yet of How Christianity and Islam Will Change Worldwide by 2050" (Christianity Today, April 2, 2015):

Christianity will gain three times more converts than any other world religion in the coming decades. Yet it will also lose 11 times more members than any other. If fertility rates, the size of youth populations, and rates of religion switching remain the same, Christianity will still be the largest religion in the world in 2050, according to a detailed report released today by the Pew Research Center.

But Islam will be gaining fast, nearly neck-and-neck with Christianity "possibly for the first time in history," and potentially eclipsing Christianity after 2070. The numbers are the "first formal demographic projections using data on age, fertility, mortality, migration and religious switching for multiple religious groups around the world," said Pew.

But this isn't counting China and India:

Since there is a lack of reliable data in China and India regarding conversions, Pew doesn't include it, CSGC [Center for the Study of Global Christianity] stated. But that doesn't mean the conversions aren't happening.

"On-the-ground contacts in China and India consistently report that Christianity is growing due to conversions, and many of these Christians are organized in 'underground' or secret communities," CSGC said. That explains why CSGC's projection for the number of Christians in both China and India in 2050 is 330 million, compared to Pew’s projection of 108 million.

That makes quite a difference. Read the article.

Rodney Stark: Statistics on Persecution of Christians

Rodney Stark

Image Borrowed from Brendon Vogt

In an interview by Daniel Philpott with Baylor sociologist of religion Rodney Stark on "Why the World Is Becoming More Violent" (Christianity Today, May 12, 2014), Stark disputes some figures I've also seen bandied about:

Much of what has been written about terrorism and the Middle East simply isn't true. There was the recent, widely publicized claim of 100,000 Christians a year dying for their faith. That's pretty stunning. When I found out how that 100,000 number was calculated, I realized it was absurd. More likely, the number was less than 7,000 a year.

As noted, I'd also heard the hundred-thousand figure claimed (though I learned it as a worldwide figure, not solely for the Middle East), and I had little reason to doubt it, until Stark challenged the statistic. He doesn't explain his reasons (those are in his book, I guess), but since he's generally pro-Christian, I think we can accept his figure. However, he also adds some disturbing news:

The most stunning finding: It had been widely reported by people who were looking at survey data that majorities throughout the Middle East disapproved of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Then I discovered something. The reason that overwhelming majorities disapproved is because they think it was a frame-up done by George W. Bush. Among those who accept that it was committed by Arab terrorists, most of them approve of the 9/11 attacks. That shocked me. Overwhelmingly, people approved to the extent that they rightly understood what happened on 9/11.

Stark wants to avoid attributing the increase in religious violence to an intrinsically violent Islam:

Religious violence isn't something new in the world. Lord knows there were 90 brands of Christianity all busy hating each other not long ago. Tolerance is hard to come by. I hesitate to think there is anything peculiar to the Islamic tradition. There is a problem, to be sure, in that Muhammad butchered people for their irreligion. But the fact is, Christians have killed each other by the millions too.

Yes, there is a problem, to put the case mildly, in that the moral exemplar for Muslims is Muhammad, much as the moral exemplar for Christians is Jesus . . .

Muslims Converting to Christianity?

Image: Courtesy, WIGTake Resources

Christianity Today

In "Why Muslims Are Becoming the Best Evangelists" (Christianity Today, April 22, 2014), Timothy C. Morgan interviews career missiologist David Garrison on Muslim conversions to Christianity:

Muslim background believers are leading Muslims to Christ in staggering numbers, but not in the West. They are doing this primarily in Muslim-majority nations almost completely under the radar -- of everyone . . . . "What did God use to bring you to faith in Jesus Christ? Tell me your story." This was the core question Garrison asked . . . . In Algeria, after 100,000 died in Muslim-on-Muslim violence, 10,000 Muslims turned their backs on Islam and were baptized as followers of Christ. This movement has tripled since the late 1990s . . . . Garrison estimates that 2 to 7 million people from a Muslim background worldwide now follow Christ . . . . [According to Garrison,] "Muslim-background believers [say] that they had met Jesus[,] . . . . people whose lives had been shaken and rattled by their encounter with Christ . . . . They look into their Koran and they see references to Jesus. In the Hadith, they hear stories about Jesus . . . . Abdul-Ahad, a Sheik from Mogadishu, Somalia . . . . had been involved in drug running, prostitution, and extortion . . . . [but] the Sheik was saved . . . . [and he] said, "You know when you see people like me with the beard and with the prayers, skull cap, you stay away from us because you're afraid of us . . . . The truth is we want you to be afraid of us . . . . But when you see people like me you need to know that we're empty and we're lost" . . . . [Garrison] often see[s that fear,] anger and hatred . . . . The sad thing is this fear is grounded in reality. You've got 14 centuries in which tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of Christians have been gobbled up into the world of Islam. It makes communism look like just a cheap parlor trick. Communism came and went in a century . . . . One reason Muslims are responding today is [their new situation]. They are in independent nations. They don't have colonial powers occupying them. As a result, they're turned in on themselves. They don't get along very well with one another. Several of the big movements . . . across the Muslim world coincide with Muslim-on-Muslim violence, horrible violence like in Algeria, Bangladesh, or Indonesia . . . . [as] self-government in Muslim-majority nations has triggered violence between Muslim factions . . . . Muslims are fighting Muslims both in the name of Allah, [but a]fter a while, people say: "Can this really be Allah's will? Can this really be his ideal for mankind? If this is Islam, I don't want any part of it" . . . . [For instance, i]n Afghanistan, one man who had been an imam said, "We were killing everybody in this village because they were a different branch of Islam than us. I took this little girl, one-and-a-half years old, in my arms. We had already killed her parents. She held my finger, looked me in the eye, as I stuck a knife into her and killed her. That was the beginning of my conversion [from Islam]" . . . . [As] for Christians[, says Garrison, t]his is not a time to . . . fear Muslims. This is a time to love, win, and reach Muslims . . . . [I]n the house of Islam, . . . [there are] movements breaking out in multiple places . . . . [One hears about Muslim dreams of Jesus, and Muslims take dreams very seriously.] It's part of the reality of their world. Mohammad listened to dreams, and he gave Muslims the impression that God could speak through them. So they do listen to them, and they do talk about them . . . . [Many of the Muslims interested in Jesus] are having dreams of a living being glowing with bright light and drawing persons to him or just exuding love or offering them a book to read . . . . [One evangelist would hear Muslims speaking of such dreams, and he would hand them a Bible, point to Matthew 17:1-2, and ask them to read.] They would start reading. "After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light" . . . . Muslims [would] read that and [say,] . . . . "That's the guy. That's the guy in my dreams. Who is this? And how do I know more about him?" . . . . A Muslim's direct encounter with the Bible seems crucial . . . . [Of these Muslim-background converts, t]here is a range [of views on Islam] . . . . Some Muslims who come to Christ and seem on the surface to be the most Islamic, hate Islam. They hate Mohammad. They would . . . [say]: "We will wipe this virus out from our people. It's just destroyed our people." And yet if you were an outsider, and you met them, you'd never even know they were a Christian, because they continue to live in the culture. And some of them are even imams and Sheiks who stayed in their culture. For many Muslims, Islam is central to the way their people function. It was their mother. It was their family. It was their community. And they had no [problem] . . . with Islam [as a culture]. What they want to do is to follow Jesus and to love their parents better and to draw them into faith. I found very few people who wanted to take on Islam. They just felt like that was a secondary battle. The real battle was to follow Jesus and to spread Jesus.

