South Korea

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Trends that influence news: Where in the world is Christianity still growing?

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Trends that influence news: Where in the world is Christianity still growing?

THE QUESTION:

Where in the world is Christianity still growing, and why?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

This page often addresses topics that have been in the air for months, even years. But this one is raised by a brand-new article this week at Christianity Today and a more academic version posted by the journal Sociology of Religion. There's further timeliness in the Gallup Poll's March bombshell that less than half of Americans now claim religious affiliations, the lowest mark since it began asking about this 84 years ago.

The CT article, headlined "Proof That Political Privilege Is Harmful for Christianity," is found here. The academic article is headlined "Paradoxes of Pluralism, Privilege and Persecution: Explaining Christian Growth and Decline Worldwide," and available for purchase.

So: Bad times for Christians are good times for Christianity?

That contention is a modern update on Tertullian's 2nd Century maxim during an era of outright persecution, "semen est sanguis Christianorum" — "blood is the seed of Christians." If you persecute us, we grow even more. And so it was.

The scholars proposing a 21st Century version of this are Nilay Saiya (writing solo in C.T.) and study partner Stuti Manchanda, both at the public policy department of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This team analyzed data on churches' rise and decline in 166 countries from 2010 to 2020, found impressive expansion, and examined causal factors.

Looking back, Asia began the last century with only one Christianized nation, the Philippines, but more recently the faith "has grown at twice the rate of the population." Africa in 1900 had only pockets of Christians, mostly in coastal locations but today is "the world's most Christian continent in terms of population."

Now, all of that is familiar to missionary strategists and historians of the modern church. What's new here is the team's fresh look at explanations. They conclude "the most important determinant of Christian vitality is the extent to which governments give official support to Christianity." It's often said that the American founders' pioneering separation of church and state energized Christianity across two centuries.


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Global COVID-19 parables: What responsibility do faith groups have to the larger society?

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I’m a great fan of a magical sense of awe, that heightened state of awareness during which the transcendent feels most palpable. However, I am decidedly not a fan of magical thinking that denies the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic.

I consider the latter delusional at best. The pandemic will not end because some — particularly those in positions of authority — wish it away. It can only be tamed, I believe, by limiting its spread until medical researchers develop a dependable vaccine or cure.

Until then, our responsibility as members of a highly interdependent society is to protect ourselves and each other via responsible social distancing and by always wearing a mask when adequate distancing is impossible. Anything less, in my book — speaking as someone who due to age and preexisting medical conditions is at great risk — is selfish and irresponsible.

Nor do I care whether the deniers are bikers in South Dakota, frat boys on any number of university campuses who can’t resist a keg or political libertarians who insist that their individual choices are at least as, if not more, important than the communal good in a national health emergency.

Ditto for the most sincerely devout of fatalistic religious believers who think their faith will protect them and their co-religionists. Or who insist that government — any secular government — lacks the authority to limit their religious expression in any way.

My news feeds have been replete with such examples. Here are three that have particularly aroused my pique. I consider each a clear example of self-aggrandizing, potentially deadly religious entitlement.

One story is from Israel and concerns a group of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews who have insisted on making their annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to a Ukrainian city where their deceased spiritual leader is buried. This, despite the probability that they’re likely to bring the pandemic with them.

A second from, South Korea, tells the tale of a megachurch that found itself at the center of a coronavirus cluster, which it blames on misleading figures released by government opponents.

The third involves the Rev. John MacArthur of Los Angeles’ Grace Community Church, who recently claimed that the number of American COVID-19 deaths is way below the generally accepted figures reported by mainstream news outlets. MacArthur claimed that there is no pandemic.


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During times of panic and plague, priests take risks to do the work they are called to do

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During times of panic and plague, priests take risks to do the work they are called to do

The second wave of influenza in the fall of 1918 was the worst yet and, by the time Father Nicola Yanney reached Wichita, Kansas, a citywide quarantine was in effect.

A 16-year-old girl had already died, creating a sense of panic. The missionary priest -- his territory reached from Missouri to Colorado and from Oklahoma to North Dakota -- couldn't even hold her funeral in the city's new Orthodox sanctuary. As he traveled back to his home church in Kearney, Neb., he kept anointing the sick, hearing confessions and taking Holy Communion to those stricken by the infamous "Spanish flu."

After days of door-to-door ministry in the snow, Yanney collapsed and called his sons to his bedside. Struggling to breathe, he whispered: "Keep your hands and your heart clean." He was one of an estimated 50 million victims worldwide.

