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- For more than 50 years, the most rapid expansion of Christianity and Islam has been taking place in Southern nations with the highest general growth of population found anywhere on earth.
By highlighting such indisputable evidence, Jenkins underscores what missiologists have been saying for some time.2 The center of gravity in world Christianity has moved South. The "average" Christian in the world today is not a well-dressed Caucasian suburban male but a poor, brown-skinned woman living in a Third World megacity. While European Christianity has become archaeology and North American Christianity hangs on as sociology, Christianity in ever-expanding sections of Africa, Latin America, and Asia is dynamic, life-transforming, and revolutionary—if often also wild, ill-informed, and undisciplined. Muslim-Christian conflicts will almost certainly grow in quantity and intensity throughout the twenty-first century as centers of rapid Christian and Muslim expansion encroach upon each other in many parts of the Two-Thirds World.
What Jenkins makes of the new world Christian reality is not what all observers will see. China, for example, does not play a large part in this book, and his treatment of India is restricted to Hindu-Christian conflict and the role of Dalit ("untouchable") conversions in fueling that conflict. Yet it may very well be that world Christian leadership for the twenty-first century might come from India (where there exists an 1,800-year history of up-close negotiation with other world religions) or from China (where incredible Christian breakthroughs are occurring among both highly educated intellectual Élites and practitioners of traditional religion among the rural poor). Still, Jenkins's own conclusions from his evidence offer more than enough for serious thought.
He is especially provocative when he insists that Christian expansion deserves to be treated substantially as the new Christians describe it. Yes, of course, the need for social cohesion among displaced peoples can explain the attraction of Christian community, massive relocation to cities can explain the attraction of inner self-discipline provided by Pentecostal experience, and the promise of divine healing can explain the appeal of Christianity where there is no modern medicine. Jenkins, however, tries very hard to break through the Western insouciance that presumes to tell non-Westerners what they are really up to. Whatever political, social, or cultural factors may be appropriate for explaining Christian expansion in the Two-Thirds World, Jenkins holds that amid the great diversity of Christian churches in the Southern world, a common feature is "the critical idea that God intervenes directly in everyday life."
Jenkins also offers convincing reasons for depicting the religious future of the planet as a series of Main Events featuring Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and Muslims, surrounded by sideshows of only marginal significance from Buddhists, Hindus, evangelical Protestants, and the Eastern Orthodox. As for modernist elements of Western Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, Jenkins obviously feels that they are drifting rapidly to the simply irrelevant.
In his description of likely future conflict, Jenkins carefully catalogues the many different possibilities for systemic violence between Muslims and Christians. These include situations where Muslims are a massive majority and construct hegemonic societies (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia); situations where large Muslim majorities must still confront smaller but long-standing Christian minorities (Indonesia, Egypt, Sudan); situations where Muslims and Christians are equally balanced and equally aggressive (Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia); situations where large Christian majorities face rising Muslim minorities (the Philippines, Uganda, Germany, France, Britain); situations where dominant Christian or secular majorities are interlaced with small but sometimes prosperous Muslim communities (the United States, Brazil, Mexico); and the situation of the former Soviet Union, where Christian minorities in the Muslim republics of south-central Asia may call upon Russia, with a slowly recovering Eastern Orthodox consciousness, to act on their behalf.
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