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By the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture, a prominent sociologist of religion said here last week. That's Director Mark reading the first paragraph of a 1968 New York Times article with the headline, A Bleak Outlook is Seen for Religion.
In a luncheon talk at the New School for Social Research, Peter L. Berger, whose works are well regarded in religious and academic circles, said the predicament of the believer was increasingly like that of a Tibetan astrologer on a prolonged visit to an American university. "The astrologer will be treated very politely, but listened to only as an eccentric, exotic diversion," he said.
For basic psychological reasons, if he stays any length of time, and particularly because he has been treated so kindly, he's going to think, "Well, maybe the stars don't control reality after all." If the astrologer comes to the campus with two or three fellow believers, a different phenomenon develops, Dr. Berger said.
They will cling to each other desperately to conquer their doubts and to hold off the disconfirming pressure. This is what is likely to happen to the churches. Very simple social processes will lead them to huddle together. And groups that huddle together, closed to the outside world, are called sects.
Dr. Berger said he hesitated to say flatly that believers would be reduced to small sects because the situation could be changed by a third world war or some other upheaval. But in a surprise free world, I see no reversal of the process of secularization produced by industrialization. The impact is the same everywhere, regardless of culture and the local religion.
Dr. Berger is talking about secularization theory, what was once the dominant sociological pattern of interpretation to describe and explain religious change in the modern period. It basically says that religion is necessarily going to decline as society advances.
The argument goes something like this. The Enlightenment generated a rational view of the world based on empirical standards of proof, scientific knowledge, and technological mastery. This rational worldview undermines the foundations of faith in the supernatural and mysterious and makes the claims of the church totally implausible.
Auguste Comte, a 19th century French philosopher, popularized the idea that society as a whole develops successively through three stages: the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the positive stage.
The theological stage is the starting point of human intelligence, directing the human mind to first causes, but attributing those causes to the supernatural. Then the metaphysical stage replaces the supernatural with more abstract forces, and then you get the positive stage, or the scientific stage, and it rests on reason and observation to explain the universe.
In the early 19th century, Comte announced that human society had outgrown the theological stage and science would soon replace religion. Then in the 1880s, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead.
Now, this wasn't a celebratory statement. It was rather just an observation that the rational revolution had eroded the church's authority. Nietzsche was actually a little bit worried, sort of, that the death of God would bring meaninglessness and a death to morality itself. Nevertheless, his words, God is dead, echoed through the 20th century.
Indeed, the death of religion was the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the 20th century. So Professor Berger was in good company in his famous 1968 predictions. Except they were wrong.
Religion isn't dead, you may have noticed. It's still here, and actually, it's growing. There are some strange numbers and global trends to consider in this episode, so it's a really good thing that our guest today is good at geography, demography, sociology, and even Christianity. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics, The Lost Letters to the Twelve Prophets by John Goldingame. Each episode at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
What's fascinating about the Peter Berger story is when Peter Berger was making that prediction that by the year 2000 religious communities will be huddled as little sects in the world,
Our founder, David Barrett, was working in Africa, counting all of the new adherence to newly forming African Christian churches. And David Barrett, in 1970, around the same time Peter Berger said religion was dying, David Barrett said there's going to be 350 million Christians in Africa by the year 2000. Wow.
And so we had these two scholars in tension. One religion is dying, one saying, actually, I'm here in Africa and it's not dying, it's thriving. That's Dr. Gina Zerlo, a world Christianity expert. She's a sociologist and demographer of religion. She's the co-director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, and she's a visiting research fellow at Boston University.
Gina is there talking about David Barrett, the founder of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. Barrett was a mathematician turned missionary. That doesn't happen every day. He spent 20 years in Eastern Africa. And while he was there, Barrett recognized the need for better research into the Christianity boom he saw all around him firsthand.
By 1982, Barrett had published the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, which offered some of the first evidence of a new era in world Christianity. The center of gravity had shifted away from Europe.
And then by the 1990s, Peter Berger recanted and said that actually the world is becoming more religious. And then Peter Berger helped us set up our institute at Boston University to study the trends in the growth of religion around the world. So we have a pretty long history with Peter Berger and David Barrett was right.
In 2013, Berger explained in a media interview how he came to abandon his secularization theory that he was world famous for, the idea that modernity inevitably produced a decline of religion. Here's how he put it. When I started out doing sociology of religion, like 200 years ago, everyone else had the same, everyone had this idea.
Secularization theory is wrong.
Berger now reckons that, contrary to what many people still say, we don't live in a secular age. We live in a pluralist age, and that's a very different beast. Professor Berger now says that while modernity doesn't necessarily lead to secularization, it does necessarily lead to pluralism, that is, to a great melting pot of ideas, religious or cultural.
Modernization doesn't get rid of God, he argues. It actually multiplies the gods we might come across in any given situation. And this might, but not necessarily, it might lead to less certainty about any particular god, but it doesn't remove the gods entirely. When Berger recanted his secularization theory, Christianity was in fact growing.
