The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Future of Christianity Trilogy) [Paperback]

Philip Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0199767467 | ISBN-13: 978-0199767465 | Edition: 3

In this new and substantially expanded Third Edition, Philip Jenkins continues to illuminate the remarkable expansion of Christianity in the global South--in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Drawing upon the extensive new scholarship that has appeared on this topic in recent years, he asks how the new Christianity is likely to affect the poor, among whom it finds its most devoted adherents. How should we interpret the enormous success of prosperity churches across the Global South? Politically, what will be the impact of new Christian movements? Will Christianity contribute to liberating the poor, to give voices to the previously silent, or does it threaten only to bring new kinds of division and conflict? Does Christianity liberate women, or introduce new scriptural bases for subjection?

Acclaim for previous editions of The Next Christendom:

Named one of the Top Religion Books of 2002 by USA Today

Named One of the Top Ten Religion Books of the Year by Booklist (2002)

Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award in the category of "Christianity and Culture" (2002)

"Jenkins is to be commended for reminding us, throughout the often gripping pages of this lively work...that the history of Christianity is the history of innovative--and unpredictable--adaptations."
--The New York Times Book Review

"This is a landmark book. Jenkin's thesis is comprehensively researched; his analysis is full of insight; and his projection of the future may indeed prove to be prophetic."
--Baptist Times

"A valuable and provocative look at the phenomenon widely ignored in the affluent North but likely to be of enormous importance in the century ahead.... The Next Christendom is chillingly realistic about the relationship between Christianity and Islam."
--Russell Shaw, Crisis

"If the times demand nothing less than a major rethinking of contemporary global history from a Christian perspective, The Next Christendom will be one of the significant landmarks pointing the way."
--Mark Noll, Books & Culture

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Jenkins (history and religious studies, Pennsylvania State Univ.) believes that we are on the verge of a transformational religious shift. As he explains it, Christianity, the religion of the West, is rapidly expanding south into Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and he predicts that by the year 2050, only about one-fifth of the world's three billion Christians will be non-Hispanic Caucasian. By numbers alone, they will be able to overwhelm the present political secular nation- and city-states and replace them with theocracies, similar to the Islamic Arab nations. He ends with a warning: with the rise of Islam and Christianity in the heavily populated areas of the Southern Hemisphere, we could see a wave of religious struggles, a new age of Christian crusades and Muslim jihads. These dire prognostications could be seen as just another rant from a xenophobic pseudo-prophet; however, the author is a noted historian, and his statements are well formed, well supported by empirical evidence, and compellingly argued. The only criticism is the brevity of the book. One hopes that The Next Christendom is only an introduction to a deeper analysis of a fascinating topic. Recommended for all libraries. Glenn Masuchika, Rockwell Collins Information Ctr., Cedar Rapids, IA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Fear of Islam is peaking, fueled by reports that the religion is burgeoning in numbers as well as militancy. Jenkins grants that Islam is indeed booming but marshals the evidence that today's largest religion, Christianity, will grow exponentially, too, and will remain the faith of the largest proportion of humanity. But the Christianity of 2050 will be very different from that molded by the 1,300 years during which Christianity was the faith of a rapidly developing Europe. The new Christianity will be liturgically anarchistic compared with the staid services of white, upper-middle-class people today. It will be overwhelmingly the faith of poor nonwhites living south of Europe, the U.S., and present-day Russia, and it won't reflect the values of the wealthy global north. It will revive Christianity's root emphases on healing and prophecy because its adherents will resemble the poor and oppressed who first embraced the redemption, the healing, and the blessing that Jesus promised. As he makes his case, Jenkins dispels some fashionable myths about historic Christianity; about historic Christian-Islamic relations; and about the nature of presumably pacific Hinduism when it is politicized. He also speculates trenchantly on how the problems of the Islamic and Christian global south will affect the global north, requiring genuine charity of the rich and genuine discernment of their leaders. A book everyone concerned about humanity's immediate future ought to read. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 3 edition (September 13, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199767467
• ISBN-13: 978-0199767465
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,763 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Jenkins is the author of The Lost History of Christianity and has a joint appointment as the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities in history and religious studies at Penn State University and as Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He has published articles and op-ed pieces in The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe and has been a guest on top national radio shows across the country.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

