DISCUSS: Christianity and the American Identity Debate

Last updated on: August 2, 2024 at 9:06 pm By Gene Veith

After writing today’s post, I realized that I neglected to address a main concern of this blog. How does Christianity apply to the controversy over “America as an Idea” vs. “America as a People”? So I thought I’d throw the question over to you.

The latter position is claimed by many Christians today, both by the Christian nationalists and the more globalist Catholic integralists. But is that necessarily true? Hasn’t Christianity shaped “America as an Idea”?

Isn’t the danger of “civil religion” more evident in a nation that wants to forge one united people? Doesn’t the American principle of freedom of religion create a climate more favorable to religion than a state church or its equivalent?

In the Lutheran migration to America due to the syncretism and liberalism of the state churches in Germany, one of the earliest settlements was in Wisconsin. These devout believers named their church Trinity and their community Freistadt. “Free City.” Why did these conservative Lutherans value freedom as much as they did?

You get the idea. . .

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Where Christianity Is Growing the Most

Last updated on: April 26, 2024 at 7:34 am By Gene Veith

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As we have often said (e.g., here), while Christianity seems to be in decline in the United States, Europe, and other industrialized western countries, it is growing dramatically in other parts of the world.

I stumbled upon a list of the 10 Countries where Christian Population will Increase the Most by 2050. It bodes well for Lutherans.

According to a related post, in 2020 there were 2.4 billion adherents to Christianity, about 31% of the world’s population, making it the most practiced religion in the world.. Those numbers are projected to grow by 22.4% to over 2.9 billion by 2050. The percentage of the world’s population will still be about 31%, as this growth in other parts of the world will be offset by declines in the west.

But Islam is expected to grow even more, from 1.9 billion in 2020 to 2.8 billion in 2050, a jump of 47%, nearly the same number as Christians. In the United States, Islam will surpass Judaism as the second largest non-Christian religion, and in Europe Muslims will constitute 10% of the population.

But here are countries where Christianity will see its biggest growth by 2050. I am rearranging these by rate of growth:

1. Zambia. 43.2 million Christians, a growth of 147%.

2. Malawi. 41.9 million Christians, a growth of 142%.

3. Uganda. 81 million Christians, a growth of 105.7%.

4. Tanzania. 54.8 million Christians, a growth of 141.5%.

5. Madagascar. 44.4 million Christians, a growth of 91.4%.

6. Kenya. 79.8 million Christians, a growth of 79.5%.

7. Democratic Republic of the Congo. 141.8 million Christians, a growth of 73.93%.

8. Nigeria. 154.8 million Christians, a growth of 61.16%.

9. Philippines. 143.6 million Christians, a growth of 40.3%.

10. Ethiopia. 84.8 million Christians, a growth of 35.4%.

By comparison, the United States will have 262 million Christians, an increase of 3.6%. Though the percentage of Americans who profess Christianity has gone down from 90% in 1990 to 75.5% in 2020, the U.S. still has more Christians than any other country.

The posts referenced here draws on data from the Pew Research Center’s 2015 study The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 with 2020 data worked in. My impression is that the researchers multiplied the population growth by the percentage of Christians in each country to get their projections, the number of conversions, of course, being incalculable. But still, this is a lot of souls.

And a lot of Lutherans. According to Lutheran World Federation figures, Ethiopia has the largest Lutheran church in the world with 10.4 million members. Tanzania is second with 7.9 million. Madagascar is sixth with 4 million. Nigeria is thirteenth with 2.2 million.

If these projections are correct, by 2050 Ethiopia will have 14 million Lutherans. Tanzania will move into first place with 19 million. Madagascar will have 7.65 million. And Nigeria will have 3.5 million.

Such growth would be good news for world Lutheranism. And yet it also brings problems, as I’ve heard from Ethiopian Lutherans studying at Concordia Seminary here in St. Louis: recruiting and training more pastors; building more places of worship; and, always, the need for more money to serve poor people in a poor country.

Still! Praise God for the vitality of these and other churches. I hope we western Christians will support them and learn from them.

