Global Conscience
by Douglas Roche
God’s Continent — Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis
by Philip Jenkins
The Next Christendom — The Coming Of Global Christianity
by Philip Jenkins
“Where in the world are we heading?” is a question dogging the best and worst of minds these days. Canadian Presbyterians, among others, anxiously visit palliative care wards to comfort our dying friends, Impact and Importance, all the while hoping that we can nurse our shaky Passion for Mission back to health. While there are a great many signs of life in our denomination, there are many situations that are moribund and desperate. Mostly I find that we are, at heart, puzzled. Those who remain among us find our worship and community life so good and helpful that we wonder why others aren’t busting down our doors, and sense at heart that the little tweaks we make to be more attractive are missing the boat. Where We Are Heading is the subject at the core of the three books under consideration, all of which look to a global and inter-religious perspective, and all of which offer challenges and options for any church body.
Global Conscience by former senator Douglas Roche outlines some of the signs of hope that he sees repeatedly as growing grassroots commitments to a new way of being in the world. Seen across cultural, religious and political boundaries is the growing realization that the world simply can no longer sustain its vast inequities, environmental degradation and futile militarism, whose chief expense and danger is the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons.
Roche catalogues his signs of hope passionately and persuasively, seeing, for example, the international acceptance of the concept of human security (legitimizing outside intervention when governments work genocide against their own people) as a seed-change from the belief that internal matters were not subject to external correction. An examination of the facts of war and peace surprisingly indicates that arms trading and armed conflicts are on the decline, while peaceful resolution of disputes and rapid intervention in military crises are on the rise. We know little of this because these stories rarely make our news. So the author cites concrete examples of a growing global conscience; in cogent vignettes of non-governmental organizations which incarnate new ways of collaborative thinking, and in hope-filled programs on peace, justice and human security that are created and serve collaboratively, beyond tribe, race, ethnicity, nationality or religion. Whenever people grasp their common responsibility for
the good of all, and face their own responsibility in hardening attitudes and gross injustices that lead to conflict and war, the global conscience is active and growing.
As an experienced politician and diplomat and from his perspective as a devout Christian, Roche believes churches must move beyond their “excess interiority” which can so focus on a relationship with God while ignoring human need and Christ’s call to love our neighbours as ourselves.
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Philip Jenkins’ interest is as contemporary as Roche’s, but his focus and analysis — in God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis — address the question of peace between religions, including the religion of the secular state, and the role of faith groups in society.
In 2000, there were approximately 10 million Muslims in Europe, with the largest number (four million) in France; a number which has no doubt grown exponentially since. While elements of racism and xenophobia lie behind many of the resulting social conflicts, Jenkins points out that in large measure, Europe’s difficulty in accommodating this wave of immigration lies less in the particulars of Islamic thought than it does in the conflict between any religious world view with a dominant culture that is officially self-defined as secular. (Witness France’s ban on religious symbols in schools, whether they be crescent moons, burkhas or crucifixes.) Given the moribund nature of most of the established churches of the continent, the triumph of secularity seemed almost assured, until immigration brought cultural and religious challenges to this accepted norm.
Two curious results are that Muslims and Christians often find themselves as allies against the state’s demands for secularity and liberalism; and the Christian memory of Europe is starting to stir among many who long ago abandoned any practice of faith but now find themselves wondering just whence their threatened values arose in the first place.
At the same time, Christian immigration to Europe is rising, but the new Christians bear a strikingly different face (more on this below) in their view of tradition, theology, ethics and social expectations. Here, as in Islam, a profound challenge exists to separate what is faith from what is culture, and for many the question itself seems irrelevant. If all life is to be lived before God, should not the state either submit to God’s will or face being ignored or actively opposed by the faithful? Some Islamic communities have successfully fought for civil rights and a societal respect that has long been lost to the Christians. Jenkins notes the irony that, since the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the outrage that followed the Danish publication of the Muhammad cartoons, European media tend to be rigorously self-censoring in their attempts not to offend the religious sensibilities of Muslims (or Jews for that matter), but Christians and scurrilous depictions of Jesus remain open game.
Jenkins in this encyclopedic and well-researched book does not see the Islamicization of Europe as inevitable, or the death of its Christianity. He notes, “The advent of Islam might also be good news for European Christianity … As European states redefine their attitudes to one religion, they have no choice but to take account of the far more numerous presence of Christianity. From a grassroots level too, the immense attention paid to religious concerns and Europe’s heritage in the last few years probably will drive more Europeans to take a renewed interest in their Christian roots … death and resurrection are not just fundamental doctrines of Christianity; they represent a historical model of the religion’s structure and development.”