114 of 118 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a world far different from the one we thought we knew September 15, 2005

By David A. Baer VINE™ VOICE

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In a memorable passage from the movie APOLLO THIRTEEN, a military man in the tense Houston control room shares with a political figure his premonition that the tragedy unfolding before them will be *the* catastrophic moment for the space program. Mission control flight chief Gene Kranz overhears their conversation and addresses it: 'With all due respect, gentleman, I believe this will be our finest hour.' The scene could stand in for the hand-wringing that often accompanies the apparent demise of the Western church when it comes to prognosticating on its fate over against the perceived adversaries of secularism and post-modernism. Philip Jenkins reminds us that, when viewed through a wide-screen lens, the immediacy of threat often yields to a broad panorama of opportunity.

Over against the fear of resurgent religion that shows its face among our cultural elites, Philip Jenkins sketches the rise of 'global Christianity' in predominantly positive terms. The Penn State University scholar of religion has noticed long before most of us that the face of Christendom is already brown, southern, and confident. He helps us to work through the implications of this even as he persuades us that the hegemony of Euro-American Christianity is a thing of the past and that-unless we pay attention-we who are part of it are likely to be, as the old song says, the last to know.

In the first of ten compact chapters ('The Christian Revolution', pp. 1-14), Jenkins starts out with a bang. Professional analysts of global trends have missed out on perhaps the biggest one, a fact that the title of Jenkins' opening chapter provocatively suggests. Religious revolutions are not, as Western intellectuals too often suppose, mere matters of the heart.... They bring with them profoundly this-worldly repercussions like crusades, wars, and what Samuel Huntington has famously termed 'the clash of civilizations'. They can also renew societies. Jenkins informs us that a 'Christian revolution' is already underway in the developing world, one that our political leaders ignore to the peril of all of us.

The historian who can write well-researched prose for a popular readership and manage to turn large assumptions on their head is a valuable person indeed. Jenkins accomplishes just this in his second chapter ('Disciples of All Nations' pp. 15-38). He helps us to see that Christianity is not best understood as a western religion. Its African, Middle Eastern, and Asian successes were large and entrenched centuries before it came to be perceived by some as the faith of white men. Even popular myth of Christian crusades dispossessing Muslims of their ancestral turf is misleading in the extreme when viewed against the historical facts of Islamic expansionism and enduring Christian communities among those peoples whom we today identify reflexively as Muslim. Europe entered late into this story. Jenkins wonders, with one of his sources, whether the universal Christianity he describes is not best seen as the 'renewal of a non-western religion', a suggestion that gains credence when one ponders how alien Western skepticism immediately appears when placed beside the biblical documents, on the one hand, and ancient or emerging Christian movements from Africa or Asia, on the other.

If Western mythology about the missionary enterprise(s) is to be believed, it is the power of kings, companies, and missionaries that enforced a European Christian faith upon the reluctant peoples of the Two-Thirds World. Jenkins does not believe it, however, arguing that even when these institutions are given their due, Christianity has become an indigenous brushfire in many of the regions under review ('Missionaries and Prophets', pp. 39-53). Indeed, Christian faith of one variety or another-and sometimes several at once-appears to have thrived since the retreat of colonial powers. A guilty missionary conscience would appear to be a neurosis suffered largely in the West.

When the demise of European empires brought forward the moment for non-Western churches to stand alone, they had little trouble doing so (Ch. 3, 'Standing Alone, pp. 55-78). Indeed, the European retraction coincided with several significant Christian advances that affected both the European-founded churches and newer autochthonous movements. Academic interest in the latter often overshadows the at least as remarkable health of Roman Catholic, Anglican, and other traditional churches. Jenkins observes parallels between the developments he surveys in the 'South' and those that characterized a similar time of awakening, urbanization, and religious effervescence in the industrializing North.