Here are some other tidbits from the Pew Study:

Atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion – though increasing in countries such as the United States and France – will make up a declining share of the world’s total population.
India will retain a Hindu majority but also will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia.
Four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Illustration: Christianity percentage by country by multiple, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. [go to the link for a larger view]

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Africa as the New Center of Christianity?

Last updated on: February 9, 2024 at 8:15 am By Gene Veith

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The great Christian poet George Herbert, subject of my dissertation and my first book, closed The Temple, his collection of mostly-short lyric poems, with a long poem entitled The Church Militant. It’s about the growth of the church, as Christianity spread from Jerusalem to the rest of the world. This growth, though, is accompanied by the growth of Sin.

It’s an interesting poem for lots of reasons. Two lines in it, though, almost kept his whole book from getting published:

Religion stands on tip-toe in our land,

Readie to passe to the American strand. (lines 259-260)

Herbert felt that Christianity was dying in England. Sin will grow to the point that it corrupts the church.

Then shall Religion to America flee:

They have their times of Gospel, ev’n as we. . . .

Yet as the Church shall thither westward flie,

So Sinne shall trace and dog her instantly:

They have their period also and set times

Both for their vertuous actions and their crimes. (lines 272-273, 290-293)

The king’s censors in 1633 did not approve of Herbert’s criticism of the Church of England, particularly his insinuation that those who were fleeing religious persecution by emigrating to the American colonies, such as the one at Plymouth, were saving Christianity. Fortunately, Herbert’s editor, the devout Anglican Nicholas Ferrar had clout at court and got the censorship overruled. (See Philip Jenkin’s discussion of this poem and its historical context.)

But Herbert’s words here and in the whole poem feel eerily prophetic, being much more true in 2024 than they were in 1633.

Luther says something similar (which may have given Herbert his idea) in To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools (my bolds):

Germany, I trow, has never heard so much of God’s Word as now; at least we find nothing like it in history. If we permit it to go by without thanks and honor, it is to be feared we shall suffer a still more dreadful darkness and plague. Buy, dear Germans, while the fair is at your doors; gather in the harvest while there is sunshine and fair weather; use the grace and Word of God while they are here. For, know this, God’s Word and grace is a passing rainstorm, which does not return where it has once been. It came to the Jews, but it passed over; now they have nothing. Paul brought it to the Greeks, but it passed over; now they have the Turk. Rome and the Latins had it, too; but it passed over; now they have the pope. And you Germans must not think you will have it forever; for ingratitude and contempt will not suffer it to remain. Take and hold fast, then, whoever can; idle hands cannot but have a lean year.

As secularism takes over Western Europe and as the “American strand” is rapidly heading that way, some are saying that the major center of Christianity in the world is shifting to Africa.

According to these 2020 numbers from Gina A. Zurlo, Co-Director, Center for the Study of Global Christianity, in the post Who Owns Global Christianity?, Africa has more Christians than any other continent, with 667 million. Then comes South America, with 612 million. Then Europe with 565 million. Then Asia with 379 million. Then North America with 268 million. And, finally, Oceania with 28 million.

According to Dr. Zurlo’s graphs, Africa currently is home to about a third of the world’s Christians. But the population trend lines project that this number will shoot up to 50% by the year 250.

Not only is Christianity growing dramatically in Africa, African churches tend to be more orthodox than many of their counterparts in the rest of the world. When the pope permitted blessings for same-sex couples, African bishops refused to comply. African Anglicans, who far outnumber English Anglicans, are fighting the liberal theology of the Church of England and the U.S. Episcopal Church. African Methodists oppose the leftward bent of the United Methodists in the U.S., which is why the conservative breakaway congregations are forming a distinctly international denomination of “Global Methodists.”

There are 24,135,469 Lutherans in Africa, as compared to 3,672,858 in North America. The largest Lutheran church in the world is the Mekane Yesus (Place of Jesus) church of Ethiopia with some 10.7 million members. The second largest is the Lutheran church of Tanzania, with 7.9 million.

The bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Kenya, with which the LCMS is in fellowship, has been ordaining bishops and pastors in Scandinavia to bring back confessional Lutheranism to the Nordic lands.

