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From there, unfortunately, Woodward only pulls out much larger brushes with which to paint:

As in the past, today's new Christians tend to take from the Bible whatever fits their needs—and ignore whatever fails to resonate with their own native religious traditions. The Chinese have no tradition of personal sin—much less the concept of an inherited original sin—in their bedrock Confucian background. But they have a lively sense of "living ancestors" and the obligation to do them honor. On the Chinese New Year, says Catholic Bishop Chen Shih-kwang of Taichung, Taiwan, "we do mass, then we venerate the ancestors"—a notion that is totally foreign to Western Christianity. In India, where sin is identified with bad karma in this and previous lives, many converts interpret the cross to mean that Jesus' self-sacrifice removes their own karmic deficiencies, thus liberating their souls from future rebirths.

There's no acknowledgement here that there are plenty of Chinese Christians who do believe in personal and original sin, or that the bulk of India's Christian leaders would find very troubling such continued belief in karma and reincarnation. Concerns about syncretism don't just come from Western imperialists—they come from local leadership. And just as Christian leaders in the developing world can have a fresh perspective with which to critique the syncretistic consumerism in Western churches, Christian leaders in various parts of the world will be justified in questioning the incorporation of ancestor worship and other "traditions" into church life elsewhere.

Meanwhile, there's some overlap between the lessons of the U.S. News article on the success of early Christianity and Newsweek's piece on the success of global Christianity. "If any continent holds the future of Christianity, many mission experts believe, it is Africa," Woodward writes. "There they see history doing a second act: just as Europe's northern tribes turned to the church after the decay of the Roman Empire, so Africans are embracing Christianity in face of the massive political, social and economic chaos." There are other clear similarities: between the martyrdom of the early church and today's persecution; between the diaspora and decentralizing of Christianity in the late first century and today's globalizing and dewesternizing of the church; between Constantine's desire to use Christianity to unite his empire and the desire of today's politicians to do the same. Surely the other distinguishing characteristic of the early church—the attempt to distinguish orthodoxy from heresy—will be a necessary part of this process as well, whether Western relativists like it or not.

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45