The world is witnessing a huge explosion of religious conversion and growth, and Christianity is growing faster than any other religion. Nietzsche's proclamation "God is dead" is now proven false. Nietzsche is dead. The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world's population. Secularism has lost its identification with progress and modernity, and consequently it has lost the main source of its appeal. God is very much alive, and His future prospects look to be excellent. This is the biggest comeback story of the twenty-first century.
If you've been reading one of the atheist bestsellers like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great, you may have missed this news. If God is back, you may wonder, why don't I see it? The reason is that many of us live in the wrong neighborhood. "Visit a church at random next Sunday," Brent Staples writes in the New York Times, "and you will probably encounter a few dozen people sprinkled thinly over a sanctuary that was built to accommodate hundreds or even thousands." Yes, I've seen the "empty pews and white-haired congregants" that Staples describes. But then, Staples lives in
Of course my neighbors do not think of themselves as atheist. Very few of them belong to atheist organizations or subscribe to atheist literature. Some of them who are highly educated like to think of themselves as agnostic: they haven't made up their minds because the evidence simply isn't in yet. Others even consider themselves Christian, either because they were born that way, or because they attend church occasionally. The distinguishing characteristic of these people is that they live as if God did not exist. God makes no difference in their lives. This is "practical atheism." We all know people like this. Some of us hardly know anyone not like this. And sometimes we live this way ourselves.
If we live in the wrong neighborhood, we risk missing the most important development of our time-the global revival of religion. It's happening on every continent. In my native country of , Hinduism is undergoing a resurgence. So is Islam. As I have written about Islamic radicalism and terrorism I am often asked,"When will the Muslims understand the importance of secularism? When will we see an Islamic Reformation?" My answer is that Muslims will never understand the importance of secularism. Nor do they need to, because as we shall see, secularism is increasingly unimportant as a global phenomenon.
Moreover, Islam is in the middle of a reformation. We see a resurgence of Muslim piety not just in the Middle East but also elsewhere. At one time Turkey provided a model of Islamic secularism, but not any longer. No Muslim country is going the way of Turkey, and in recent years even has stopped going the way of Turkey.
Some Western analysts describe the religious revivals around the world in terms of the growth of "fundamentalism." This is the fallacy of ethnocentrism, of seeing the world through the lens of our own homegrown prejudices. Remember that "fundamentalism" is a term drawn from Protestant Christianity. It is an American coinage that refers to a group of early twentieth century Protestant activists who organized against Darwinian evolution and who championed the literal reading of the Bible. Fundamentalism is a meaningless term outside this context.
There are, of course, Hindu militants and Islamic radicals, and they are indeed a menace to the world. But the growth of religious militancy and the growth of religion are very different. One may seek to benefit from the other, but the two should not be confused. The resurgence I am talking about is the global revitalization of traditional religion. This means traditional Hinduism, traditional Islam, and traditional Christianity. By "traditional" I mean religion as it has been understood and practiced over the centuries. This is the type of religion that is booming.
Traditional religion is the mainstream, but it is not the only form in which religion appears today. There is also liberal religion. Here in the West, especially among the intelligentsia, we meet liberal Christians. Some of them have assumed a kind of reverse mission: instead of being the church's missionaries to the world, they have become the world's missionaries to the church. They devote their moral energies to trying to make the church more democratic, to assure equal rights for women, and so on. A small but influential segment of liberal Christianity rejects all the central doctrines of Christianity. H.Richard Niebuhr famously summed up their credo: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."
I have met liberal Christians who are good and sincere people. But their version of Christianity is full intellectual withdrawal, and it is also becoming less relevant. The liberal churches are losing members in droves. Once these churches welcomed one in six Americans; now they see one in 30. In 1960 the Presbyterian church had 4.2 million members; now it has 2.4 million. The Episcopal church had 3.4 million; now it has 2.3 million. The United Church of Christ had 2.2 million; now it has 1.3 million. Traditional Christians who remain within liberal churches become increasingly alienated.