It wouldn’t be unusual for Africa to become the center of global Christianity. The city of Alexandria in Egypt provided much of the intellectual leadership of the early church. St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo in present-day Algeria, was and remains one of the most important theologians of the church, both to Catholics and Protestants.

To be sure, the churches of Africa have their problems–poverty, bad government, lack of education, the Prosperity Gospel, Islamic persecution–but development is starting to take hold. The West, where Christianity is declining, at least has money and expertise and can help with that development.

If the leadership and the dynamic core of Christianity does pass over to the African strand, that doesn’t mean that the faith will disappear in the hinterlands of America and Europe, with their depleted population and their spiritual emptiness. There will be churches, however small, and Christians, however beleaguered. Besides, the Africans will doubtless be sending us missionaries.

Photo: Confirmation of new members, Hola, Tana River County, Evangelical Lutheran Church of Kenya via Facebook

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From Islam, to New Atheism, to Christianity

Last updated on: November 12, 2023 at 5:24 pm By Gene Veith

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somali-Dutch activist and writer who, a cradle Muslim, has become one of the major critics of radical Islam. With multiple fatwas calling for her death, Ayaan became an atheist. But now she has become a Christian.

She tells her compelling story in an article in Unherd entitled Why I am now a Christian.

Ayaan tells about growing up under Islam, which had mostly been about prayers, fastings, and other observances. But then as a teenager she fell under the spell of the Muslim Brotherhood, which taught a strict, black-and-white, obey-or-be-damned version of Islam that is at the root of today’s Islamic radicalism.

Then came the rise of Islamic terrorism and the 9/11 attacks. She strongly and publicly condemned them, making a name for herself as a critic of radical Islam.

A year later, Ayaan read Bertrand Russell’s 1927 essay “Why I am Not a Christian.” “It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed,” she writes. “Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.”

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

She became an atheist. She became friends with the “New Atheists” Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. In fact, she was sometimes mentioned with them as one of the “horsemen” of that movement.

So what changed for her, directing her to Christianity? She writes,

Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

Ayaan says that the “secular tools” we have been trying to use–“military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil”–are not working.

The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

I’m thinking that Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is shaping up to be one of the most effective apologetics books of our time. It decisively refutes the New Atheists’ insistence that, in the words of the subtitle of one of Hitchen’s books, “religion poisons everything.” To the contrary, Holland, a respected historian, shows that Christianity–and only Christianity–is the source of the benevolent values that the New Atheists holds dear. Read this post and this post about the book.

But Ayaan was drawn to Christianity for more than just cultural reasons:

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life? . . . .

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

Pray for her.

Photo: Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47476351

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“Queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity”

Last updated on: June 17, 2023 at 3:47 pm By Gene Veith

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We often assume that if we give in just a little, the other side will be satisfied. But it never is, pushing for more and more and more, going to ever greater extremes.

The issue in progressive churches is no longer gay rights, or accepting LGBTQ+ members and pastors, or performing same-sex weddings, or being inclusive of transgendered individuals. Rather, all of this is only preparatory to Queer Theology, according to which Christianity itself is all about homosexuality and transgenderism.

In order to know what is happening in mainline churches and liberal seminaries, you must read Queering Jesus: How It’s Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools. The article, by John Murawski of RealClearInvestigations, shows just how pervasive “queer theology” has become in these ostensibly Christian circles. Here is an excerpt, with my bolds:

Progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of “queer theology.” Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.

In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure. . . .

Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news. 

I can’t bring myself to quote any more of what Murawski describes and critiques on this blog. Read it yourself.

This is not just the speculations of academic theologians. Murawski shows how this is showing up everywhere in mainline churches.

We keep hearing that the split in the United Methodist Church, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) breaking away from the Episcopal Church, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) breaking away from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the revolt of global Anglicans against Canterbury are all about “accepting gay pastors” or the like. But the bigger issue is surely the rise of Queer Theology and whether it will be allowed to replace actual Christianity.

Back when the main issue with liberal theology was the higher critical approach to the Bible, as accompanied with the “social gospel,” J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, in which he argued that liberal theology was not just a strain of Christianity or a theological option in the church universal. Rather, liberal theology is a different religion than Christianity.

