The Pilgrimage of World Christianity

on December 17, 2012

Researchers and scholars filed into the Library of Congress on December 13 to hear former Reformed Church in America general secretary Wesley Granberg-Michaelson discuss global Christianity. Much of his audience seemed disturbed by the international ascendancy of orthodox Christian faith.

A visiting scholar at the LOC’s Kluge Center, Granberg-Michaelson already boasts quite the resume: an aide to the late liberal Republican Senator Mark Hatfield, a former board member of  the National Council of Churches, and a six-year stint as director of church and society for the World Council of Churches. Besides the usual DC patrons-of-the-arts and taciturn library researchers, Sojourners chief Jim Wallis attended the event with his wife, Joy.

Granberg-Michaelson opened by remarking on the titanic cultural shifts brought on by the 15th century’s movable-type printing press. “Christianity is in the midst of another pilgrimage,” he asserted. The Church is undergoing “the most dramatic geographical shift of this sort in all 2,000 years of its history.” He showed the statistical center of Christianity over the centuries. The demographic center of the Church began in the Middle East, moving somewhat west over the centuries. The center shot up northwest circa 600-700 (Granberg-Michaelson failed to note that this corresponded to Islam’s conquests of North Africa and the Middle East); the point shifted out into the Atlantic Ocean after the 1500s (with the discovery of the Americas). However, at the rise of the modern missionary movement in the 1800s up to today, the center boomeranged around to the southeast. 

“For the first time in 1,000 years, Christianity turned south,” Granberg-Michaelson noted. In the year 2000, the center of the Church’s populace was located near Timbuktu, Mali. The explosion of Christianity in Africa has been crucial in this development. The visiting scholar informed the audience that Christianity’s center first started moving rapidly east around the 1970s, when China began to experience revival. He remarked that more Christians may be meeting on Sundays in China than in the U.S. There are an estimated 350 million Asian Christians with 460 million projected for 2025. Latin America has also witnessed rapid expansion of vibrant faith, with an estimated 640 million Christians. 

The lecturer showed that around 60% of all immigrants coming to the United States are Christian. Quoting a Candler School of Theology researcher, he contended, “Every Christian migrant is a potential missionary.” Granberg-Michaelson predicted, “As the West becomes post-Christian, non-Western Christianity will come to the West.” Several of the listeners shifted uncomfortably in their seats and exhibited other signs of fearful astonishment. No doubt their secularist sensibilities felt threatened by a tremendous worldwide revival, with immigrants sharing a religious outlook more akin to that of the benighted Bible Belt rather than the sophisticated DC elite. 

The RCA veteran described the nature of this globalized faith as “evolving from established norms and orthodoxies to fresh spiritual awakenings…[Global Christians] have freed themselves from the colonialism of the West…and have gone beyond the framework of the modern Enlightenment.” Pentecostalism and the broader charismatic movement play a prominent role in international theology. One out of every four Christians in the world is Pentecostal or charismatic. “Liberation theology is about the poor. Pentecostalism is the church of the poor,” he observed, “It comes without the weight of white colonialist power…and favors immediate spiritual experience.” 

The expanded Church faces several difficulties in the coming years. Granberg-Michaelson worried about the balance of power in various ecclesiastical bodies: while the Global South has the majority of population, the Global North still owns the majority of intellectual and financial resources. In addition, post-Reformation denominationalism was exported in the modern missionary movement; there are currently 43,800 Christian denominations worldwide. “Continuous and endless fracturing has spread across the earth,” Granberg-Michaelson mourned. Finally, he concluded, “The gulf between the two worlds [of the Global North and the Global South] now constitutes the most pressing challenge to the unity of the Church…We are without doubt at one of those pivotal moments in Christian history.”

The Q&A session was revelatory. One supercilious participant asked if the conversions to Christianity in the Third World were “aspirational” (he did not clarify if this meant Prosperity Gospel or pseudo-conversions to Christianity to access Global North resources and acceptability). Granberg-Michaelson pointed out that the conversions are generally quite sincere—many of these new Christians are in societies in which the Church suffers persecution. The same skeptical interlocutor wondered if there was a connection between Pentecostalism’s popularity and primitive animism. The researcher stoutly disabused him of this notion: “I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think instead that our Enlightenment sensibilities are confronted by a faith that is not secular.” Another audience member questioned Granberg-Michaelson’s characterization of Global South Christians as liberated from “Western” orthodoxy; she noted that in the Anglican Communion, African leaders are the voice for orthodoxy, especially on the prickly realm of homosexuality and marriage. At this point, the rather detached academic tone of the RCA leader evaporated. “The issue of same-sex relationships is not an issue of the Global South…It’s an issue of the Global North.” Most foreign and traditional Western Christians would say this is to the shame of the North. Not Granberg-Michaelson: “What’s happening in Uganda is a direct result of Global North evangelicals pushing their agenda and trying to use southern influence.” He was citing long-time, stalled legislation in Uganda’s parliament aimed at homosexuality

One always wonders how aging liberal oldline bureaucrats analyze the rise of orthodox Christianity internationally. They can find insight in Granberg-Michaelson’s hope of disestablished orthodoxy, Marxist power-struggles based on zero-sum resources, and yet optimistic analysis of a global faith confronting a “post-Christian” West.

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