Unfortunately the central themes of some of the liberal churches have become indistinguishable from those of the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, the gay rights cause, and the environmental conservation movement. The traditional churches, not the liberal churches, are growing in America. In 1960, for example, the churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention had 8.7 million members. Now they have 16.4 million.
The growth of traditional religion and the decline of liberal religion pose a serious problem for a conventional way of understanding religious trends. This is the way of secularization-the idea that as an inevitable result of science, reason, progress, and modernization, the West will continue to grow more secular, followed by the rest of the world. The more confident exponents of secularization believe, as Peter Berger puts it, that"eventually Iranian mullahs, Pentecostal preachers, and Tibetan lamas will all think and act like professors of literature at American universities."
For a good part of the last century, this secularization narrative seemed plausible. Secular people believed it and reveled in it, while religious people believed it and bemoaned it. But now we see a problem with the thesis. If secularization were proceeding inexorably, then religious people should be getting less religious, and so conservative churches should be shrinking and liberal churches growing. In fact, the opposite is the case.
Some scholars put this down to "backlash" against secularization, but this only begs the question: what is causing this backlash? The secularization thesis was based on the presumption that science and modernity would satisfy the impulses and needs once met by religion. But a rebellion against secularization suggests that perhaps important needs are still unmet, and so people are seeking a revival of religion-perhaps in a new form-to address their specific concerns within a secular society.
Of course the secularization thesis is not entirely invalid. In Europe, Australia, and Canada, religion has been expunged from the cultural mainstream. It has been largely relegated to a tourist phenomenon; when you go to Chartes and Canterbury , the guides tell you about architecture and art history and little about what the people who created those masterpieces actually believed. According to the European Values Survey, regular churchgoers number, depending on the country, between 10 and 25 percent of the population. Only one in five Europeans says that religion is important in life. Czech president Vaclav Havel has rightly described Europe as "the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind."
But if Europe generally supports the secularization thesis, the United States presents a much more problematic case. America has not gone the way of Europe. True, church attendance in the United States has declined in the past three decades. Still, some 40 percent of Americans say they attend church on Sundays. More than 90 percent of Americans believe in God, and 60 percent say their faith is important to them. All of this is a serious difficulty for the secularization thesis, because America is at the forefront of modernity. The thesis would predict that America would be the most secular society in the world. In fact, America is the most religious country in the Western world.
Perhaps the greatest problem for the secularization theory is that in an era of increasing globalization and modernization, the world as a whole is becoming more religious, not less. In a recent survey, sociologists Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart sum up the evidence. Despite the advance of secularization in the West, they write, "The world now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before, and they constitute a growing proportion of the world's population." Consequently, the West is more secular but "the world as a whole is becoming more religious."
Even more remarkable is that the religious revival is occurring in places that are rapidly modernizing. China and India today have the fastest growth rates in the world, and religion is thriving in both places. Turkey is the one of the most modern of the Muslim countries, and Islam has steadily gained strength there. In Central and South America , the upwardly-mobile classes are embracing Pentecostal Christianity.
The global spread of American culture, with the secular values it carries,seems not to have arrested or even slowed the religious upsurge. The reason is that many non-Western cultures are actively resisting secularism. A common slogan in Asia today is "modernization without Westernization." Many people want American prosperity and American technology but they want to use these to preserve and strengthen their traditional way of life. They want to live in a world of multiple modernities.
We often read that Islam is the fastest-growing religion. Not true. Christianity is the fastest-growing religion in the world today. Islam is second. While Islam grows mainly through reproduction-which is to say by Muslim shaving large families-Christianity spreads through rapid conversion as well as natural increase. Islam has become the fastest-growing religion in Europe, which for more than a thousand years has been the home of Christianity. The Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1920 that "the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith." Belloc was convinced that the future of Christianity lay in Europe.
