the future of christianity

In the past couple years, I've read six or seven books on "the future of Christianity" or very recent trends in Christianity. That's on top of the ... probably about twenty, I guess, similar books that I've read since my education in religious studies began at the turn of the century. (It's interesting the differences in trends and emphases since then.) Where these books have commented on the future of conservative Christianity or specifically conservative Protestantism, which most have done, they have all been clear in their predictions that its days of dominance are numbered: there are signs of rebirth in liberal Christianity, as well as promising new movements in progressive Christianity, even among the evangelicals.

I'm reading a book on global Christianity right now, intended for theology students, and I think these books have it badly wrong.

In my lifetime and the decades immediately preceding it, these trends have held true in the United States:

1: Conservative evangelical Protestantism, including but not limited to fundamentalist sects, has gradually overtaken mainline Protestantism.

2: Church attendance and religious engagement have declined overall, but especially among liberals. Though this is not the only factor causing Protestantism to become more conservative, one of the effects has certainly been that the "everyman" Christian American has become more and more conservative with each decade.

3: Catholicism has remained largely liberal while taking heat for its conservative positions on abortion, birth control, divorce, and sexual ethics.

4: The number of people identifying as "spiritual but not religious" has grown significantly.

5: Religious literacy has declined significantly. The fact that I can not only have a conversation with a well-educated friend who knows zip about religion and who finds it reasonable and unremarkable that he knows zip about religion, but that he also finds it reasonable that he argue about religion anyway, tells you a lot.

6: For the most part -- waxing and waning more than these other points, and varying more according to specific religious group and political issue -- conservative Christians have become more politically engaged and more willing to bring their religious beliefs into the political arena, while liberal Christians have become less willing to affiliate their political engagement with their religious affiliation. That is, liberal Catholics are as likely as ever to fight poverty and human rights abuses, but are less likely to identify themselves as doing so because it is the Christian thing to do. Conservative Catholics are not similarly reluctant to talk about their pro-life views.

Some of those trends have recently shown signs of change. For instance, although evangelical Christianity has become virtually synonymous with fundamentalism and is grouped in with the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, it predates all three of these movements. Though moderate and liberal evangelicals never entirely disappeared, especially in historically black churches, American evangelicals have largely been dominated in recent decades by politically engaged, politically conservative factions descended from segregationist groups, who sought a political alliance with Catholics and so adopted an anti-abortion stance. For the last fifty years, they have been America's Grumpy Racist Grandpa, complaining that every social change is the end of the world and that all our ills would be repaired if the womenfolk would just listen to their husbands and if kids listened to their parents and parents listened to the Good Book. Only a bit less harmless than that.

Fundamentalists have always defined themselves in opposition to other Christian groups. They are, as I keep pointing out because it's important, a relatively new movement, dating to the late 19th/early 20th century -- making them, for instance, about as old as canned pineapple. They are the self-appointed conscience of Christianity, deriving their identity from being purer and more Christian than the Christians around them, by adopting an artificially strict interpretation of the Bible. They don't really want everyone else to adopt their form of Christianity. They want for there to be a larger group compared to which they can be the VIP room.

It sort of makes sense that as fundamentalism and evangelism cross-pollinate as much as they've done over the last century, this definition-by-opposition idea would permeate even the non-fundamentalist evangelical groups. And of course, the best way for an evangelical group to stand out is to reject conservative Christianity.

That's not necessarily the mechanism or the only factor by which liberal and progressive evangelical Christianity is growing, but it is growing, and not because of millennials. Everyone likes to use Jay Bakker -- son of Jim and Tammy Faye -- as an example, but there are other routes to take than being the son of scandalous televangelists.

That trend is one reason these books keep predicting an end to the dominance of conservative Christianity. People like me -- which you could read either as "liberal Protestants tired of the conservatives being the only voices people hear" or as "churchless Christians" -- are another reason.

But of course, this whole conversation is only talking about the United States (and to some extent the West as a whole). And in the next few centuries, the United States is really only a footnote in Christianity's story.

That's what this book drove home for me. It's something I sort of knew without thinking about the implications of it. The majority of Christians today don't live in the West. Christianity is going through the most dramatic expansion in its history, and it's happening in Asia, the Middle East and India, and especially Africa. We sort of already know this when we stop to think about it, because it's in the news in the form of the trouble Anglicanism is going through, with its split between mild-mannered liberal English Anglicanism and ultraconservative homophobic African Anglicanism.

Christianity in what most people still call the Third World and this book calls the Majority World (following the convention adopted at a theology conference) is unabashedly conservative in matters of social and sexual ethics. On the other hand, it's also a Christianity introduced in and growing in a religiously pluralistic society -- a Christianity made up of members who are thoroughly versed in at least one other religion and often several other religions, whether traditional African religion, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or something else. Just as the Christianity we know was dramatically shaped by the Greco-Roman thought familiar to (/ useful to / important in) first in the antiquity of Paul and Augustine, later in the Europe of Aquinas and the Renaissance, so too will these Christianities -- these majority Christianities -- be shaped by the parlance of their converts.

This post might be a little Inside Baseball; most of my readers are Americans, I imagine, and the fact that Christianity outside the West is going through very different changes might seem to have little impact on you. We'll see.