Abstract
The World’s Christians: Who They Are, Where They Are, and How They Got There
Douglas Jacobsen
Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 399 pp.
Introducing World Christianity
Charles E. Farhadian (ed.), Robert W. Hefner (preface)
Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 292 pp.
A Short History of Global Evangelicalism
Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 320 pp.
There is no shortage of books, conferences, and general interest in the topic of world Christianity, but the question remains whether it is best described as a field, a discipline, or a set of methodological approaches. As a historian, I see world Christianity as a field that my scholarship seeks to engage. As an educator, I employ world Christianity as a pedagogical approach to reconsider the subjects, assumptions, and methodologies I highlight in the classroom.
These are not mere academic questions. Questions of world Christianity confront us every day in the diversity of students that we teach, and in the pews of our religious communities. They are front and center in debates over global commerce, international affairs, humanitarianism, and civil society. Undergraduate classes in religious studies or in graduate theological education are keenly aware that the demographics and networks of a globalized Christianity force students and teachers to reconsider their disciplines and curricula.
Yet for me, world Christianity required a pedagogical conversion of sorts. While I maintain the need for a general narrative in my introductory Christian history courses, I have come to decenter the Western story by highlighting under-represented histories and reframing historical periodization. I choose subjects that force students to attend to specific themes like place alongside others like migration so that they consider the interactions and tensions between the local and global while grasping what Andrew Walls named the “cross-cultural process” of Christian history. Such an approach leads us to ask how we can talk about a singular Christianity alongside diverse Christianities. It enables me to privilege religious practice and indigenous agents alongside formal theology and institutions. And it allows me to present Christianity as a world religion always in dialogue with other religions as well as engaged with its political, social, and cultural contexts. Accomplishing all of the above in any given semester rarely proves possible, but the first step was a willingness to adopt a new approach.
The next challenge remained finding resources. While publishers have produced an increasing number of fine-grained studies, introductions to world Christianity remain less prevalent. Few authors were initially willing or able to take on the challenge. Yet, with a ready market of new and redesigned courses looking for materials, publishers and authors inevitably have sought to fill the void. The current task is sifting through the ever-increasing options.
Arguably, the most successful recent text is Douglas Jacobsen’s The World’s Christians: Who They Are, Where They Are, and How They Got There. Having already earned a reputation as a respected scholar of Pentecostalism, Jacobsen has also become a reliable scholar of world Christianity. As a professor of church history, he understands the challenge of introducing a breadth of material without misrepresenting it through oversimplification. The World’s Christians is an introductory text, and his approach feels almost experimental. As the subtitle suggests, Jacobsen covers the same ground through three lenses: parsing the world’s Christians by tradition (who they are), region (where they are), and historical context (how they got there).
Jacobsen first delineates Christianity into four traditions: Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal/Charismatic. Identifying Pentecostal/Charismatic as a separate tradition highlights its global prevalence (making up 17.5% of world Christians) while also demonstrating how Jacobsen categorizes traditions as much through particular emphases (e.g., the active role of the Holy Spirit) as through explicit theological differences. Each tradition is described through its spirituality, salvation, story, and structure. While sometimes cumbersome to shoehorn traditions into these categories, it does enable interesting cross-comparisons. It also allows Jacobsen to reframe insufficient dichotomies such as theology or practice, top-down hierarchies or grassroots movements.
Jacobsen devotes the largest section (over half the book) to exploring Christian traditions regionally. Some will quibble with his nine regions. For instance, the Middle East/North Africa gets a chapter equal in length to all of Sub-Saharan Africa despite the superior Christian diversity, numerical growth, and public presence of the latter. Jacobsen also pairs each region with a subtitle (e.g., “Western Europe: Thin, but Alive” or “East Asia: Piety and Politics”). Like the geographical boundaries, the subtitles are debatable. While they do not overwhelm, they do shape the coverage of each chapter, giving a perspective for readers to consider. A particular strength of these chapters is their contemporary relevance. Case studies like the diversity among Chinese Christian churches, ongoing violence between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, or the revival of Orthodoxy in post-communist Russia should capture students’ attention.
Jacobsen’s foregrounding of cultural and regional particularities recasts attention away from a grand narrative, yet his final section returns to cover all of Christian history in 100 pages, striving for comprehensive if not exhaustive coverage. He reserves roughly equal space for the first and second millennia of Christian history as well as the Christian East and West (and the Global South in more recent history). Divided into four chapters of 500-year increments, he focuses on two dimensions, what he labels “convictions” (beliefs and practices) and “encounters” (social history) (267).