Ironically while Europe has moved away from Christianity, the Christian religion has been expanding its influence in Central and South America, in Africa, and in Asia . The new face of Christianity is no longer white and blond but yellow, black and brown. "If we want to visualize a typical contemporary Christian," Philip Jenkins writes in The Next Christendom, "we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela." The vital centers of Christianity today are no longer Geneva, Rome, Paris, or London. They are Buenos Aires, Manila, Kinshasa, and Addis Ababa . "The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes," Jenkins observes, "and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning."
In 1900, more than 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and America. Today 60 percent live in the developing world. More than two out of three evangelical Christians now live in Asia,Africa, and South America . Here are some numbers Jenkins provides. Europe today has 560 million Christians and America has 260 million, yet many of those are Christians in name only. In comparison, there are 480 million Christians in South America, 313 million in Asia, and 360 million in Africa. The vast majority of these are practicing Christians. There are more churchgoing Presbyterians in than in Scotland.
Oddly enough, this Christian growth occurred after the period of European conquest and colonialism has come to an end. The old boys in pith helmets are long gone, but the faith that first came with them has endured, and now thrives without them. It's just like the early times of Christianity. After Constantine converted and Theodosius proclaimed Christianity the state religion toward the end of the fourth century, Christianity was carried by the Roman empire. Yet the faith spread fastest after the collapse of that empire, and soon all of Europe was Christian. We're witnessing a comparable pace of growth for Christianity in the rest of the world.
A century ago, less than 10 percent of Africa was Christian. Today it's nearly 50 percent. That's an increase from 10 million people in 1900 to more than 350 million today. Uganda alone has nearly 20 million Christians and is projected to have 50 million by the middle of the century. Some African churches have grown so big that their churches are running out of space. While Western preachers routinely implore people to come every Sunday to fill the pews, some African preachers ask their members to limit their attendance to every second or third Sunday to give others a chance to hear the message.
Central and South America are witnessing the explosive growth of Pentecostalism. As David Martin shows in his study Tongues of Fire,partly this is a shift within Christianity: millions of South American Catholics have become evangelical Protestants. In Brazil, for example,there are now 50 million evangelical Protestants whereas a few decade sago there weren't enough to count. The movement of Catholics into Protestant evangelicalism should not be considered purely lateral, however, as the conversion of lackadaisical, nominal Catholics to an active, energized evangelicalism can perhaps be considered a net gain for Christianity.
Even within Catholicism there is an expanding charismatic movement that has grown in response to the success of the Protestant evangelicals. This charismatic Catholicism emphasizes many of the same themes as "born again" Christianity including a personal relationship with Christ. And the Catholic numbers remain huge: Brazil had 50 million Catholics in 1950, but now it has 120 million.
Despite the limitations imposed by the Chinese government, there are now tens of millions of Christians in who worship in underground evangelical and Catholic churches. At current growth rates, David Aikman observes in his book Jesus in Beijing,China will in a few decades become the largest Christian country in the world. In South Korea, where Christians already outnumber Buddhists,there are numerous megachurches with more than 10,000 members each. The Yoido Full Gospel Church reports 750,000 members. The Catholic Church in the Philippines reports 60 million members, and is projected to have 120 million by mid-century.
What distinguishes these Christians, Jenkins writes, is that they immerse themselves in the world of the Bible to a degree that even devout Western Christians do not. For poor people around the world, the social landscape of in the Bible is quite familiar. They, too, live in a world of hardship, poverty, money-lenders and lepers. The themes of exile and persecution resonate with them. Supernatural evil seems quite real to them, and they have little problem in understanding the concept of hell.
This "original" Christianity is coming our way. South Korea has become the world's second-largest source of Christian missionaries, with 12,000 preaching the faith abroad. Only the United States sends more missionaries to other countries. We may be seeing the beginning of a startling reversal. At one time Christian missionaries went to the far continents of Africa and Asia, where white priests in robes proclaimed the Bible to wide-eyed and uncomprehending brown and black people. In the future, we may well see black and brown missionaries proclaim the Bible to wide-eyed and uncomprehending white people in the West.
