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In their hasty efforts to explain Islam to the American public, media commentators have offered some dubious statistics that, if true, would have striking consequences for the picture of religion worldwide. How many times of late have you heard that Islam is the world's fastest-growing religion, that Islam will be the world's largest religion within a few decades? The figures are spurious, since Christians will far outnumber Muslims at least through the coming century. That North Americans so readily accept such predictions testifies to our continuing ignorance of the flourishing state of Christianity in the global South, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Despite all the superb scholarship on "Southern" Christianity over the last 20 years, many North Americans are oblivious to the booming numbers of Christians worldwide. For our secular Élites, at least, there are ideological reasons to ignore this Christian explosion—to hope, perhaps, that if they ignore it, it will go away. Across the global South, the churches that are enjoying the richest harvests are quite alarming even from the viewpoint of mainline liberals, let alone hardcore secularists. These newer churches preach deep personal faith and communal orthodoxy, mysticism and puritanism, all founded on clear scriptural authority. Whether such congregations describe themselves as Pentecostal, independent, or even Catholic, they preach messages that, to many a Westerner, appear simplistically charismatic, visionary, and apocalyptic. In this thought-world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith healing, exorcism, and dream-visions are all fundamental parts of religious sensibility. For an American liberal, this emerging Christianity is about as alien as Islam, and perhaps just as frightening.
Published in 1990, David Martin's Tongues of Fire became one of the most influential sociological attempts to analyze the Pentecostal movement, as it exists in its Latin American heartlands. Working from a British perspective, Martin drew parallels between today's growing Pentecostal/Protestant movements and the historic experience of Dissenting and Methodist churches in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (Ultimately, as Martin has argued in these pages, Pentecostalism grows out of Methodism, by way of the Holiness tradition). In Latin America today, as in the industrializing England of 200 years ago, enthusiastic new churches emerge to fill needs left untouched by the traditional society. These needs might be economic, since the new churches offer mutual aid and support, but at least as important is the sense of community that the congregations offer in the wastelands of urban society. The new churches offer transformations that are both personal and cultural. Converts feel free to speak and think for themselves in a way that was not possible when they were required to show deference to the old hierarchies of church and state. In more senses than one, "tongues of fire" are lapping across modern Latin America.
With its sympathetic approach, Martin's book did much to lay to rest the then-popular myth that Latin Pentecostalism was little more than an arm of U.S. cultural imperialism, a cia-sponsored counter to Catholic liberation theology. Indeed, Martin's writings over the years have not only helped to explain the social appeal of modern Pentecostalism but also, perhaps, indicated its patterns of future growth. Though a modern Latino Pentecostal might be unimaginably poor by Western standards, the thrift, sobriety, and self-confidence acquired in his or her congregation promises to lift that family into the ranks of respectability and, within a generation or so, into full middle-class status. Inevitably, the Pentecostal and evangÉlico churches will gain wealth, power, and social influence within their respective countries. Pentecostalism must therefore be seen as a crucial aspect of modernization and social development: so much for the familiar Western dismissal of "fundamentalism" as a panicked rejection of modernity and globalization!
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