This is interesting, but even if we assume the high estimate of seven million Muslims converting every year from Islam to Christianity, that's a very low percentage out of one and a half billion Muslims, so I can't quite see much general impact, hardly the "staggering numbers" promised at the outset of this article . . .

Robert D. Woodberry: "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy"

Robert D. Woodberry
Google Images

In yesterday's blog entry, I noted Robert D. Woodberry's article, "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy," American Political Science Review Vol. 106, No. 2 May 2012). He seems to have proven his thesis, that stable modern democracies are significantly dependent upon the presence of independent Protestants who missionized various places around the world. I won't deal with his statistical data since I have no competence in that area; I will instead quote extensively from his paper in passages where he offers substantive reasons for why Protestant missions led to democracy. Here's his summary of the argument, which describes the role of nonstate, conversionary Protestants (CPs):

I discuss the following arguments in more detail in the history section, but in brief, CPs such as Protestant missionaries wanted people to be able to read the Bible in their own language and wanted to facilitate lay religious involvement. Thus, as CPs tried to spread their faith, they catalyzed mass education, mass printing, and civil society -- hampering elite attempts to monopolize these resources. Protestants themselves did not always provide the most educational, printing, and civil society resources, but Protestant initiatives spurred others to invest heavily in these areas and to pressure governments to create schools that restricted Protestant content. These resource transfers to non-elites helped alter the class structure, fostered the rise of political parties and nonviolent political movements, and facilitated broader political participation.

In addition, Nonconformists (i.e., non-state-supported Protestant denominations) historically suffered from discrimination and persecution by governments and state churches. Thus they fought for religious liberty and against state interference in civil society. In addition, both Evangelicals in state churches and Nonconformists wanted a "converted clergy." Thus in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, CPs generally sided with Enlightenment elites against state churches and their conservative allies. When they lacked this religious support, Enlightenment elites had a small power base and typically set up either autocratic or unstable and illiberal democratic regimes.

Finally, nonstate missionaries moderated colonial abuses, particularly when abuses undermined conversions and in British colonies (where CPs had greater influence). To reach their religious goals, nonstate missionaries punished abusive colonial officials and counterbalanced white settlers, which fostered the rule of law, encouraged less violent repression of anticolonial political organization, and facilitated peaceful decolonization. Of course, Protestant economic and political elites were as selfish as anyone else. Protestant slaveowners fought slave literacy, and Protestant settlers exploited indigenous people; however, when missionaries were financially independent of the state, of slaveowners, and of white settlers, missionaries undermined these elite co-religionists in ways that fostered democracy. (246a)

Woodberry's thesis is not entirely straightforward. The particular circumstances, as much as religious beliefs, shaped nonstate, conversionary Protestantism's activities. But the CPs did play a significant role:

Those who doubt the religious roots of democracy typically overemphasize its Athenian, Enlightenment, and Deist roots. However, religious factors are also important. Modern democracy differs greatly from Athenian democracy, and Enlightenment theorists incorporated many legal and institutional innovations from earlier religious movements. In fact, arguments for political pluralism, electoral reform, and limitations of state power were originally framed in religious terms.

For example, Calvinists tried to reconstruct states along "godly" lines and limit sinful human institutions. Perhaps as a result, most Enlightenment democratic theorists came from Calvinist families or had a Calvinist education, even if they were either not theologically orthodox or personally religious (e.g., John Locke, Rousseau, Hugo Grotius, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton), and they secularized ideas previously articulated by Calvinist theologians and jurists. For example, Hobbes' and Locke's social contracts are secular versions of Puritan and Nonconformist covenants, and Locke's ideas about the equality of all people are explicitly religious.

Although stated in secular form, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights derive most directly from earlier colonial covenants, compacts, and bills of rights that were generally justified explicitly in biblical and theological terms; many were written before Hobbes and Locke expounded their ideas. Only 7 of the 27 rights enumerated in the U.S. Bill of Rights can be traced to major English common law documents. Even between 1760 and 1805, political writings quoted the Bible more often than either Enlightenment or classical thinkers (34% versus 22% and 9%, respectively).

Furthermore, the strength of Calvinism and Non-conformism better predicts where democracy emerged than does the strength of Greek and Enlightenment influence. (248a)

I wonder if these numbers cover the substantive story that needs to be fleshed out. Perhaps the Bible was cited more because it held more authority for most people, not because it contained democratic ideas. In other words, secular and Enlightenment views may have 'borrowed' the cloak of religious authority to make their position more persuasive. This assumes, of course, that the Bible is vague enough -- on the political system it supports -- for democratic ideas to be read into the text. Nevertheless, the impact of CPs was real:

One mechanism through which CPs dispersed power was massively expanding access to printed material and news. Scholars often claim that printing and capitalism birthed the public sphere and that the public sphere in turn enabled democracy. CPs greatly accelerated the development of mass printing, newspapers, and the public sphere for several reasons. First, CPs changed people's ideas about who books were for. According to CPs, everyone needed access to "God's word" -- not just elites. Therefore, everyone needed to read, including women and the poor. Moreover, books had to be inexpensive and in language that was accessible to ordinary people, not in foreign languages or classical versions of local languages. Second, CPs expected lay people to make their own religious choices. They believed people are saved not through sacraments or group membership but by "true faith in God"; thus, each individual had to decide which faith to follow. CPs used printed material to try to convert people, which forced other groups to use such materials to compete for ordinary people’s allegiance. This competition helped give rise to mass printing. (249a)

The principle of free individual choice clearly played a huge role, sometimes by example:

CPs advocated mass literacy so that everyone could read the Bible and interpret it competently. Their attempt to convert people through education threatened other elites and spurred these elites to also invest in mass education. (251a)

These are all plausible explanations, but Christianity in general -- if we include Catholics and Orthodox -- would not seem, in itself, to be obviously conducive to the development of stable democracies. In fact, state-supported Protestantism seems to have been as nonconducive to the development of stable democracies as were Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Two things, I think, remain to be done: 1) detailing the ideological links between stable democracies and the religious beliefs of independent Protestants to show how these religious views supported the secular ones, and 2) explaining in detail how the democratic character of these religious beliefs arose within the context of a Western Christendom that had never been especially democratic. These are important for a bigger question that interests me, namely, whether or not Christianity, in general, was in some way more conducive to the emergence of modernity.

