It’s hard to believe that it has been two decades since historian Philip Jenkins published his groundbreaking essay “The Next Christianity” in The Atlantic Monthly.
It contained key material from the first of three books that Jenkins published on the future of world Christianity and, thus, of the changing face of world religion — period. The first book was entitled: “The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.”
This piece of the Atlantic subtitle is crucial: “We stand at a historical turning point, the author argues — one that is as epochal for the Christian world as the original Reformation. Around the globe Christianity is growing and mutating in ways that observers in the West tend not to see.”
Sure enough, many reporters didn’t see what Jenkins was describing, even though clashes between the chilly, declining Christian West and the blooming Christian South and East are easy to see looming in the background of many major stories. As the Anglicans and United Methodists about that.
Understanding Jenkins’ work is a crucial first step to understanding the importance of a new Crux think piece by the omnipresent John L. Allen, Jr. The headline: “In new Catholic numbers, an ‘imponderable’ movement shaping history.”
First, consider this from Jenkins:
If we look beyond the liberal West, we see that another Christian revolution, quite different from the one being called for in affluent American suburbs and upscale urban parishes, is already in progress. Worldwide, Christianity is actually moving toward supernaturalism and neo-orthodoxy, and in many ways toward the ancient worldview expressed in the New Testament: a vision of Jesus as the embodiment of divine power, who overcomes the evil forces that inflict calamity and sickness upon the human race. In the global South (the areas that we often think of primarily as the Third World) huge and growing Christian populations — currently 480 million in Latin America, 360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia, compared with 260 million in North America — now make up what the Catholic scholar Walbert Buhlmann has called the Third Church, a form of Christianity as distinct as Protestantism or Orthodoxy, and one that is likely to become dominant in the faith. The revolution taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is far more sweeping in its implications than any current shifts in North American religion, whether Catholic or Protestant. There is increasing tension between what one might call a liberal Northern Reformation and the surging Southern religious revolution, which one might equate with the Counter-Reformation, the internal Catholic reforms that took place at the same time as the Reformation — although in references to the past and the present the term "Counter-Reformation" misleadingly implies a simple reaction instead of a social and spiritual explosion. No matter what the terminology, however, an enormous rift seems inevitable.
With that in mind, let’s move on to Allen and some sweeping, but often overlooked, trends in modern-day Roman Catholicism.
Allen starts with a quote from historian Arnold J. Toynbee:
“The things that make good headlines are on the surface of the stream of life, and they distract us from the slower, impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the surface and penetrate to the depths. But it is really these deeper, slower movements that make history, and it is they that stand out huge in retrospect, when the sensational passing events have dwindled, in perspective, to their true proportions.”
Allen then turns to the pages of the Vatican’s “Annuario Pontificio” and the “Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae.”
What is going on?
… The Annuario notes that Catholicism added 16 million new members in 2020, the latest year for which statistics are available. Granted, that meant the church did no more than keep pace with overall global population growth, but it’s still significant at a time when most western perceptions are that the church is shrinking due to the fallout from the sexual abuse crisis, various scandals at senior levels, bitter political infighting, increasing irrelevance to younger generations, and any number of other alleged failures.
For sure, if you live in western Europe or in some parts of the United States, where parishes are closing or consolidating and Mass attendance seems in free fall, those perceptions are understandable. Yet the reality is that on a global level, Catholicism enjoyed the greatest expansion in its history over the past century, more than tripling from 267 million in 1900 to 1.045 billion in 2000 and 1.36 billion today.
Consider that 16 million is more than the entire Catholic population of Canada, and the church added that number of new followers in one year alone, Today, Catholics represent a robust 17.7 percent of everyone on earth.
In other words, the dominant Catholic story today is not decline, it’s breakneck growth.
But, as Jenkins noted, there are tensions between the growth in the Global South and the declining churches of Europe and parts of North America. This can be seen in issues of worship, doctrine and church governance.
Can you say Synod on Synodality?
Can journalists in high places see the bigger picture? Here is Allen, again:
Catholicism, in other words, is already a non-western religion, at least at the grassroots, and it will be increasingly more so as time wears on. By the middle of this century, three-quarters of every Catholic man, woman and child will live outside the west. Trying to understand the church exclusively through the prism of western preoccupations and priorities, therefore, is a fool’s errand, yet it continues to be how most of us in the press cover the church. …
Consider that North America has almost the same number of priests as all of Africa, despite the fact that there are 84 million Catholics in the US and Canada and more than three times that number in Africa, at 236 million.
It doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to figure out something’s wrong with this picture.
Read it all. I would also challenge journalists and news consumers to consider writing a list of major stories that are shaped by these demographic realities, whether assignment editors get it or not.