Christ the Liberator Will Replace Christ the King in the New Christendom
Episcopal News Service. May 10, 1990 [90032_Z]
A Church of England hymn informs Anglicans that in Ceylon (now independent Sri Lanka) every prospect pleases and only man is vile. When the English were singing these words, Portuguese Roman Catholic missionaries in Goa, now a part of India, were requiring their converts to adopt Portuguese names, to wear European clothes, and to eat beef to show their contempt for the Hindus' holy cows. Missionaries in Africa christened their converts with the names of Old Testament prophets.
Such cultural arrogance is now regarded as downright unchristian by most denominations in a religion that has recently had far more success winning adherents in the Third World than retaining them in its European heartland. In Africa, the number of Christians expanded, mainly through conversion, from fewer than 10 million in 1900 to 236 million in 1985 and is on course to total nearly 400 million by 2000. In Latin America, the figures are 62 million in 1900, 392 million in 1985, and 571 million in 2000; in South and East Asia, 19 million, 148 million, and 225 million, respectively. Meanwhile in Western Europe, the number of Christians is expected at best to remain steady until the end of the century. Three-quarters of Western Europeans believe in God. But only about half of the believers put their faith in "a personal God." The others believe in "some sort of life force."
Fewer and fewer Europeans practice their faith. Malta and Ireland apart, churchgoing has declined calamitously almost everywhere in Western Europe. Perhaps because it puts so much emphasis on weekly participation in the mass, the Roman Catholic Church has larger congregations than other groups. Including all denominations, about one person in 10 goes to church in Britain each Sunday, compared with more than one in three in the 1850s. In Scandinavia, upward of 90 percent of the population belong to the Lutheran Church, but fewer than 5 percent enter churches on Sunday.
The decline in the number of Western Europeans choosing a religious life is even more marked. Places famous for sending priests around the world -- Alsace, Belgium, Ireland, northern Italy -- now sometimes find it hard to staff their own churches. India produces more Jesuits than any European country.
The decline of Christianity in Western Europe is not irreversible. Church attendance has stopped falling, and those who fill the pews are more committed than people were in the days when going to church was the done thing. A revival of interest in religion is obvious. The Roman Catholic Church -- though not its liberal orders and movements -- reports an increase in vocations.
Nonetheless, Christianity in Western Europe is unlikely soon to regain anything like its old confidence. But Western Europe's crisis of faith is exceptional. In North America, as in much of the rest of the world, religion has a strong hold. Christianity in the United States has resisted all of those "-ations" that are supposed to cause a falling off of interest in religion: modernization, secularization, urbanization, and industrialization. Gallup polls show that 94 percent of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit (exactly the same percentage as in 1947); that 70 percent of Americans believe Jesus Christ is God; that 70 percent believe in heaven and 53 percent in hell.
Christianity in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe also shows remarkable and growing strength -- after the most determined effort ever made to wipe out a religion. By 1940 the Russian Orthodox Church had all but ceased to exist. The German invasion reprieved it. Stalin wanted the church's support to rally the faithful and got it.
Orthodoxy has continued to be tolerated by Stalin's successors. When it joined the World Council. of Churches in 1961, the Russian Orthodox Church said it had about 30 million regular adult worshipers, probably a deliberate underestimate, for the church was anxious not to alarm the Soviet authorities. Recently, estimates of the number of worshipers have risen to 60 million.
Institutionally, Russian Orthodoxy is emaciated. In 1914 it had 54,000 churches and 25,000 chapels. It now has fewer than 7,000 and not enough priests to serve them. The country's laws on religion, which the Communist authorities have promised to liberalize, are still a straitjacket. Priests are confined to spiritual duties.
Meanwhile, Poland is in a class of its own. Nationalism and Roman Catholicism go together there and make a potent mix. By 1980 the country had twice as many churches and priests as it had before World War II, yet Sunday services are so packed that pews have to be removed to create more standing room. Polish seminaries are crowded. In the Krakow diocese, about 400 men are training for the priesthood. Some will have to be found employment abroad, so Poland is poised to fill gaps left by the Irish, the Italians, and others in staffing churches around the world.