In other words, is there something about Christianity -- in contradistinction to, say, Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism -- that makes its democratic reinterpretation more easily accomplished?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Global War on Christians?

Global Jihad?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has published an eight-page article in Newsweek, mostly photos with about two pages of text, on the worsening plight of Christians -- usually Christian minorities -- in the Muslim world. There's nothing new for those of us who've been keeping up with the news for the past decade, but the surprise is that the issue has gotten such major attention from a prominent publication: front cover image of Jesus 'wounded' by Islamist transgressions!

Even more surprising is the decision to call it "war." Again, look at the front cover, see the all-caps font: "The War on Christians." That's a rather bold move by Newsweek. I wonder if this will bring serious attention to the issue, or if it will be seen merely as a desperate attempt to bolster sales and increase subscriptions, which is also the case, of course.

Online, the article's title is "The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World," which rather clearly spells out the Newsweek view: Global Jihad. The hard copy version is more sedate: "Christophobia." That's a not-so-subtle dig at the term "Islamophobia." Ali opens her article in even more unsparing terms:

We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring's fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway -- an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

She then offers evidence of persecution from Nigeria through Sudan, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia. The list could have been far more extensive, and I would dispute some of the statistics on numbers of Christians. Ali gives 40 percent as the number for Nigeria, but I believe I've seen statistics that make Christians equal to Muslims, perhaps even greater in numbers. She gives 7 percent in Indonesia, but few who know of Christianity's growth there would consider that figure accurate. But I don't wish to nitpick. I do think Ali is correct on the 'organization' of this war against Christians:

It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem. No, the violence isn't centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. In that sense the global war on Christians isn't a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.

If Ali is right that this isn't centrally planned, what accounts for the 'jihad'? She cites an expert:

As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have "lost the protection of their societies." This is especially so in countries with growing radical Islamist (Salafist) movements. In those nations, vigilantes often feel they can act with impunity -- and government inaction often proves them right. The old idea of the Ottoman Turks -- that non-Muslims in Muslim societies deserve protection (albeit as second-class citizens) -- has all but vanished from wide swaths of the Islamic world, and increasingly the result is bloodshed and oppression.

What can be done? Ali offers suggestions:

As for what the West can do to help religious minorities in Muslim-majority societies, my answer is that it needs to begin using the billions of dollars in aid it gives to the offending countries as leverage. Then there is trade and investment. Besides diplomatic pressure, these aid and trade relationships can and should be made conditional on the protection of the freedom of conscience and worship for all citizens.

The expression "all citizens" is key, given what we learned from Egyptian Protestant and head of Egypt's Bible Society, Ramez Atallah. Ali nevertheless closes on a rather more defiant, even Christocentric note:

Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let's take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world. Tolerance is for everyone -- except the intolerant.

The persecution directed against Christianity is the article's focus, so the conclusion fits the piece, but I've noticed Ali explicitly saying positive things about Christianity over the past couple of years. I don't think that she has converted -- so far as I know, she's officially atheist -- but she did marry Niall Ferguson in a church. He's no believer either -- merely agnostic, I think he's acknowledged -- but he has argued that Christian belief, especially Protestantism, is correlated with economic success, a variant of the old Weber thesis.

There are ironies in all of this, though these don't override the truth of Ali's remarks . . .

Kuwaiti Prince Abdullah al-Sabah Converts to Christianity?

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File this one under the "Interesting If True" heading. In a recent issue of the Vatican Insider (January 16, 2012), Marco Tosatti reports on "Kuwait: The prince's mysterious conversion," informing us that "a Kuwaiti royal prince has become a follower of Jesus Christ" and has posted the affirmation in an audio file using his full name, Abdullah al-Sabah, on the Arabic Christian satellite TV channel al-Haqiqa, which transmits Christian religious programing:

In his audio file, Abdullah declared: "First of all, I fully agree with the distribution of this audio file and I now declare that if they kill me because of it, then I will appear before Jesus Christ and be with him for all eternity." In this statement, the prince demonstrates his awareness of the fate in store for a martyr of the faith, according to Christian doctrine. The television channel stated that Abdullah is a member of the royal family, and that he recently renounced his faith in Islam and became a Christian, without specifying which particular branch of Christianity he had chosen. After stating his full name, the prince declared: "I will accept whatever they do to me, because the truth in the Bible has guided me towards the right path."

This sounds like evangelical Christianity to me . . . except that it sounds more like a hoax, particularly since a Kuwaiti prince by the name of Azbi al-Sabah insists: "There's no one by that name in the Kuwaiti royal family." He could be lying about that, of course, but getting caught in a lie so easily checked leads me to think he's telling the truth. This doesn't rule out the possibility that Abdullah al-Sabah is a pseudonym taken on by a real convert to hide his true identity, though such would seem to contradict the reported audio. Anyway, if the reported conversion is genuine, we may be hearing more about this in the near future.

To this Kuwaiti report, Tosatti adds a bonus point about neighboring Iran and the growth of Christianity there, a worrisome issue for Iran's theocratic Shi'ite state, leading the Iranian authorities to utter typically paranoid statements:

After Heidar Moslehi, the Iranian intelligence minister, asked Muslim seminaries to become proactive in stopping the spread of Christianity, a high-ranking cleric declared that Evangelical Christianity is the most horrifying intelligence and security organisation in the world. This statement seems to have appeared on press agencies close to the Revolutionary Guard.

In a conference on "New Age cults" held in Varamin, a district south of Teheran, Akhond Mohsen Alizadeh declared: "We should not allow these cults to question Islamic jurisprudence under the cover of mysticism." He went on to add: "They tell the youth that God is wrathful and horrible in Islam but is love in Christianity. Also, Christian preachers answer the questions and doubts of youth in their own interest and try to attract them." Nevertheless a whole series of signs seem to indicate that non-traditional Christianity -- there are Catholics and Orthodox Christians in Iran as well as a large Armenian community -- is spreading. The regime's press recently spoke of them with concern and the number of cases of repression and condemnation following conversions is growing.