We might think that this preaching will fall on unreceptive ears. But I'm not so sure. The Washington Post reports that there are 150 churches in Denmark and more than 250 in Britain run by foreigners as "part of a growing trend of preachers from developing nations coming to Western Europe ." Stendor Johansen, a Danish sea captain, seems to reflect the sentiments of many Europeans who are joining the new congregations. "The Danish church is boring," he says. "I feel energized when I leave one of these services." If more people come to share these sentiments then secularization may ultimately be reversed even in Europe.
Peter Berger writes about what he calls "the myth of secularization." He means that the thesis of inevitable secularization has now lost its credibility. In fact, it is going the way of Zeus and Baal. Berger's work points to the reason for this. Berger argues that modernization helps people triumph over necessity but it also produces a profound crisis of purpose in modern life. The greater the effects of modernization, the stronger the social anxiety and the striving for "something more." As Wolfhart Pannenberg puts it, "Secular culture itself produces a deep need for meaning in life and therefore also for religion."
This may not be religion in the same form in which it is imbibed in Nigeria or Korea, but it is traditional religion all the same, no less vital for having adapted to new circumstances. It is quite possible that a renewed Christianity can improve modern life by correcting some of the deficiencies and curbing some of the excesses of modernity.
I have found this to be true in my own life. I am a native of , and my ancestors were converted to Christianity by Portuguese missionaries. As this was the era of the Portuguese Inquisition, some force and bludgeoning may also have been involved. When I came to as a student in 1978, my Christianity was largely a matter of birth and habit. But even as I plunged myself into modern life in the , my faith slowly deepened. G.K. Chesterton calls this the "revolt into orthodoxy."
Like Chesterton, I find myself rebelling against extreme secularism and finding in Christianity some remarkable answers to both intellectual and practical concerns. So I am grateful to those stern inquisitors for bringing me into the orbit of Christianity, even though I am sure my ancestors would not have shared my enthusiasm. Mine is a Christianity that is counter cultural in the sense that it opposes powerful trends in modern Western culture. Yet it is thoroughly modern in that it addresses questions and needs raised by life in that culture. I don't know how I could live well without it.
In the end, though, my story doesn't matter very much and neither does it matter whether the West returns to Christianity. Perhaps the non-Western Christians will convert the Western unbelievers, and perhaps they won't. Either way, they are the future, they know it, and now we know it too. Christianity may come in a different garb than it has for the past several centuries, but Christianity is winning, and secularism is losing. The atheists may continue their fulminations, but they represent not the cry of victory but the cry of desperation. Deep down, the atheists realize that God is winning and atheism has no future.
Excerpted from What's So Great About Christianity, Regnery Publishing, October 2007.
Reader Comments ( Page 2 of 7)
16. Dinesh D'Souza is NOW reduced to teh old and well known Grafitto-'God says Nietzsce" is Dead. He actually sayd Nietzsche has been "disproved". That's not tehpoint-N was not making a falsifiable scientific statement. THe MANIC and rather desperate spread of religion may be slowing in US and the spate of Atheist works is a good sign.
THIs is a good thing-What this country needs right now, is a good dose of Atheism. Remeber teh GOd's EYE on the $ is Hermetic and Deist NOT Xtian.
BUT THE NEOCONS-many of them Atheists them selves need their 'Know Nothing " allies and others to reinforce what is now an irresponsible and DELUSIONAL Worldview. There is a good book to be written on 'THe Neoconservative Neurosiss'
DRJ
Jay Bregman at 11:50AM on Oct 22nd 2007
17. ROFLMAO!!!
"...atheism has no future"/per D'Souza
-that is the only hope this planet has
independent reasoning and scientifically based reactions/per da Sue
grow a brain Din lol
Sue at 11:50AM on Oct 22nd 2007
18. Yet another example of D'Souza's intellectual laziness. The font flip and lack of formatting indicate a copy-and-paste job. He didn't take the time to proofread or he would have realized that most of the country names were omitted. There are no references or footnotes to justify many of his statistics. The essay lacks focus, rambling on like a laundry list from one idea to the next.