He was right then in 1923. And Queer Theology, as the decaying fruit of that rebellion against the authority of Scripture, is certainly a different religion than actual Christianity.

This happens to be the 100th anniversary of the publication of that book. It is worth reading in light of what liberal theology has mutated into.

Photo: Church Door with Pride Flag by Haanala 76 via PublicDomainPictures.Net, CC0

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Predictions of Christianity’s Comeback

Last updated on: April 18, 2023 at 1:40 pm By Gene Veith

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What with the Nones, declining church membership, declining church attendance, and consistently bad PR, Christianity seems to be fading from American culture.

But as John Blake writes for CNN (no less), in a story with this headline, Predictions about the decline of Christianity in America may be premature.

He brings up various factors, but here is his main point:

For years, church leaders and commentators have warned that Christianity is dying in America. They say the American church is poised to follow the path of churches in Western Europe: soaring Gothic cathedrals with empty pews, shuttered church buildings converted into skate parts and nightclubs, and a secularized society where one theologian said Christianity as a norm is “probably gone for good — or at least for the next 100 years.”

Yet when CNN asked some of the nation’s top religion scholars and historians recently about the future of Christianity in the US, they had a different message.

They said the American church is poised to find new life for one major reason: Waves of Christians are migrating to the US.

And they said the biggest challenge to Christianity’s future in America is not declining numbers, but the church’s ability to adapt to this migration.

More immigrants come to the United States than any other country and lots of them are Christians. This is starting to allow the U.S. to become a part of what Blake calls “the booming of Christianity in what is called the ‘Global South,’ the regions encompassing Latin America, Africa and Asia.”

According to Blake, “Latino evangelicals are now the fastest-growing group of evangelicals in the US.” He quotes New York Times religion columnist Tish Harrison Warren:

“The future of American Christianity is neither white evangelicalism nor white progressivism,” Warren wrote. “The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants [or] the children of immigrants.”

I know what some of you are thinking. . . .But we have so much immigration because we don’t have control of our borders! That’s not sustainable or desirable! Are they going to take over our churches too?

Well, not all immigrants are here illegally. You can oppose illegal immigration without opposing legal immigration. And you can appreciate fellow Christians wherever you find them.

The article says that the effects of “the booming of Christianity” from the Global South might be muted if white Christians do not accept these new believers. But this will not just be a problem from the conservative side. Blake asks, “What if progressive Christians prove unwilling to align with non-White immigrants who tend to be more conservative on issues of sexuality and gender?”

I daresay that American “progressive Christians” will have more problem welcoming these immigrant Christians than conservative Christians will, due to their commitment to Biblical morality. Already the United Methodists are willing to tear their church apart rather than accommodate the beliefs of the Methodists from the developing world who were voting with the white evangelical Methodists in rejecting same-sex marriage and homosexual pastors. These immigrant Christians, few of whom are “liberal” theologically, should prove extremely helpful in keeping the American church on the right course.

I’ve been attending some urban Lutheran churches lately–confessional, conservative, Missouri Synod Lutheran churches–and I’ve been impressed with how those particular congregations include worshippers from Africa, India, Japan, Korea, Latin America, and other of the new Lutheran centers around the world. Some of these are first generation immigrants, but others are second or third generation, being quite assimilated to American culture, except that they are committed church goers. Everybody seems to welcome everybody else and be glad to see each other. I know some churches have intentional ministeries to some of these groups. Others just let it happen naturally, as Lutherans from Ethiopia or Brazil simply seek out a good orthodox congregation for them to attend.

Do any of you have any experience with this sort of thing in your congregations? Do the immigrant Christians have any problems fitting in with the rest of your community of faith? Is there any resistance to them from other members? Do you think this phenomenon has the potential to revitalize Christianity in the United States?

Photo: “Worshipers from the India Evangelical Lutheran Church receive the Lord’s Supper during a service on the campus of Concordia Theological Seminary, Nagercoil, India, in June” by Jonathan Shaw, Lutheran Reporter

HT: Tom Herring

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