By "non-traditional Christianity," Tosatti means evangelicalism, which includes pentacostalism, a variant on evangelical Christianity that seems to appeal to a lot of individuals outside of the West. If these folks make up "the most horrifying intelligence and security organisation in the world," then I can only conclude that the Holy Ghost must be involved in espionage, which rather fits the insider lingo that refers to spies as "spooks"!

Spooky indeed, but with God of their side, meaning that on the side of the Iranian theocratic state is . . .

Heather Mercer on Personalizing Relations with Muslims

Heather Mercer with Kurdish Woman

(Image from Christianity Today)

Ten years ago, Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were Christian social workers assisting Afghans through Shelter Now, a housing outreach organization, and had been arrested by the Taliban, ostensibly for proselytizing among Muslims. The charges were probably accurate, in a general sense -- though the two did not explicitly attempt to convert Muslims -- for they believed that living for Christ would draw Muslims to Jesus. Both Heather and Dayna were threatened with capital punishment, but I had the impression from the news reports that the Taliban weren't sure what to do with them. Eventually, they were rescued by anti-Taliban forces as Nato's intervention overthrew the Islamist government in the aftermath to 9/11.

According to Timothy C. Morgan, "How Heather Mercer's Hostage Stint Turned into Global Hope," Christianity Today (September 12, 2011), Heather relocated to Iraqi Kurdistan in 2003 and has continued relief work among Muslims. Her experiences seem to indicate that despite the clash of civilizations, cordial relations can be forged across cultural fault lines. Individual Muslims seem to respond well to personalized religious overtures, as we see from the following interview conducted by Morgan:

What can American Christians do to better understand Muslims?

Muslims are people just like us. They have the same desires, the same ambitions. They want to raise their family to be healthy, happy, and whole. The first point is bringing a human face to Muslims. Many Muslims are god-fearing people. They believe in a monotheistic God. They want to experience the promise of eternal life. But they have been handed a religious system and tradition that does not allow them to know the God we know.

Muslims come to know Christ through an authentic relationship with a follower of Jesus, through reading the Scripture in their language, and through having a personal encounter with Christ -- through a dream, or a vision, or through supernatural healing.

Evangelicals in this country can take their experience with Christ and share that with their Muslim neighbors. For the most part, Muslims are very open to that. They love relationship; everything rides on the spirit of hospitality. They love prayer. Engage them on those levels.

Do you believe that relations between Christians and Muslims are improving?

I don't think we're as far as we need to be. There are 1 billion Muslims around the world and 88 percent of them have never met a follower of Jesus. The church needs to rise up with love and humility, and have a willingness to lay its life down for the Muslim world.

Where should a Christian leader start?

It can feel very intimidating. Start a conversation with a Muslim. Find out what they believe. Talk to them. Understand their life. Ask questions. Try to understand their worldview. Get training. In this country, helping to train the American church to reach Muslim neighbors is an organization called Crescent Project.

Another step is pray like crazy. Start a prayer ministry at the church praying for the Islamic world. Visit the local imam and ask him for dialogue. I've never once had a Muslim deny prayer in the name of Jesus. I always ask them, "May I pray for you in Jesus' name?" I want them to know who it is I worship. It's not an easy assignment. But it's a worthy one. If God can use a 20-year-old, blonde, blue eyed, single American girl then he can use anybody.

Heather is no longer just 20, of course. A decade has passed, and she has undoubtedly learned a great deal since 2001. What I find interesting about her remarks is the statement that Muslims "love relationship; everything rides on the spirit of hospitality." That suggests to me that everything is personalized for Muslims. They take nearly everything personally, which might also explain their tendency to easily take offense at perceived slights. Or at real insults.

This tendency toward offense, the personalized coin's other side, doesn't work well in the West, where many Muslims are migrating these days -- that old clash of civilizations again -- for the West is largely based not on personal relations but on rational-legal ones. Evangelicals, however, offer friendship and helpful assistance based on relationships patterned after the personal relationship that they believe themselves to have with Jesus, and they offer Muslims the possibility of enjoying this same divine relationship. Muslims often find that combination irresistable.

I, too, have found Muslims to be very friendly on a personal level, though I've also learned that I have to be careful in what I say, for their honor compels them to an affronted defense of Islam, especially among Arab Muslims.

Heather's emphasis upon friendship with Muslims is a significant insight, but the West expects more of individuals than personalized relations, and a rational-legal system can't work without ignoring personal connections, so the larger problem remains.

Heather and Dayna, by the way, are Baylor alumni, which partly explains my interest in their story.

Disenchantment with Islam under Islamists?

Muslim Missions

(Image from Christianity Today)

Christianity Today has an interesting article by J. Dudley Woodberry, dean emeritus and senior professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. Titled "Muslim Missions: Then and Now" (September 8, 2011), it compares Christian missionary work among Muslims before and after 9/11, but also draws some general inferences about the consequences of Islamism for Christianity -- and allows, I suggest, for even more general inferences of a secular bent, as we shall see:

[M]ore rigid or militant forms of Islam often increase receptivity to the gospel. This happened during the Khomeini Shiite revolution in Iran in 1979 (22 years before 9/11) and the Sunni Taliban takeover in Afghanistan that facilitated 9/11. In fact, Iran and Afghanistan reveal a broader pattern: Whenever Muslim governments have adopted a militant type of Islam or have tried to impose a form of Shari'ah law -- and where there has been a local example of an alternate, friendly Christian presence -- Muslims are attracted to the gospel. But persecution [by Islamists] often follows.

The receptivity has also been particularly noticeable when Muslim factions are at odds [and fighting each other] -- such as the Mujahideen militias after they had driven the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989, the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, and the herdsmen and villagers in Darfur [in Sudan]. Such hostilities and their resultant migrations, natural disasters in Bangladesh and Aceh [where Christians provided more aid than Muslims did], and ethnic resurgence among the Kabyle Berbers [in reaction to Arabizing Islamists] in North Africa have all led to an increased receptivity to the gospel.

I think that we could draw an even more general inference. Wherever Islamist governments are set up, those Muslims who have to live under the repressive shariah that regulates every detail of life become disenchanted with Islam and more open to democracy and human rights. An Iranian student of mine confirmed this about Iran under the mullahs and their rigid Shi'ite Islamism. Millions of nominal Muslims in Iran have no interest in Islam and would reject it instantly if given a choice. Attendance at mosque is very low, despite governmental pressure upon the population to conform to Islamic values. The government is widely seen as corrupt, and rightly so, for it is corrupt.

