Religion & Law

Global Christianity

By Elizabeth Schiltz

For an "Ecclesiology" class that I'm taking, we just read the first chapter of Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom:  The Coming of Global Christianity.  While reading the following passage, I was unable to shake the memory of the opening plenary session I attended at the AALS meeting in New York in January.  The day-long program was co-sponsored by the Sections on Women in Legal Education, Aging and the Law, Family and Juvenile Law, Law and Economics, Minority Groups, Poverty Law and Socio-Economics.  It was billed as a "day-long program seeking to discuss and address issues of gender and class from multiple perspectives."  At the time, I was struck by two things:  (1) how many of the plenary panelists identified themselves as Marxists or influenced by Marxist thought; and (2) how the only references anyone made to religious perspectives on the topics of the day were casual, vaguely derisive and dismissive comments.  In retrospect, that panel seems to me to have been a perfect illustration of Jenkins' observations about the blindness of large sectors of the academic world to the (growing, not diminishing) global vitality of religion.  (In fairness, I only attended one of the rest of the day's panels;  perhaps religious perspectives were addressed, for example, in the "Globalization" panel.  My reaction was just to the opening plenary session.)  Here's the Jenkins quote:

The theological coloring of the most successful new churches reminds us once more of the massive gap in most Western listings of the major trends of the past century, which rightly devoted much space to political movements like fascism and communism, but ignored vital religious currents like Pentecostalism.  Yet today, Fascists or Nazis are not easy to find, and Communists may be becoming an endangered species, while Pentecostals are flourishing around the globe.  Since there were only a handful of Pentecostals in 1900, and several hundred million today, is it not reasonable to identify this as perhaps the most successful social movement of the past century?  According to current projections, the number of Pentecostal believers should surpass the one billion mark before 2050.  In terms of the global religions, there will by that point be roughly as many Pentecostals as Hindus, and twice as many as there are Buddhists.  And that is just taking one of the diverse currents of rising Christianity:  there will be even more Catholics than Pentecostals.

Full post as published by Mirror of Justice on March 04, 2008 (boomark / email).