As to the content, I'm reluctant to contribue to what I'm sure will be another long-winded, point-by-point debate among commenters, but I'm bored so here goes.
1. How can the lateral conversion of Catholics into "energized" evangelicals be considered a gain for Christianity when every other paragraph in this post points to membership counts as the sole basis for your argument? That's a point that should have been further developed.
2. If you're attacking atheism, why mention "liberal" church memberships? Shouldn't you be counting atheists and agnostics? You beg the question of whether "liberal" Christians are abandoning the church alltogether (against your point) or becoming "traditional" (for your point). Isn't it likely that people are just becoming more polarized?
3. How can you reference membership growth numbers without talking about population growth as well? For example, the U.S. census reports a population growth of ~65mil (36%) from 1960 to 2005. I presume growth rates are much higher in places like Brazil and China, which you mention. How much church growth can be attributed to population growth? Has there been any change in the ratio of theist to atheist/agnostic in these countries? Shall we assume that everyone who didn't join a church became an athiest/agnostic? This is the kind of hard work I would expect from serious writers.
eddroid at 11:55AM on Oct 22nd 2007
19. more mindless drivil from someone trying to push his book! im tired of these religious articles from Dinesh as they are always BS! Atheism is alive and well and will always be as people discover that religion is just a load of dogma used to control the masses. i would have to side with Hitchens over Dinesh any day!
Ross at 9:31AM on Oct 23rd 2007
20. "The world is witnessing a huge explosion of religious conversion and growth"...Which world? Obviously, you're not living in the real one. You need to have your meds changed. They're apparently not quieting the "voices" like they should.
Jimmy Hoffa at 12:25PM on Oct 22nd 2007
21. Responding to DD's critics and the critics of Christianity and other faiths:
Somber wrote: "This man is not worth any more of my attention. Why is he worth yours?"
Then, WHY ARE YOU HERE? For most every article that DD posts, the first 5 - 10 posters are his critics (often the same ones). You people appear to waiting like drooling dogs to read his articles.
If you are confident in your beliefs, why do you feel the need to read DD's articles and respond? I do not bother reading the blogs of atheists. You will not find me posting on those sites.
I am not asking you to go away. First, this is not my blog, thus, I am a visitor just like you. Second, I do not think it appropriate to shoo you away. But, I do have to question your psychology!
ray at 12:59PM on Oct 22nd 2007
22. AFTER READING THESE POSTS, I HAVE TO SAY I AM SO GLAD I AM NOT AN ATHIEST. WHAT A BUNCH OF FOUL, DISGUSTING PEOPLE.
AMEN.
Dot at 1:11PM on Oct 22nd 2007
23. "Oddly enough, this Christian growth occurred after the period of European conquest and colonialism has come to an end. The old boys in pith helmets are long gone, but the faith that first came with them has endured, and now thrives without them. It's just like the early times of Christianity. After Constantine converted and Theodosius proclaimed Christianity the state religion toward the end of the fourth century, Christianity was carried by the Roman empire. Yet the faith spread fastest after the collapse of that empire, and soon all of Europe was Christian. We're witnessing a comparable pace of growth for Christianity in the rest of the world."
Please note, however, that the period described by this statement is known as the Dark Ages, an age marked not by scientific discovery and enlightenment, but by "divine right of kings" and feodalism that locked most of Europe's population into a near-perfect state of ignorance, in which anything not blessed by the pontiff was to be destroyed.
sandslice at 1:13PM on Oct 22nd 2007
24. I am so tired of the athist rant about religion causing all the wars. The spread of athism has caused more deaths than any religious wars. Hitler murdered 6 million Jewish people. Stalin murdered millions, Lenin murdered millions, Marxism promotes the extermination of Jews and Christians...give me a break, athism (socialism, communism, etc.) are the real killers and murderers of humanity. You CANNOT deny this fact.