In the long run, Islamists will prove the demise of Islam itself . . .

Baylor University wants my opinion . . .

Summer 2011

Volume 9, Issue 4

(Image from Baylor Magazine)

. . . and the opinions of thousands of others.

In a brief article on page three of the hard copy, Baylor Magazine asks "Why does the world need Baylor?":

More specifically, what makes Baylor University distinct? What would be missed most if Baylor suddenly ceased to exist? We want to hear from you.

I have a few thoughts, but let's first read the fine print:

As part of the university-wide strategic planning process now underway, Community Input Sessions all across the country posed similar questions, and many of those answers will help direct Baylor's course over the next decade or more.

Now, we at Baylor Magazine want to hear from you. Why does the world need Baylor? Why is it important for Baylor to be a part of the academic landscape in the world today? Why is it worth your support? We'll share responses in the next issue.

The basic question asks why the world needs Baylor. That's an unexpected way of putting a question about the significance of Baylor University. Why 'unexpected'? It suggests that Baylor is attempting to formulate a global vision of its purpose. This an extension of its earlier vision, which can be seen through its motto in the above image: Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana. For Church, For Texas.

There was an earlier extension, probably less clearly articulated, by which Baylor's vision extended beyond Texas to the American nation as a whole. I'm just guessing here, but I imagine that my decision to attend Baylor was a result of that national vision, for I'm not from Texas.

The extension of Baylor's vision probably stems from the "Pro Ecclesia" half of the motto. Originally, that may have been understood as referring to the Southern Baptist Church of Texas, though I don't know how old this motto is, but Baptists have always insisted that the Church is an invisible institution known fully only by God and therefore not subsumed under any particular denomination. The Church extends throughout the world, so Baylor's vision was always, in principle, global.

The risk for Baylor in asking this question -- "Why does the world need Baylor?" -- is that the focus might become 'worldly' rather than global.

If I were to post a response, I'd probably say something like this:

Baylor University can be significant for the world if it successfully accomplishes three things that it's been attempting ever since I studied there in the latter 1970s. It must continue its commitment to the goal of being a great teaching institution. It must strengthen its commitment to the goal of being a great research institution. It must maintain its commitment to the goal of being a great Christian institution. Holding to these three will not be easy, for the tendency of other Protestant Christian universities, as they have developed into significant, respected centers of education, has been to lose their focus as Christian institutions, eventually secularizing themselves. Some might say that the attempt to reach the highest intellectual levels while remaining Christian is like trying to square the circle, for intellectual inquiry is an open-ended search for truth, whereas Christian doctrine is grounded in an unchanging revelation of truth. If Baylor can manage to do this, and also continue as a great center of teaching, then it has something significant to offer the world.

Yeah, I'd probably say something like that. If anyone else has things to say on this issue, Baylor is eager to hear from you:

Please submit your answers HERE.

See, I told you . . .

"Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry" Revisited

Mountain of Fire

(Image from Wikipedia)

A little over one year ago, I posted a light, ironic entry on the "Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry" because it seemed to be preaching the so-called "Gospel of Wealth," an impression made upon me by an invitational flyer -- handed to me on the streets of Seoul -- that told the story of how the faithful 'Brother Enoch' had been showered with material blessings from God:

As a factory employee in S/Korea then, God has elevated him from the dept of the valley to the mountain top, from ordinary to extra ordinary person now. Someone who was regarded a a write off in the family is now an immense source of blessing. As a humble servant of God, he took a giant step and an astronomical rise to stardom. He is now an investor and the C.E.O of a famous company in S/Korea.

Although I myself could really have benefited from some of those material blessings, my response was skeptical:

Enoch's story sounds utterly implausible to me. Foreigners don't easily rise to positions of power here in South Korea, not even Westerners.

If 'Enoch' really were "the C.E.O of a famous company in S/Korea," then the flyer would have identified him and the company more explicitly so that the story would have more impact. I Googled this 'denomination' at the time of my posting and found a noisy website:

MFM Ministries, Lagos, Nigeria

The music was so loud that I didn't stay long enough to investigate further, so I don't know specifically what is being taught. The flyer was therefore my primary source of information . . . until members of that church noticed my post and left comments. Most of these were testimonials -- and friendly enough, I might add. At least until the most recent comment, posted a day or two ago by a certain Dorin:

I happened on this site, not really glad I did, but I have to say something before I go. There seems to be a glaring truth that absolutely NO ONE can dispute and yet, has not been addressed . . . Where there are speakers, THERE IS VOLUME CONTROL, and mute! Good Lord in heaven . . . How many times can you give the excuse of volume for not looking further into a ministry you continue to banter back and forth about?

If you are so concerned about Seoul's soul, then tell somebody who has the authority to do something about it, at least.

As a side note . . . That's why this country is in such trial, because people voice their complaints to a bunch of nobodys instead of speaking up in a meaningful way to the "powers that be" and choose to be a caytalyst for true and lasting change.

The Israelites murmmered and complained amongst each other and where did that get them in the end??

So what if two accented men came up to you with a flyer?? Did they flash you a membership card? Do you know for an absolute that these men were given authority to represent the church?

Go to Vegas, there are 20 guys to every street corner giving out flyer after flyer about this dancer and that strip club. I guarantee that the girls in the ad ARE MODELS! You are not going to see them at the club. Do you believe everything you read? For those idiots who look at the flyer and then go there thinking they are going to see her, you are an idiot! But, I'll tell you what.. at least they go to see for themselves and can walk out of there with the truth . . . YOU can not say as much. Who is the true idiot??

Don't believe everything you read and check the facts. "The idiot's guide to truth 101"

Well, I reckon I've been told off and thus ought to slink away with my tail between my legs, but I instead got up on those hind legs again and posted a response:

Dorin, volume control and mute are not always easy to find, and I don't like having to look for them while being subjected to blaring music.

As for bantering back and forth, I don't see much of that (if any) in my comments. I do try to respond to every commenter's post, and I attempt to do so respectfully, which is not always easy, especially when I receive hostile words, as sometimes happens.

I won't respond in detail to each of your points because most of them seem to have little to do with me particularly, nor do you seem to be defending the "Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry" specifically.

But I do wonder at the analogy that you've made between the church in question and a Las Vegas strip joint and your implicit advice that I check out both. You seem to imply that the flyer given out by the church and one given out by a strip joint are both equally dishonest. Perhaps so, but I don't have to enter a strip joint to know that I shouldn't enter a strip joint, so what conclusion do you expect me to draw from your comparison with this church?

But since you consider me an "idiot," then perhaps you expect me to draw the wrong conclusion.

