It was a strange headline that appeared two years ago in The London Times: "Christianity Almost Beaten in Britain, says Cardinal."
The stunning statement was made by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, when he addressed a gathering of Roman Catholic clergy in England in 2001.
And who could blame him for his pessimism? Christianity in the West appears to be in the process of retreating everywhere under the advancing assault of secularism and New Age spirituality.
What should encourage believers everywhere, however, is a phenomenon that is developing, for the most part, outside the notice of much of the Western press. In what is called the "Global South" -- Africa, Latin America and Asia -- Christianity is growing in staggering fashion, promising in the next 50 years or so to eclipse the West as the spiritual home of the faith.
Relocation and Rebirth
This is not what Western elites in the media or on college and university campuses thought was happening. "For over a century, the coming decline or disappearance of religion has been a commonplace assumption of Western thought, and church leaders have sometimes shared this pessimistic view," says Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, in his book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.
That secularists expected the demise of Christianity is not hard to understand. After all, they viewed that faith as a Western religion, and Jenkins admits that "[u]ntil recently, the overwhelming majority of Christians have lived in White nations ...."
If Christianity were mainly a religion of the peoples of Europe and North America, as secularists have always thought, then Jenkins says it made sense that "the growing secularization of the West [could] only mean that Christianity is in its dying days."
However, a strange thing has been happening: rather than dying, Christianity has spread in unexpected ways. Mark Hutchinson, chairman of the church history department at Southern Cross College in Australia, says that "what many pundits thought was the death of the church in the 1960s through secularization was really its relocation and rebirth into the rest of the world."
Jenkins says, "We are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide .... The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning."
The numbers boggle the mind. In Africa in the year 1900, for example, there were approximately 10 million Christians on the continent. By 2000, the number had grown to 360 million.
The Anglican Communion is a perfect example of this worldwide trend. Whereas in its U.S. branch -- the Episcopal Church -- membership has declined over the last 40 years to 2.3 million, in Uganda alone there are more than 8 million Anglicans.
Worldwide, evangelical Christians are a thriving part of the Christian community. Yet, 70% of evangelicals live outside the West.
'God Goes Where He's Wanted'
What has been driving this trend? "As I travel," says author and journalist Philip Yancey, "I have observed a pattern, a strange historical phenomenon of God 'moving' geographically from the Middle East, to Europe to North America to the developing world. My theory is this: God goes where He's wanted."
If Yancey's supposition is correct, it would explain a lot, because Christianity does seem to be waning in the West -- especially in Europe. In an article for The New York Times, writer Frank Bruni says that "Europe already seems more and more like a series of tourist-trod monuments to Christianity's past. Hardly a month goes by when [Pope John Paul II] does not publicly bemoan that fact, beseeching Europeans to rediscover their faith."
Rev. David Cornick, the general secretary of the United Reformed Church in Britain, says, "In Western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails. The fact is that Europe is no longer Christian."
Secularism deserves much of the blame, say some Christian leaders, including the pope, who has complained that the proposed constitution for the European Union completely omits any reference to God or the continent's Christian past.
One sign of the weakness of Christianity in Europe is church attendance. According to a major survey in the 1990s, the percentage of people attending church on an average Sunday in some European countries is a mere fraction of the total population: England (27%), West Germany (14%), Denmark (5%), Norway (5%), Sweden, (4%) and Finland (4%).
More than even secularism, however, Gene Edward Veith, culture critic for World magazine, says the problem is found in many of the churches themselves: "This decline is directly attributable to the theological liberalism of the once-powerful state churches."
Veith says that, where the more conservative Catholic Church holds sway, church attendance is far higher: Ireland (84%), Poland (55%), Portugal (47%), and Italy (45%).
"These are Catholic countries where the church has remained conservative," Veith says. "Catholic churches that have gone liberal -- in the United States, France, the Netherlands -- have the same low attendance rates as liberal Protestants."
In the Global South, however, Christianity is finding converts by the millions. According to researcher David Barrett, author of the well-respected World Christian Encyclopedia, Africa is gaining 8.4 million new Christians a year, and that number is a net total -- that is, new converts minus those who leave the faith.
South Korea is another example of a nation in which the growth of Christianity has been stunning. In 1920, Jenkins says, there were only about 300,000 believers in all of Korea. But today, in South Korea alone, there are 10 to 12 million Christians -- about 25% of the population.
"And it is not modernist, liberal Christianity that is sweeping through the Southern Hemisphere," says Veith, "but a Christianity in which the gospel is proclaimed, that believes God's Word, that refuses to conform to the world."
Christianity and Islam