Ransomed at 1:24PM on Oct 22nd 2007
25. Good then I can sit back and watch all you religious fanatics eventually kill each other and laugh....
Larry at 2:04PM on Oct 22nd 2007
26. Dinesh wrote: “The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world's population.”
Dinesh, what evidence is there that “the ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world's population?” My understanding is that the NUMBER of unbelievers in the world is growing fairly significantly. I guess it is possible that the PERCENTAGE of unbelievers in the world is shrinking as the NUMBER of non-believers in the world grows significantly, as population increases in the world are fairly significant. But I’m skeptical that the NUMBER of non-believers could be growing at the fast rate it is while the PERCENTAGE of non-believers in the world shrinks. Although population grow is something to consider, the increase in the number of non-believes is so dramatic that I have a hard time believing that percentage of non-believers in the world is shrinking.
Here is a link to an article in which the authors say that the number of unbelievers is growing and is higher than it has ever been before:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html
Here is a quote from the article:
“The number of nonreligionists…. throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000…. Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism…. Two immense quasi-religious systems have emerged at the expense of the world's religions: agnosticism…. and atheism…. From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems…. are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians" (italics added). (The WCE probably understates today's nonreligious. They have Christians constituting 68-94% of nations where surveys indicate that a quarter to half or more are not religious, and they may overestimate Chinese Christians by a factor of two. In that case the nonreligious probably soared past the billion mark already, and the three great faiths total 64% at most.)”
Moreover, recent estimate are that the number of unbelievers in the world is now over 1 billion. According to this survey, there are 1.1 billion “Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist,” making the non-religious the third largest “belief system” in the world:
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html
Moreover, given the number of non-religious in China, it is very likely that the number of non-religious people in the world in over 1 billion. According to a recent New York Times article, a recent poll conducted by East China Normal University suggests that only 31.4% of Chinese over the age of 16 are religious. That would be roughly 400 million believers in China, a much smaller percentage than non-believers. Here is a link to the New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/world/asia/04china.html?_r=2&ref=world&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Wes at 2:20PM on Oct 22nd 2007
27. pathological liar ray,
Why are YOU here, since all you ever do is lie?
Knight_of_BAAWA at 2:49PM on Oct 22nd 2007
28. Ransomed, prove that atheism = communism.
Knight_of_BAAWA at 2:50PM on Oct 22nd 2007
29. Yawn...
David McCool at 3:08PM on Oct 22nd 2007
30. Speaking of reaching into the bastions of liberal theology:
Modernity, especially science sometimes aligns with religion, as elementary physics' M theory has a whole lot in common with basic theology held by all branches and denominations of Christians & Jews, and also referenced in the Koran. Stems from, "And G-D said, 'Let there be light.."
From this understanding comes the brand new and emerging theory of art, called UnGraven Image. It uses the original Hebrew letters from Bible texts for each and evey stroke. The strokes represent the branes or strings of M theory. Since the font is bibary, this also references and sybolizes important binary concepts in science and mathematics as well as concepts of duality, such as good and evil -- but also concepts in Eastern religions such as yin yang and otheres in Hinduism, Buddhism and the Tao, plus more.
Ironically UnGraven Image theory artistically is a next step from Conceptrual aty, especially word art. This is fully secular art and until now, cutting edge.
As UnGraven Image works usually have subject matter that has until now been artistically classified as secular, such as landscapes, seascapes, animals. portraits (not of Bible or religious personages), it can be seen as secular and science based art or religious art or both. However, the meaning is always intrinsic in the strokes, which are biblical texts.
So, religious Christains and Jews, secular agnosyiocs, athiests, Muslims, Hindus, Buddists, etc. can share a vision through this new art, which seeks to show that the words of G-D are everywhere, they are the pre-matter of the world.
There is a whole lot more info about how the science, Abrahamic theology and art history line up at the UnGraven Image web site, including a manifesto that can be downloaded for free.
Judy Rey at 5:45PM on Oct 22nd 2007