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Across three great regions of the world—sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and southern and eastern Asia—two trends are rearranging the social and political landscapes. One of these, the growth of democracy in civic life, politics, and governance, has attracted the attention of some of the most prominent scholars of public affairs. The late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard famously called this movement "the third wave" of democratic revolutions in modern history. This trend is anything but inevitable, however. Despite dramatic advances, democracy in many lands is fragile, and there have been many setbacks, as any reader of the "world" section of the daily news can attest.
The other development, which until recently was nearly invisible to most scholars and pundits, is Christianity's dynamic development in these regions, which is causing a seismic shift of the faith's place and role in the world. Christianity, it turns out, is not just the fading tribal religion of the Europeans.
The faith is practiced worldwide, in many more places and languages than any other religion. The great majority of Christians now live outside Europe and North America. Just as the nations of the Global South and East are the most interesting places to study democracy these days, so too the main questions about Christianity increasingly arise from its new heartlands in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. One of those questions, which has received surprisingly little attention, is what these two trends have to do with each other. A number of political scientists, including Huntington, have noted that a re-energized Roman Catholicism, with a new theological purchase on freedom, has been a critical force for democratization, especially in parts of Latin America. What about some of the other dynamic Christian movements, notably the Pentecostals and other evangelicals? By the year 2000, twelve percent of Latin Americans identified as Protestants, and two-thirds of them were Pentecostals. In Africa, where Christians now make up half of the continent's total population, Pentecostals and charismatics account for more than a third of the Christians. Christians constitute small minorities in Asian nations except South Korea (30 percent) and the Philippines (85 percent), but wherever there are Christians in Asia, evangelicals in general and Pentecostals in particular are on the rise. So what relationship do these religious movements have to the public life of these regions?
A cadre of evangelical intellectuals from the Global South and East decided to address this question. This group, known as the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians (INFEMIT), has been led for many years by Vinay Samuel, an Indian theologian. INFEMIT operates the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, sponsors a geographically dispersed, interdisciplinary doctoral degree program, and publishes Transformation magazine. In 1997, ts leaders conceived an ambitious, three-continent study, and Timothy Shah, an American political scientist of Indian descent (who is also Samuel's son-in-law), organized and launched it two years later with major support from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The results are finally in, and they constitute three volumes of essays, edited by eminent scholars and published this year by Oxford University Press.[1] These works cover three continents and 16 nations, ranging from Brazil to Nigeria, from India to the Philippines.
This project, Shah empasizes, has been an exercise in "critical self-understanding," sponsored by evangelicals and conducted by a healthy mixture of evangelical and non-evangelical scholars. It was prompted to a great extent by INFEMIT's concern that where evangelicals entered the political fray, the results have been mixed (to put it mildly). On the one hand, many of the Pentecostals in Guatemala backed the military dictatorship of Efrain Rios Montt in the 1980s. In Kenya, on the other hand, born-again leaders in the older, mission-founded churches were among the most vocal critics of the Kenyan autocrat, Daniel arap Moi, in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet Moi made moves to co-opt other evangelical leaders, including those of his home denomination, the Africa Inland Church. So what could evangelicals worldwide learn about themselves from a closer study of their political activity and impact? And what could those who study Global South politics and religion's role therein learn from studying evangelicals? Plenty, on both counts, it turns out.
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