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Everyone agrees that the great shifts in the social geography of Christianity over the past half century have been the redistribution of demographic weight southward, and the inundation of the Christian south by Pentecostalism and its charismatic penumbra. However, most of the attention so far has been focused on Latin America, where the Catholic monopoly has collapsed in a welter of competition, rather than on Africa, where even more important developments are in train.
Whereas in 1900, Christians in sub-Saharan Africa were a small minority, they now number about one third of a billion, and the Pentecostal wave that took off in Latin America in the Sixties swept across Africa about a decade later. There is, of course, no monopoly in Africa outside the Islamic north, but there are major emplacements of Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism that feel their massive political influence threatened by born-again Christianity and its increasing emphasis on health and wealth. In a continent where the state is corrupt, weak, and often ethnically divided, the churches and associated NGOS constitute what there is of civil society and are the arbiters of the moral arena. Born-again charismatic Christians represent a new generation and can provide an alternative source of political legitimation, on occasion it must be said to the benefit of autocratic rulers.
Africa is not just a continent but a diaspora which through slavery includes Brazil and the Caribbean. If one traces the origins of Pentecostalism to the confluence of black and white revivalism in the United States, then what is going forward in Africa itself is as much a homecoming as a visitation from elsewhere. It is no wonder then that opinion is divided between those who trace a gospel of healing and prosperity to the United States and those who see it as characteristically African. Lots of Americans celebrate prosperity and clearly lots of Africans would like to.
There are similar conflicts of opinion over the origins of the Zionism often found in born-again Christianity. There are those like Paul Gifford who trace it to more immediate sources in the United States, whereas others point to long African roots, as well as to several centuries of Protestant philosemitism.
Clearly Pentecostalism is a terrain of ideological contestation, especially when it comes to what is to count as genuinely and authentically African. Nowadays, anthropologists tend to leave notions like authenticity to nationalist intelligentsias and other dealers in mythic genealogy, but there was a time when the African Independent Churches attracted the lion's share of attention, in part because they were regarded as authentic and indigenous. But as John Peel's classic study Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (1968) and other studies in southern Africa showed, the frontiers between Independency and Pentecostalism were far from clearly marked.
Linguistically—African languages apart—the non-Islamic African world is Iberian, French, or Anglo-American, and up to quite recently these linguistic spheres had a fairly stable relationship with either Catholicism or mainstream Protestantism, the latter being largely confined to English-speaking countries once under British imperial aegis. However, the acceleration of global communication since the Sixties and the weakness of the nation as the primary source of identity and belonging, has seen a seepage of evangelical and charismatic Christianity into all the Latin cultures, from Brazil to Mozambique, and from Haiti to Congo and Benin. Evangelical Christianity now speaks French, Spanish, or Portuguese with a native accent, while at the same time extending the influence and range of what James Bennett has called "the Anglosphere." Partly the spread of English is a matter of contiguity, so that Francophone Benin is infiltrated from Anglophone Ghana, or Lusophone Mozambique from neighboring Zimbabwe, but it also reflects a long-distance dissemination of messengers and messages. Ex-empires also strike back so that Brazilians (for example) missionize not only in Mozambique but in metropolitan Portugal and for that matter even in metropolitan Britain. You can find the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brixton or Finsbury Park.
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