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In The Next Christendom — The Coming of Global Christianity, which predates and informs his work on Europe, Jenkins presents us with statistics and research that demonstrate clearly that the face of Christian faith is profoundly changing. Today’s Christianity stands in a nearly reciprocal relationship with global economics; while financial and economic strength lie primarily in the northern hemisphere, Christians in our day are, by a great majority, southern, non-white and poor. While we struggle to maintain congregations and meet budgets, church growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America is soaring. While many new Christians are responding to and coming under the wing of traditional mission churches, the majority are gathered in independent and neo-Pentecostal fellowships, usually led by a series of charismatic figures who claim direct experience of God and gifts of the Spirit that match those of the first apostles. That difference alone is the source of some rivalry and conflict between these emerging churches as issues of authority and territory are hashed out between them, as well as between them and other faiths and governments. Problems in Nigeria and India may be among the best known, but they are far from unique.
Many Christians are under violent threat from rival religions and hostile governments, and a martyr’s death or imprisonment is not something to be read about and pondered in history books or in the Book of Acts — it is a part of daily experience. Jesus’ teachings on responses to suffering and expulsion, the apostle’s experiences in spreading the gospel, and the Book of Revelation’s psychedelic visions are living realities for many. So it’s not too surprising, given that kind of direct experience, that a literalistic view of the Bible is prominent.
Nor is it surprising that we are being taught more about our beginnings as a faith for the outcast, downtrodden and despised. “Consider your calling,” St. Paul wrote, “not many of you were of noble birth …” Our first fathers and mothers in faith were like Isaiah’s suffering servant, despised and rejected, people of sorrows acquainted with grief. The southern church has much to teach us of our Saviour’s presence among the poor. Jenkins writes, “African and Latin American Christians are people for whom the New Testament Beatitudes have a direct relevance inconceivable for most Christians in northern societies. When Jesus told “the poor” they were blessed, the word used does not imply relative deprivation, it means total poverty, or destitution. The great majority of Christians in the global south (and increasingly, of all Christians) really are the poor, the hungry, the persecuted, even the dehumanized. India has a perfect translation for Jesus’s word in the term Dalit, literally “crushed” or “oppressed.” This is how the country’s so-called Untouchables now choose to describe themselves; as we might translate the Biblical phrase, “blessed are the untouchables.”
For us Canadian Presbyterians, all three of these books offer ways into the future that call for a profound recasting of much of our focus. We’ve long since realized that many of our old ways have to go, if for no other reason than we are failing in large part to connect with the deep spiritual hunger of our times. Douglas Roche’s work implies a call to less interiority and to a greater partnership with all who are working for God’s peace and justice; to bolster the hope of the world for a better, fairer future, not least by seeking resolutely to find and exploit whatever common ground we share with others of a different faith, or of no faith at all. As he states, “In the discord of the 21st century, it is already clear that there must be peace among religions if there is to be peace among nations. And there cannot be peace among religions without a genuine, respectful dialogue among religions and between religious and secular society.”
Recent debates at assembly have demonstrated a great variety of opinion in our church about an appropriate stance for interfaith dialogues; gaining a hearing from others enamored of the secularism of our society is an even more difficult process. How do we re-encounter our “cultured despisers” (to use 19th-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s term)? Shall we begin by clearly understanding our marginal position, sloughing off our unhelpful cultural accretions, and focusing on what we have to offer to the world and to the church? And are we willing to embrace creatively the suffering and marginalization that will be our lot regardless?
Philip Jenkins’ studies open our eyes to see the problems and possibilities inherent in Christian and Muslim growth in other lands coming home to roost with us through the fluidity of populations in our day. There is a profound theological challenge underlying these rapid changes. What will our Christianity look like when it encounters a new majority of brothers and sisters whose understanding of family, sexuality, government, ecclesiology and even learning is so different from what we are used to? What part will we play, if indeed God in God’s grace casts us in a role in this drama? How much flexibility do we allow in our own theology without losing the core of who and whose we are?
One thing is clear. As Jenkins writes, “The distribution of modern Christians might well show that the religion does succeed best when it takes very seriously the profound pessimism about the secular world that characterizes the New Testament. If it is not exactly a faith based on the experience of poverty and persecution, than at least it regards these things as normal and expected elements of life. That view is not derived from complex theological reasoning but is rather a lesson drawn from lived experience. Christianity certainly can succeed in other settings, even amid peace and prosperity, but perhaps it does become harder, as hard as passing through the eye of a needle.”