Jenkins' fifth chapter ('The Rise of the New Christianity', pp. 79-105) produces some plausible and startling speculations based upon demographic trends extrapolated out from evidence that is available today. Population growth and contraction look poised to reduce European populations radically while a boom in many southern states continues apace. When turning to religious indicators, all of them suggest that the surge in southern Christianity has barely begun. The picture becomes even more interestingly when population mobility is factored into the equation. Immigration to Europe may well establish a renewed Christian presence on that continent. America looks set to become even more of a Christian nation than it is today, again due to immigration.

In 'Coming to Terms' (ch. 6, pp. 107-139), Jenkins surveys how churches in the Two-Thirds world `inculturate' the gospel in their cultural contexts. Though the results are sometimes alarming to Western Christians, Jenkins' view is rather more sanguine, claiming that most of these adaptations are well within the parameters of recognizably Christian faith. As demographic changes favor the Southern churches, their patterns of life and worship-often viscerally supernatural in their orientation-are bound to become the dominant ones in a new Christendom.

Jenkins' seventh chapter prognosticates about the varying models of church and state that can be expected as important southern countries become demographically Christian ('God and the World', pp. 141-162). The predictions are not all reassuring to heirs of a strong tradition of separation between the two. Even more unsettling is the possibility of a secular north looking down its nose at-and perhaps coming to blows with-a fervently religious south. In the limited but important realm of ecclesiastical politics, events since the 2002 publication of the book make Jenkins look prescient, a virtue he takes scholarly care to disown. Developments in the American political landscape make one wonder whether this country might become divided in two along the same lines rather than ease into alignment with its secular northern compeers. The sight of sophisticated American Episcopalians separating from local oversight, calling themselves 'Anglicans', and placing themselves under the pastoral care of African bishops may be the robin that calls this particular Spring.

Jenkins' book is highly quotable and for this reason often brandished as a triumphalist Christian tract. That this is a misreading of his work is nowhere more obvious than in his prediction of continued and severe Muslim-Christian conflict ('The Next Crusade', 163-190) in those regions where both Islam and Christianity are experiencing a resurgence. Jenkins acknowledges that a world in which powerful adversaries take religion far more seriously than does today's sophisticated North should keep strategic planners up at night. Simple parents imagining the world in which their children will come of age might also join this insomniac corps.

What effect will southern Christianity have on northern churches and culture? This is Jenkins' question in 'Coming Home' (pp. 191-209). Events since the late 90s have given the author some hard facts to work with. The southern churches are almost all theologically and culturally more conservative than their northern partners. But are they so distinct so as to be incapable of re-evangelizing secularized Europe and the USA? Maybe not. Stay tuned.

Jenkins takes up his final opportunity ('Seeing Christianity Again for the First Time', pp. 211-220) in the first person plural, for the first time plainly identifying himself as a Christian social scientist who cares deeply about the 'we' of Christian faith. Dispassionate analysis is exchanged for what becomes almost an indictment of northern Christian myopia. From the angle which Jenkins permits us to view the world of, say 2050 A.D., the persecution and poverty of which so much are made in the New Testament literature is also the context of the majority of today's Christians (not to mention those who await their moment a half-century hence).

As a Christian reviewer whose work takes him to those corners of the world (or are they its centers?) that Jenkins surveys, I find in Jenkins' work the ring of truth. Many Christians exult in the statistics of Christian resurgence that crowd the pages of this book and allow its title to sound something other than arrogant. In my judgment, they have misread Jenkins. There is more challenge here than pom-poms for waving by those of us whose historical circumstances make it comfortable to cheer on impoverished brethren who remain-by and large-at a safe distance.