A century later, many Orthodox Christians in America -- especially those of Syrian and Lebanese descent -- believe Yanney should be recognized as a saint. And now, as churches face fears unleashed by the coronavirus, many details of his final days of his ministry are highly symbolic.

"Father Nicola got the flu because he insisted on ministering to people who had the flu," said Father Andrew Stephen Damick, creator of "The Equal of Martyrdom," an audio documentary about the man known as "The Apostle to the Plains."

"For priests, there are risks. But you cannot turn away when people are suffering and they need the sacraments of the church. You go to your people and minister to them. This is what priests do."

Few acts in ministry are as intimate as a priest huddled with a seriously ill believer, hearing what could be his or her final confession of sins.


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God credited with shrinking figure skater's brain tumor, but otherwise terrific story haunted by ghost

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"Scott Hamilton Was Demoted as an Olympic Broadcaster. Don’t Feel Sorry for Him."

That's the headline on a fascinating New York Times sports column on the famous U.S. figure skater and broadcaster.

Why shouldn't we feel sorry for him?

If you really want to know, I'd urge you to click the link and read the full column. 

But basically, the idea is that Hamilton has suffered through a series of cancer battles and has his priorities in the right place. That means, as the Times explains, that the loss of his Olympic broadcasting gig hasn't hit him as hard as it might have otherwise.

The Times even hints that a higher power might be involved:

Hamilton said he had prayed about 12 times a day for it to go away. Doctors treated him with radiation, and the tumor did go away.

And later, there's this mention:

The tumor had shrunk, by about half. Hamilton choked up when describing what happened next.
“Have you ever had one shrink without treatment before?” he said he asked the doctor. “And the doctor said, ‘Nope, never.’”
Hamilton asked, “So how can you explain this?”
The doctor said, “God.”
It floored him. He was in the process of losing three friends to colon cancer, yet he, somehow, someway, was given this miracle? At his latest doctor’s visit, in December, the tumor was even smaller.


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Are reporters missing a surprising religion ghost when covering news about North Korea?

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Are reporters missing a surprising religion ghost when covering news about North Korea?

Media mention of religion in North Korea generally involves the arrest of some unfortunate foreign Christian who thought they could sneak a Bible or other evangelism materials into what is arguably the world's most repressive state -- which is saying something, given the number of horrific governments out there.

By way of example, click here. Or click here, and then read what GetReligion editor Terry Mattingly said over the weekend about a CNN take on a major North Korea story.

As for the existence of religion in North Korea itself, the default position for most journalists, including those on the religion beat, is that the nation formally (and oxymoronically) known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is officially atheist. On occasion, a more knowledgeable reporter may note that its official philosophy is known in Korean as Juche.

This recent New York Times piece does just that. Here's the pertinent sentence: "Juche, or self-reliance, is the North’s governing ideology."

Well, yes. But there's so much more that can be said. Including that some who study the sociology of religion consider Juche -- as politicized and seemingly secular as it is -- a "religious" ideology. Which means there's a "religion ghost," or unrecognized religion angle, hidden in some stories about how the North's oppressed population endures.


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Beleagured Jehovah's Witnesses in South Korea get sympathetic treatment in New York Times

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Jehovah’s Witnesses are notoriously tough to interview.

They didn’t used to be. Back in the late 1980s while I was on the religion beat at the Houston Chronicle, I arranged for myself and a photographer to follow a team work its way, door by door, through a certain posh neighborhood. Other than the fact they tried to convert me and we got into an argument as to whether Easter should be a Christian festival, it was an enlightening time. I was amazed at how rude people were to these visitors and how many doors were literally slammed in their faces.

But in 2012, when I assigned students in my religion journalism class at the University of Maryland to find a JW team to follow around, I learned that no Witnesses could talk with us now unless their New York headquarters allowed them to. And I could never get anyone from New York to answer my calls.

Which is why this New York Times story of the horrors that Witnesses face when refusing military service in South Korea was a real coup.

No doubt the Witnesses over there talked because they wanted to get word out about how bad things truly are in the Land of the Morning Calm. When reading this story, just take into account that it's unusual to get Witnesses to cooperate much with the media. The article starts out with:

SEOUL, South Korea -- Since he was a teenager, Kim Min-hwan knew he would have to make a choice: abandon his religious convictions or go to prison.


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