As an experiment, Jacobsen’s book is intriguing if at times perplexing to know how to use. Must a class use all three sections, and if so successively? What would be gained or lost if you were forced to pick and choose? Jacobsen introduces his book as “a kind of scientific field guide” that seeks to identify the various “species of Christianity around the world” (14), and his image is a good one. The book is at its best when categorizing and counting. Adept at interpreting demographics through various methodologies (with a number of charts and graphs to help), Jacobsen offers a broad but careful picture of the diversity among world Christianities. But the next step is for students to move beyond the field-guide approach. Despite attempts at balancing a regional focus with lenses of tradition and history, what can get lost are the connections. How do global networks, migration patterns, or cultural imaginaries shape world Christianity(ies)? Of course, one book cannot do it all. Jacobsen’s breadth, attention to detail, and innovative approach have much to recommend.
As publishers have recognized the need for world Christianity texts for the classroom, Wiley-Blackwell may be taking the lead. Alongside Jacobsen’s introduction, it has launched a new Global Christianity Series as well as Charles E. Farhadian’s edited collection, Introducing World Christianity. Farhadian, an associate professor of religious studies at Westmont College, has assembled a well-regarded slate of authors, each contributing a chapter from their own regional specialty. Farhadian introduces this collection as a new paradigm for world Christianity. If the original paradigm focused on the global extension of Christianity (Kenneth Scott Latourette), a second paradigm presented a polycentric Christianity focused on indigenous agency, contextualization, and translation (Phillip Jenkins, Lamin Sanneh, and Andrew Walls). While building on these earlier approaches, Farhadian proposes a third paradigm that attends to the “social, cultural, political, religious, and historical forces and their uneven relationships with Christianity” (2). Movement serves as his chief metaphor. More than cyclical or serial change, he focuses on flow—spatially in terms of the migration of ideas or peoples as well as “varying rates of change” that lead to the dynamic and relational nature of world Christianity itself (2). I found the movement metaphor helpful in considering the relationship between both the local and global, structural power and indigenous agency, and the erecting as well as crossing of boundaries.
Farhadian promises both historical breadth and social-science depth to give new attention to the flows of world Christians’ bodies, ideas, and institutions, but this is a tall order to deliver in an edited volume. While each chapter provides a good dose of social-science data, each also follows the whim of its author. Some provide broad coverage, others are tightly focused (some to the point of obscuring the larger regional context). Unlike Jacobsen’s four consistent categories, comparisons between chapters are difficult. The pieces are also much more theory-laden. Positively, this allows scholars like the late Ogbu Kalu to trace typologies of charismatic African Christianity or Simon Coleman to question European definitions of the secular, but I fear it could overwhelm beginning students. The book’s greatest strength may be its number of chapters. Parsing world Christianity into 17 regions lumped under five sections (Africa, Europe, Asia, Americas, and the Pacific) allows readers an opportunity to compare contexts such as East and West Africa, Brazil and Mexico, or even Melanesia and Micronesia.
Farhadian makes no apology for lack of comprehensive coverage and admits the collection is light on history and theology while heavy on contemporary social and political contexts. Most chapters succeed in addressing Christianity’s contemporary contexts and prognostications over future prospects, but as an edited collection, it is limited in its ability to trace Christians’ flows and movement between chapters and across regions. In articulating a new paradigm, however, Farhadian’s approach leaves future scholars plenty of room to explore.
If the previous two books attempt broad coverage of world Christianity’s diverse contexts, Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe’s A Short History of Global Evangelicalism takes another approach by reframing a traditionally Western story with new actors, networks, and historical markers. Analysis of global evangelicalism is hotly contested. Many eagerly equate the rise of Christianity in the Global South with evangelicalism either to champion worldwide revival or raise anxieties over biblical literalism and social/theological conservatism. Others identify global evangelicalism either as an unwelcome Western export or a popular form of cultural globalization. Hutchinson and Wolffe are aware of these debates but largely steer clear of them here. They also admit evangelicalism defies precise definition. Opting for fluid boundaries over rigid categories allows the authors to avoid a single definition while enabling them to employ theological, sociological, and historical tools in tracing the contours and contestations inside and outside the movement. For students of world Christianity, their work provides an example of how we might recast a broad Christian movement in global context through multiple methodologies.