This is not an optimistic book, though it is profoundly hopeful. It is perhaps among the two or three that Western Christians ought first to read in this decade, as we hope for a revision of this fine work in the next. We live on the cusp of extraordinary Christian advance, indeed it is already upon us. In the light of these demographic trends, however, the ancient voice of Tertullian sounds ever more pertinent to the world that is already taking shape, a world that Jenkins urges us to see from an entirely fresh angle. 'The blood of the martyrs', that church father still soberly reminds us, 'is the seed of the church.' Read more ›

78 of 83 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A (perhaps unintended) endictment of "northern" Christianity June 20, 2002

By Kerry Walters VINE™ VOICE

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Jenkins's *The New Christendom* is an incredibly thought-provoking estimate of the new faces Christianity will wear in the next half century. Given that population and religious enthusiasm is waning in the northern hemisphere, and just the opposite is going on in the southern one, Jenkins predicts that Christianity's center of gravity will migrate to Africa and Central and South America in the immediate decades ahead. This will result in the emergence of new symbols, new styles of worship, new metaphors, and new ethical sensibilities, all of which mean that Christianity will no longer be dominated by an Eurocentric history and ethos.

Because southern Christianity will become increasingly pentecostal, evengelical, and politically and morally conservative, northern sensibilities, which already tend to take the Christian message with an urbane grain of salt, are likely to dismiss Christianity even more. It will be dismissed as "jungle religion," (p. 169) contrary to both enlightened and postmodern ways of viewing the world. Thus the north will find pseudo-legitimation for its steady move toward secularism in religious revival of the south.

In defending this thesis, Jenkins indirectly raises serious concerns about the spiritual health of North American and European Christianity. If his predictions are in any way true--and they certainly have the ring of plausibility--then it follows that mainstream institutional Christianity, Catholic and Protestant alike, needs to reflect seriously on both its style and convictions. If it's become so indifferent to its own message that it finds enthusiastic support of that message distasteful, things have reached a sorry state.... In predicting the rise of a "southern" Christendom, then, Jenkins has done more than suggested a demographic migration. He's also implicitly invited "northern" Christians to take a hard look at themselves and their beliefs, and ultimately to cut bait or fish.

Jenkins is a good writer with a fluid and lively style. The first four chapters, in which he makes the statistical and demographic case for his predictions, are nonetheless rather slow-going. Readers with no head (or patience) for statistical tables might wish to read the first two chapters and then skip immediately to Chapter 5. Read more ›

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Death of Christianity? Think again. March 17, 2002

By A Customer

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If you are interested in the future of religion in general and Christianity in particular, the one must read book this year has been written by Phil Jenkins.

A respected professor at Penn State University who has been known for "going against the flow," Jenkins argues that the rapid growth of primitive/Pentecostal Christianity around the world (both within and alongside existing traditions) will literally reshape the world, with possible religious conflict affecting everything from historic European denominations (already happening in Anglicanism) to geopolitics.

In a post-modern world, religion returns to center stage, and Jenkins has already turned on the spotlight. This is a must-read for all futurists--including the armchair variety such as myself. After reading Jenkins' seemingly airtight (even understated) analysis, it is difficult to give credence to any author suggesting the passing of Christianity. For every empty cathedral in Europe, there is a burgeoning congregation in Africa or Latin America. In fact, the western, modern version of Christianity may be be all but swept away in the next 50-100 years, but the primitive variety is reemerging at an incredible pace.

Not many works from Oxford University Press read like thrillers. This is an exception.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Paradigm-altering but tedious January 4, 2009

By R. S. Fertig

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In The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins paints a picture of the future of Christianity in colors unfamiliar to typical American thinking. He clearly delineates the characteristics of the rapidly growing Christian churches outside Western Europe and the United States: conservative and charismatic. He illustrates the potential conflicts between Christianity and other major religions such as Islam or Hinduism. And he speculates about what the effects will be on established churches of having a Christian majority outside the West. The information he presents is fascinating and paradigm-altering. His writing is clear and his organization straight-forward. Nevertheless, I found the book to be tedious. The writing is dry and seemingly designed only for the utilitarian purpose of conveying information, far removed from any literary pleasure. But the information contained in this book is critical for formation of an accurate picture of the past, present, and future of global Christianity. On those grounds I recommend it to anyone interested in the growth of the Christian church, although I wouldn't recommend it for reading enjoyment.