I've not yet heard back from Dorin, but since he happened onto my site and wasn't really glad that he had, maybe he won't return. I have to admit -- upon further reflection -- that the man does have a point. One ought to investigate carefully before drawing firm conclusions. Perhaps I've been too hasty in drawing an inference about the "Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry" . . . though I thought that I expressed myself tentatively enough.

But to judge more accurately, I would like to hear from that successful CEO, 'Brother Enoch' and find out how miraculously the "Mountain of Fire" has sheltered him in its ministry during the past year's storm of financial trials and tribulations.

Interreligious Understanding?

R. Nkwonta, A Hypocrite

What we got here is an interreligious understanding.

(Cropped Image from Christianity Today)

Christianity Today presents an unusual case of 'interreligious understanding' in a recent article by Laurie Fortunak, "Dual Allegiance: Pastor jailed for using human head in occult ceremony" (August 2008):

Nigerian pastor Benjamin Ojobu and his wife, Patience, were arrested in May for allegedly using a human head in rituals for church members.

Apparently, this isn't so unusual as I first imagined:

The practice of using severed body parts to ensure prosperity -- whether material, emotional, or spiritual -- is not uncommon in West Africa. In a region where voodoo is culturally acceptable, nearly all Christians engage in some form of occult practice, according to some experts.

Benjamin-Lee Hegeman, who previously worked as a missionary in West Africa but now teaches in the Intercultural Studies Department of Houghton College, explains:

"One out of 10 self-named Christians in this region practices only Christianity . . . . [The other 9 self-named Christians also practice traditional religion.] Some people call it syncretism, but it may be more like dual religious allegiance, where Christianity is practiced in the daytime and occult [practice] is done at night. Many of the pastors will preach from the pulpit that this type of thing is wrong, but secretly take part in it at night. There is the mentality, especially in African Initiated Churches, where the prosperity gospel is preached, that you do what you've got to do to get ahead. You rely on the powers available to you. You are hopeful that Christ will help, but when he can't come through on Sunday, you may take out a different insurance policy at night."

That's an interesting distinction between syncretism and dual allegiance. I wonder if dual allegiance is the first stage as a religion becomes embedded in a culture. I would not be surprised to find that early Christianity, in its spread through the Roman Empire, 'converted' a lot of pagans who practiced some form of dual allegiance that over the generations grew into a syncretistic faith. I've often noted syncretism in Medieval Christianity. Even a 'late' work such as the strongly pious story Sir Gawain and the Green Knight mixes Christian beliefs with Celtic paganism and has a Green Knight -- who is, arguably, an elf-man -- standing in god-like judgement over the stumbling Christian Gawain.

I suspect that the developmental process, taking centuries, runs something like this: dual allegiance --> syncretistic religion --> purifying reform. That third stage, by the way, isn't necessarily a positive thing, for it can be horrifyingly violent . . . as was the case in the Protestant Reformation.

But neither is dual allegiance intrinsically positive -- as that severed "human head [used] in rituals for church members" reminds us. Particularly surprising for me was the pastor's nonchalant explanation:

"Yes, I am a man of God. But I do this outside church hours," Ojobu told the paper. "I am both a native doctor and a man of God. This is my personal practice; I do it to complement my church job, and I have been assisting a lot of people with it."

Okay, Pastor Ojobu, you're kind of like a 'medical' missionary . . . but a human head? At least the head was obtained "from a man working at a local cemetery," or so Ojobu claims.

Some African Christians, however, would disagree with the good pastor's nonchalance. The artist Nkwonta, who painted the image above, has titled it A Hypocrite. The uncropped image can be found at the blog site Koranteng's Toli (also at Flickr), maintained by Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah, a West African from Ghana, who notes:

No words are minced in the case of a hypocrite. The overt purpose of this exhortation is the shaming of hypocrites: those who, on the one hand, take up the the cross and bible and, the next day, turn to 'darker' matters shall we say.

Ofosu-Amaah presents other, even more fascinating works of art by Nkwonta, whose paintings include comic-strip-style panels showing Jesus as a championship wrestler and as a soccer star -- two different stories -- defeating the forces of evil.

Now, that's syncretism! . . . of Christianity and the religion of sport. Not quite the sort that I was describing above, but syncretism nonetheless, and more uplifting than severed human heads.

The Mission Field...

Iranian Christians

An Official Church

(Photo by Mehdi Ghasemi, ISNA)

Sunday morning has come, so what better time than now to look briefly at some intriguing but also imprecise reports on the 'growth' of Christianity in Iran (and elsewhere) -- since I happened just this morning to come across an article that got me to searching for more:

Farsi-language Christian broadcasts and websites are blanketing Iran with the gospel message 24/7 . . . . This kind of hearts-and-minds campaign is having significant results, notably among Iran's huge population of young adults unhappy with the current regime. According to Compass Direct News, house churches are growing rapidly. (Editorial, "Talk to Iran," Christianity Today, July 2008)

The expression "house churches," as you probably know, refers to the homes where Christians hold worship services in countries where religion, or often specifically Christianity, is suppressed. The spread of such churches in China is well known and accounts for the wildly differing 'statistics' on the number of Chinese Christians -- ranging from 30 million to 130 million, if I recall -- for nobody is keeping precise records. The lack of accurate official records in China had its obvious reasons in the past, but China is becoming more tolerant toward religious beliefs, so we might be seeing more accurate numbers there in the near future.

Iran, however, as with the Muslim world more generally, is a different story. One continues to hear of the 'growth' of house churches in Muslim countries, e.g., among the Berber people in Algeria's Kabylie region, who have reacted against the extreme Islamists and their jihadist violence, which has convinced them that "Christianity is life, Islam is death." But this Berber report dates from about 2000, and I've heard little since then other than imprecise reports about continued 'growth' and more recent reports in mainstream media about former Muslims being arrested for having converted to Christianity.

Something is going on in these areas, but I have no idea how to evaluate the reports. Muslim governments have an interest in suppressing not only house churches but also any reports of significant growth, and local Christians have an interest in keeping a low profile, so one might expect the true rates of growth to be higher than reported . . . except that mission reports back in the 'Christian' lands have an interest in citing higher rates to justify continued support for missions.

In one of my classes recently, I had an Iranian student. This person was a secular Muslim, so I asked about Iranian Muslims converting to Christianity. The student knew about this but like me also had no idea of the numbers.