After exploring definitions, Hutchinson and Wolffe take six chapters to trace the historical development of evangelicalism. As seasoned scholars, they adeptly engage historiographical debates in the background without allowing them to disturb the narrative flow. Covering so much territory, they hit the highlights, albeit the important ones. Recasting their history in a broader context allows them to reframe the typical narrative. When considering evangelicals’ engagement with industrialization, science, or even slavery/abolition in a more trans-Atlantic and less American-centric worldview, evangelicalism looks much more diverse and sometimes quite different. For the majority of the text, the history remains trans-Atlantic even if it falls short of being fully global. The authors may have missed several opportunities to go deeper in exploring topics such as Christianity and colonialism or the growth of African American and Afro-Caribbean Christianities, but by the turn of the twentieth century, the story becomes truly global with attention to missions, world wars, and ecumenism.
In chapter eight, “The Actual Arithmetic: A Survey of Contemporary Global Evangelicalism,” Hutchinson and Wolffe make an abrupt turn to unleash a deluge of statistics to demonstrate evangelicalism’s global expansion over the last 50 years. The analysis is good, but in an otherwise broad cultural history, the chapter feels like an outlier. The chapter succeeds in placing the evangelical growth in the Global South in a larger context. The authors debate whether global growth means decline in the trans-Atlantic center of evangelicalism. They also introduce the concept of an “other West” made up of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa as a point of intersection that mediates evangelicalism out of its former trans-Atlantic center as well as interpreting “indigenous evangelicalism” back into the West. While I appreciated their attention to flows and mediating spaces, the particularities of global evangelicalism are shortchanged. Africa gets three pages, Latin America four, and Asia eight. These sections are not intended as comprehensive regional studies but rather explanations for evangelical growth. Yet, when held up to the finely grained study of the previous six historical chapters, the picture feels out of focus.
The last chapter, entitled “Localism and Transnationality: 1970s to 2010,” addresses evangelicalism’s transnational and indigenous expressions. In presenting organization structures defined by megachurches or denominations, conservative politics, and a shared humanitarianism promoted by major NGOs, Hutchinson and Wolffe demonstrate evangelicalism as a global network. Yet when introducing diverse local expressions, the authors question whether evangelicalism still can be classified as a single movement. The chapter serves as a good conclusion forcing students to debate questions of power and inequities, the balance of global and local networks. If Jacobsen and Farhadian favor the histories and contemporary contexts of particular regions, Wolffe and Hutchinson offer the chance to measure a single tradition or movement in historical and global context. In a classroom, they would allow students to see the difficulties and benefits of each approach.
As Paul Kollman notes in his article, historians of Christianity have already made the “turn” to world Christianity, yet our classrooms sometimes fall a step behind. This need not be the case. Along with an orientation to an increasingly complex map, the diversity of world Christianity can push students to a place of bewilderment—just enough discomfort to spark learning and to engage new perspectives. Yet, for those of us teaching in predominantly Western contexts, we must avoid the temptation of equating world Christianity to the study of the Global South. Not only does such an approach fail to take account of much more complex global networks and migration, but also it often falls back into focusing on differences and exoticizing an “other.” A strength of the three texts under review here is their focus on the West as one among many contexts of world Christianity. Repositioning the West can reframe unhelpful binaries such as conservative vs. liberal, belief vs. practice, and particularly the West vs. the rest. It also highlights the centrality of movement, interstitial spaces, and boundary-crossing as key themes to explore. We now have a number of fine micro-studies and a growing list of macro introductions. A new challenge for scholars remains intermediate studies of regions or networks that can focus on particularities while placing them in larger contexts.
Finally, these texts illustrate how world Christianity has become an increasingly interdisciplinary field, and we as teachers must mirror the rich diversity of approaches in the classroom. I have found that multiple approaches from theology, cultural history, and the social sciences give students more access points and tools to use in not only making comparisons but carefully attending to another perspective. As I taught my Introduction to Christian History course last semester, I listened as a local Church of God in Christ Pentecostal preacher, an Antiochian Orthodox priest, and a Full Gospel Church of Kenya pastor debated the new Latin American pope’s impact on the Catholic and global church. I could not question the necessity of bringing world Christianity into my classroom. It was already there in the stories and outlooks of my students. Our challenge as teachers is to demonstrate that only in multiplicity can we make sense of the diversity of traditions and cultures that make up world Christianity or any world religion while also better understanding the contexts that shape our own perspectives.