Many Third World Christians are as fervent as the Poles. They are not, however, nearly as radical as is commonly supposed. A myth has grown up in the West that Third World Christians are bent on revolutionary activity and on "enculturation" (that is, merging native ideas and practice with Christianity).
A visit to South Africa or Zaire will suggest that there is something in this caricature. Zaire has encouraged authenticite: Sermons are interrupted by applause and shouts; the bread and wine are danced up to the altar. In South Africa, black Christians have a propensity to form breakaway churches. But in much of Africa, the enthusiasm for enculturation comes not from the Africans but from Western missionaries. It makes no sense for an African congregation to sing about "the faith of our fathers." Yet many Africans are shocked when Westerners come up with such radical ideas as substituting beer for wine in the Eucharist. African nuns disapprove of their European sisters' abandonment of the habit for everyday clothes.
African Roman Catholic bishops are just as conservative. Africa's 175 Anglican bishops tend to be more independent. Yet even they are sometimes reluctant to tug, let alone cut, apron strings. At the 1988 Church of England conference, Bishop Dinis Sengulane of Lebombo, in Mozambique, was shocked by the idea that Lambeth conferences might be held outside England: "Whether you like it or not, you are the mother of the Anglican Communion."
Broad generalizations about Asia, too, fail to survive scrutiny. Asian Christians, it is said, are so hugely outnumbered by Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists that they cling to each other for comfort, unwilling to contemplate changes in doctrine. In fact, some Asian Christians are far from defensive. In the Philippines, where the Roman Catholic Church was prominently involved in the struggle that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos, missionaries are being trained to spread the Gospel to Thailand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and even Australia. In South Korea, Christianity -- which gained prestige in the campaigns for democracy -- is winning adherents so fast that the country may become, following the Philippines, the second large nation in Asia to have a Christian majority.
In Latin America, where Western conservatives worry about the way in which Roman Catholic liberation theology has created a genuinely popular religious-political movement, conservative American sects have won millions of converts. Pro Mundi Vita, a Catholic research body, counted more than half as many North American missionaries (1,498) as Roman Catholic priests (2,240) in Central America in 1979. Most of the sects are as conservative on political and social questions as on religious ones.
Nonetheless, the shift of Christianity's center of gravity from the rich north to the less developed world will certainly change the faith. Third World Christians already outnumber the Christians of North America and Europe -- and the margin will widen by the year 2000. The Third World's influence on denominations is disproportionately small. It will not remain so.
For example, the bias toward the poor has been popularized in Europe by, among others, Bishop David Sheppard. He was thinking of Britain's poor, but a bias toward the poor is much more obvious on Third World development issues. The bias is inevitable. Mainline churches are sure that they have a moral responsibility to campaign for economic sacrifices to be shared unequally, with those who can afford it sacrificing more. Additionally, many people influenced by liberation theology want the Roman Catholic Church -- the church of more than half of the world's Christians -- to extend its centuries-old defense of tyrannicide and just wars to cover just revolutions. The idea has caught fire in Latin America, especially in Central America.
Christianity's new Third World majority is also going to make it harder for the mainline churches to continue their live-and-let-live approach to other great religions. Muslims, in particular, are not showing the same tolerance in return. The idea that Christians should have as much right in Islamic countries to seek and make converts as Muslims have in Christian countries is routinely rejected. So are calls for the relaxation of such Islamic laws as those that prevent a Muslim woman from marrying a Christian. Discrimination against Christians living among Muslims is not confined to fundamentalist countries. Egypt's Coptic Christians complain of insidious pressure to convert to Islam.
Finally, there is the question of married priests. Outside the developed world, ordaining women priests is a nonissue, along with the allegedly sexist language of the Bible, prayers, and hymns. But it seems likely that in Africa and Latin America the Roman Catholic Church will have to allow priests to marry.
The gender of the priests, pastors, vicars, ministers, and evangelists and the style of their faith are far less important than its content. Christianity is not a passive religion; it responds to the faithful. The new majority sees itself as dispossessed. Their savior is not the triumphalist Christ the King of old Christendom. New Christendom's savior is Jesus the liberator, the crusader against injustice. He will comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.