I did find this article by Golnaz Esfandiari, "A Look At Iran's Christian Minority" (Payvand's Iran News . . .), dating from late 2004, and Esfandiari quotes an Iranian Protestant, Issa Dibaj on the number of Muslims in Iran who have become Christians:

Issa Dibaj is the son of reverend Hassan Dibaj, a Christian convert who was jailed and later found murdered in 1994. Issa Dibaj left Iran five years ago and now lives in the U.K.

"There is another Christian minority that people know little about, these are Iranians who are born as Muslims and then later become Christians," Dibaj said. "Their number is growing day by day. [There] may be around 100,000 [of them], but no one really knows the exact number."

The number 100,000 sounds impressive and would signify rather impressive growth . . . until one recalls that Iran has a population of about 70 million. But that was in 2004. What about today? Serendipitously, I found an article in Friday's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle on the topic of secret Iranian Christians:

Although there are no statistics on how many Iranians have converted to Christianity in recent years, officials at such Christian television stations as SAT-7-PARS say that in the past two years they have received a flood of e-mails and thousands of telephone calls from Iranians. With the advent of satellite television, they say, Christianity is on the rise, with some Iranians even undergoing clandestine conversions at Assyrian churches, said David Harder, communications manager at SAT-7-PARS' Cyprus headquarters. (Anuj Chopra, "Iranian Christians forced to worship in secret," San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 2008)

Intriguing details, but "no statistics" . . . so where does one find dependable numbers on such things?

Anybody know?

Religion: Church in China

Lord's Prayer in Classical Chinese

(Image from Wikipedia)

For those interested in this sort of thing, an interesting article by Rob Moll, "Great Leap Forward," appears in the past week's online Christianity Today about the present status of Christianity in China.

The most surprising thing is the estimated number of Christians, even in estimates cited by government officials:

The dazzling growth of Christianity inside China began in the late 1970s at the end of the Cultural Revolution. During that period, up to 7 million people died from widespread violence and famine.

At that time, there were an estimated 3 million Catholics and Protestants in China. Three decades later, estimates of the number of Christians vary widely, anywhere from 54 million to 130 million, the higher number representing a 43-fold increase, which would be one of the largest growth spurts in the history of Christianity.

Scholars have debated for decades about the number of Christians in China. But the new estimates both come from government sources. The higher number of 130 million reportedly comes from Ye Xiaowen, the head of China's State Administration of Religious Affairs. According to reliable reports, he used the 130 million head count at two government briefings in 2006. Bob Fu of China Aid Association has cited 130 million as a credible estimate. Other experts believe any statistic reporting over 100 million Christians is not credible.

That Ye Xiaowen, head of China's State Administration of Religious Affairs, would cite 130 million Christians renders the number credible, albeit with a couple of caveats, namely: (1) how would he know, and (2) are the reports really reliable?

I recall looking into this issue of Christian growth in China back around 2003, when the higher estimate of the number of Christians was between 80 and 100 million. Most of the reasoning behind those estimates looked like guesswork to me. The number of Christians, even if 'merely' 54 million, still looks fairly impressive, given the base of 3 million in the late 1970s, for the increase would amount to about 50 million in around 30 years.

Also interesting is the Chinese perspective on Christianity's role in the West. As does the Muslim world, Chinese tend to see the West as 'Christian'. The fact that much of the West is strongly secular does not seem to strike them as significant, so they interpret the West's characteristics and actions as 'Christian'. The difference lies in the differing reactions of Chinese and Muslims, respectively.

Chinese look to Western power and ask, how can we attain that? They infer that it springs from a spiritual source and turn their attention to Christianity. Many, apparently, convert -- though whether from secular or spiritual motives, I won't speculate.

The Muslim world looks to Western power and asks, how can we defeat that? They also infer that it springs from a spiritual source and likewise turn their attention to Christianity. However, not many convert, for they have a long-standing conflict with 'Christendom' and a cultural hermeneutic of suspicion derived from their belief that Christians have corrupted the original, Islamic revelation brought by Jesus.

The Christianity Today article, by the way, doesn't speculate about Muslims and their resistance to Christian conversion. These musings are my own, based on my scattered readings over the years about Islam and Muslims.

Concerning the Chinese Christians, however, we have their own words from this article:

Hsu, a former television journalist for the state-sponsored CCTV, is a telling example of how a member of China's educated elite moves to Christianity.

Hsu told his story to CT over a meal at a crowded Beijing KFC. It began with his search for freedom -- politically and personally. The search led him to European history. "Westerners are not more interested in freedom than anyone else," he says. (page 3)

Yet the West has achieved and sustained a greater degree of liberty than any other culture. Hsu wondered what the West had that China didn't. "Before freedom comes, you have to have a foundation. In the West that foundation is Christianity."

Hsu's vision for a new China parallels his readings on the march of freedom in the West. From the 10th to 12th centuries, Hsu reasons, Europe developed legal studies, hospitals, and universities, all of which grew out of the church. These developments resulted in breakthroughs in human liberty, as seen in the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Today, Hsu says, the church is an incubator for similar developments in China. (page 4)

Interestingly, these are the very issues about which we historians of the West debate . . . endlessly. Basically, the debate centers on a central, two-fold question: was modernity a furtherance of Medieval Christianity by other means, or was modernity a rejection of Medieval Christianity?

My own answer would be to emphasize the complexity of Modernity's relation to the Middle Ages, but for the Chinese, it seems, the overwhelming factor behind Western Modernity is Christianity. I suppose that this is partly a matter of looking in from outside.

Anyway, if this sort of thing interests you, take a look at the seven-page article -- which, of course, is journalistic, not scholarly.

Islam and Christianity: Religious War Coming?

Sébastien Mamerot, Siege of Antioch

Medieval Miniature Painting, 1490

(Image from Wikipedia)

Religion and politics are difficult to disentangle, whether among Christians (who make a crucial distinction) or among Muslims (who make no significant distinction), a point that I'm reflecting on these days due to a couple of my courses (on British and American culture at Kyung Hee University and on Islamism at Yonsei University).

Hence my dark thoughts for today.

In an interview by Mark Galli for Christianity Today, "Our Geopolitical Moment" (March 2008, Vol. 52, No. 3), the political scientist Walter Russell Mead -- who is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy on the Council on Foreign Relations and currently a visiting professor of political studies at Bard College -- argues that evangelicals play a crucial role in American foreign affairs.

Mead observes that our current "global system of politics, power, investment and trade, and culture and ideology . . . was first dimly sketched out by the Dutch, taken over by the English and then by the Americans." American evangelicals have come to prominence in a world where America largely holds sway, which tends to make Americans happy but which greatly dismays a force formerly powerful in the world. Mead characterizes two visions of the past 300 years of world history:

We Americans look at the last 300 years of history, and we basically see a world that's getting better and better. The rule of freedom expands. The economy develops. We have risen to become the world's greatest power. The American people are extraordinarily comfortable, affluent, and secure. It's easy for us to make the argument that God's purpose is being fulfilled through history and through the rise of American power. And to some degree, it probably is.

