The Face of Christianity is Changing and With it Comes Real Dangers for Peaceful Free Loving People
Philip Jenkins has published a few books in which he argues that the locus and shape of Christianity is rapidly changing. A summary of his newest book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity states this:
Christianity is growing among the people of the southern hemisphere and in Asia by leaps and bounds. It's doing so among superstitious thinking people who are already prone to believing in superstitious things.
Reason and scientific literacy make people less superstitious, period. It took centuries for science and reason to reduce superstitious thinking in Europe (and other things like WWI, WWII), but it eventually did. Europe's Christian population now seems to be at all time lows. Scientific reasoning and freethinking are showing evidence of having its effect on the American continent too, as recent polls show. Christianity flourishes among superstitious people, period. The Christian gospel story is just a more wonderful story as told when compared to other superstitious contenders (God's son died for me? How wonderful!). That's why superstitious people embrace it, not because of the evidence. For if the evidence were behind the Christian story the most scientifically literate people would be the ones embracing it in the industrial West.
So the fact that Christianity is growing in places like Africa and Asia doesn't surprise me at all. Although, sooner or later scientific literacy will catch up to these Christian people and they too will move in the direction Europe has and where America is headed. If we do our best it probably won't take as long for them to become enlightened as it did for the industrial West, maybe just 150 years. But only if we put more effort into this and ban together for the cause of freedom and the planet itself. In the meantime if Jenkins is correct, brace yourselves and your children and your children's children for an escalation of more religious violence in the world.
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.His is a dire warning to be heeded and worth looking at very closely. If true this is one more reason to support the people who argue against Christianity and Islam and for translating our books into these other languages. If you can translate this Blog into Spanish, Korean, or other languages, that is a real need! To this same end I also need your support here at DC. There is a donate button to your right. Please use it to help. If you don't have the means to do the research, I do, but only if I don't have to get a second job. If you have financial means to do so that's how you can help out. Whatever you do, do something for the future of peaceful free loving people and the the planet itself.
- From Library Journal
Christianity is growing among the people of the southern hemisphere and in Asia by leaps and bounds. It's doing so among superstitious thinking people who are already prone to believing in superstitious things.
Reason and scientific literacy make people less superstitious, period. It took centuries for science and reason to reduce superstitious thinking in Europe (and other things like WWI, WWII), but it eventually did. Europe's Christian population now seems to be at all time lows. Scientific reasoning and freethinking are showing evidence of having its effect on the American continent too, as recent polls show. Christianity flourishes among superstitious people, period. The Christian gospel story is just a more wonderful story as told when compared to other superstitious contenders (God's son died for me? How wonderful!). That's why superstitious people embrace it, not because of the evidence. For if the evidence were behind the Christian story the most scientifically literate people would be the ones embracing it in the industrial West.
So the fact that Christianity is growing in places like Africa and Asia doesn't surprise me at all. Although, sooner or later scientific literacy will catch up to these Christian people and they too will move in the direction Europe has and where America is headed. If we do our best it probably won't take as long for them to become enlightened as it did for the industrial West, maybe just 150 years. But only if we put more effort into this and ban together for the cause of freedom and the planet itself. In the meantime if Jenkins is correct, brace yourselves and your children and your children's children for an escalation of more religious violence in the world.