But suppose you are a sincere and pious Muslim. What you see in 1700 marks the beginning of the rise of England and America, the beginning of the great decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Ultimately it will be divided into little pieces. The English are beginning to challenge the great Islamic empire of India. The Persians are beginning to lose their greatness. Over the next 300 years, it just gets uglier and uglier. The Muslims are driven out of Europe and in many cases, ethnically cleansed or persecuted. The English stopped the expansion of Islam in Nigeria. The Spanish colonials stopped the expansion of Islam into the Philippines. What you see is a history that's gone wrong, a very different attitude about the modern era and the values that have shaped it.

This is a point similar to one that Bernard Lewis made in his Atlantic Monthly article, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (September 1990) in his book What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Harper 2003), and I'm assuming that Mead has learned from Lewis on this point.

Mead goes beyond Lewis, however, in drawing upon Harvard professor Joseph Nye's arguments about "soft power," and he notes that the worldwide spread of evangelical Christianity, particularly of the Pentecostalist variety, tends to enhance America's image among those who convert:

In terms of creating American soft power, this is extraordinary. If you travel around a lot of the developing world, what you see is the extraordinary progress of Christian missions and evangelization. Christianity in general leads people in many cases to have very positive feelings about the United States and American foreign policy. Polls taken, say, among Pentecostals in Nigeria, showed great support for America's war on terror at a time when, in a lot of the world, that policy was profoundly unpopular. Polling evidence shows that in places like Kenya, Nigeria, and other African countries where Christianity has become a very vibrant presence, people are optimistic about their future; they actually are glad to see American values playing a larger role in their countries.

In The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins -- the Distinguished Professor of History and Religious studies at Pennsylvania State University -- has noted that the enormous growth of Christianity throughout Asia and Africa through conversion and population increase is outpacing even the growth of Islam, often in the same areas.

Given Samuel Huntington's arguments in his clash of civilizations theory -- see his article "The Clash of Civilizations?" (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993) and his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster 1996) -- namely, that the fault lines between civilizations are, fundamentally, the lines of conflict between great religions, then I ask the question posed in the heading to this blog entry.

Is a war of religion coming?

Since I'm on a Christianity Today kick...

World Distribution of Religions?

(Image from Wikipedia)

...I'll blog briefly about a recent issue's book note, partly because it touches on the ideas of Samuel P. Huntington and on one of the themes in the conference on Asia that I'll be participating in tomorrow.

The book note -- Christianity Today calls it a "Bookmark" -- concerns Globalizing Theology: Belief and Practice in an Era of World Christianity, edited by Craig Ott and Harold A. Netland, editors.

Dave Broucek begins his very brief review, "Declaration of Interdependence," with an unsourced quote attributed to Philip Jenkins (perhaps from the book under review?):

"In our lifetimes, the centuries-long North Atlantic captivity of the church is drawing to an end."

Jenkins is making an oblique allusion to the "Babylonian Captivity" of the Papacy, 1309-1377, also known as the Avignon Papacy, a time in which the French kings controlled the Catholic Church and used it for their own political purposes. (Behind this allusion lies the further allusion to the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, approximately 597-537 BCE.)

Broucek remarks that "Christianity has become polycentric," although one of the volume's contributors, Tite Tiénou, puts things somewhat differently in his article, "Christian Theology in an Era of World Christianity":

[T]he center of gravity of world Christianity has shifted to the South. (40)

And he gives some figures to back this up by citing Andrew Walls, figures that clarify that a center of gravity is consistent with a polycentric Christianity:

In 1900, 83% of the world's Christians lived in North America and Europe. Today [in 1989], something approaching 60% live in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific. (40)

That was nearly 20 years ago, and the percentage outside of Europe and North America has since grown even more.

Tiénou echoes Jenkins on the end of the "Babylonian Captivity" in stating that:

The shift of Christianity's center of gravity is good news because it means that, as a global reality, the Christian faith is increasingly at home in many cultures and will not be imprisoned by any single culture. (41)

That decentralization might raise problems of its own -- think of Islam's chaotic lack of a center -- but it also raises some questions that I'd like to pose to Samuel P. Huntington, and I'm not the only one:

[O]ne would not know that Christianity is increasingly non-Western if one reads publications such as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (1996).

It is remarkable that in this book, published in 1996, Huntington states, "The West is now universally used to refer to what used to be called Western Christendom" (1996, 46). This statement seems to accredit the idea that Christianity is Western, especially if one accepts, as Huntington apparently does, the proposition that "religion is a central defining characteristic of civilization" (1996, 47). Western civilization, then, continues to be defined by the Christian religion. (42)

Tiénou needs to read Huntington a bit more carefully. Huntington does not mean that "Christianity is Western," for he distinguishes between Western civilization and Orthodox civilization, which is also Christian. However, I take Tiénou's point, namely, that Huntington fails to recognize the global nature of Christianity, and that poses problems for his classification of civilizations.

Huntington sees no problem in classifying all of Islam as a single civilization, regardless of where it has spread in the world. Hence, the Muslims of the southern Philippines are part of Islamic civilization and define one length of Islam's "bloody borders" -- to borrow Huntington's memorable expression.

But what about the Catholic Filipinos who confront those same Muslims of Mindanao? Are they part of Western civilization? And what of the sub-Saharan Africans, the vast majority of whom are Christian? Are they part of Western civilization? Huntington doesn't specifically include Catholic Filipinos in the West, and he specifically excludes Africans by classifying them as part of African civilization (despite Tiénou's remark, page 42-43, that Huntington does not recognize an African civilization).

Yesterday, I posed a related question to the Korean students in my course on Contemporary Issues in English. I noted the spread of Christianity in South Korea -- along with the fact of democracy and capitalism here -- and asked my students, "To what civilization does South Korea belong?"

Generally, they agreed that Korea is in a transition toward Western civilization. They acknowledged that it had long been part of Confucian civilization but that Confucianism was weakening steadily. They noted that Korea is still more collectivist and less individualistic than the West, but they expected this to change.

I then suggested to them that we think of the transition as one toward a global civilization rather than one toward Western civilization, my implicit point being that the West itself is altering under the pressure of globalization -- though global culture is being most powerfully influenced by Western ideas.

Well, I could go on and on, but I did say that I'd blog briefly, so I'll leave my thoughts at that.