In the 70s and 80s, there was a huge boom in Christianity across Africa in particular, and it led many sociologists, not just Berger, to rethink their theories. But what about now? 22 years on from Berger's year 2000 deadline, is Christianity still growing? Yeah, that's a great question. So any religion...
Christianity included, only grows on a country level in three ways. Either you're born into that religion or you migrate into that country or you convert to that religion. So globally, migration cancels itself out, right? People leaving, people coming.
So really, religious growth is mostly about births and deaths. It's about straight facts of demography. And there's a whole slew of demographers and social scientists who are dedicating their whole careers to tracking trends in births and deaths and total fertility rates to see, you know, what is the future of religion? Because the piece that's much harder to track is conversions and people leaving religions.
So it's true that Christianity is still on an upward trajectory, but not at all like it was in the 50s, 60s and 70s when we had African Christianity growing like crazy. Because we have lots of people leaving churches in Europe and North America and even Latin America and of course, Australia, New Zealand, prime examples of this. So that the growth of Christianity in Asia and Africa
is not quite outpacing the losses. That doesn't sound awesome. There are, though, some uncertainties around all of this, Gina tells me, mainly around China and India, which we'll discuss in just a moment. But just looking at my own country, Australia, Gina's point is stark. There are losses.
The 2021 census data has been released, shows our population is growing fast and more diverse and less religious. The number of people who say they have no religion has almost doubled in the past decade or just under 40%. As we were putting this episode together, the census data for Australia from the year 2021 was released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
That's a clip from Channel 7, which echoes other headlines which began to shout. Abandoning God. Christianity plummets as non-religious surges in census. Census results mean religion should stop getting special treatment. Australia losing our religion. Christianity in crisis. Church seeks transformation after census results.
For the first time in Australian history, Christians are officially a minority of the population. 44% of Australians now identify as some kind of Christian, down from 61% a decade ago.
Christianity is still Australia's most common religion, but 39% now say they have no religion. Ten years ago, that was just 22%. Obviously, commentators have differed in their interpretations of the data, and given it's only been a week or so since the numbers came out, we're bound to hear more on this topic. But here's my six-part take on it.
One, genuine Christians have long been in the minority in Australia. This official data is just catching up to reality. Two, when Christians were a statistical majority and pointed this out to others, sceptical friends frequently countered that a significant portion of those who tick Christian in the census were just nominal Christians, not real Christians. I'm sure that's right.
Three, as the church has lost its social respectability for reasons that are pretty obvious, like the child sexual abuse scandals and plenty of other things, the civic motivation in Australia and elsewhere to tick Christian in the census has declined.
And so the declining percentage of Christians in the census reveals the dropping away of this nominal class of Christians. For I've long said that the percentage of Australians that actually has some kind of heartfelt trust in the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ is something closer to 25%.
So we may have a long way to go from 44% down to that 25%. The declining percentages of Christians is going to be recorded for a while yet. Five.
In a few more censuses, let's just say 2037, the decline is likely to bottom out as nominal Christians have dropped away and I reckon, by God's grace, we'll see the number of Christians once again increase. Because that increase is already happening, right? People are becoming Christians all over the country.
but it's currently obscured by the large cohort of nominal Christians. So once that nominal curve drops down, we'll begin to see the increase in conversion. 6. Whatever the case, it is time in my view.
Over time, probably, for Australian Christians to recognise and embrace their minority status. I pray that we'll be a confident, humble, cheerful minority.
So Christianity has been in decline in the West for several decades now, obviously not just in Australia. In the US, statistics from the Pew Research Center in 2019 found that 65% of American adults described themselves as Christian, which had dropped 12 percentage points over the last decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated population increased to 26%, up from 17% 10 years before.
In the UK, data from their most recent census in 2021 is unfortunately yet to be released. But in 2011, 59.3% of the population of England and Wales ticked some kind of Christianity box, down from 72% in 2001, a decade earlier.
The expectation is that that number is going to fall again in the 2021 statistics, with some statisticians predicting it will dip below the 50% mark, just like Australia. But there is some evidence that the decline is slowing down. But is the decline slowing? I have read elsewhere that it's slowing.
Yeah, I think the thing that is declining more quickly as it pertains to Christianity is institutional affiliation, not necessarily belief in God or people who pray or that kind of thing. Institutional Christianity is definitely declining. We see that because we collect denominational level data on Christianity. And you can see year after year, this denomination declining 2% a year, 3% a year.
So people are leaving churches. That's happening. But are they necessarily leaving Christian faith? And there have been a lot of studies that indicate, well, maybe not. A big one was the Pew Research Center, the quote, rise of the nuns, N-O-N-E-S. I really wish they had chosen a different term.
It's caused a lot of confusion in world Christianity circles. But it showed that 68% of the so-called nuns believed in God. Well, they're not atheists and agnostics if they're openly saying that they believe in God and they have spiritual inclinations and they pray every day. I feel like more of the spiritual but not religious pray every day than Christians do sometimes.
So we're definitely getting a lot of more fuzziness in religion. It's not as clean cut as it used to be. That might also be the same study if it's the 2017 study. I think it also found that amongst those who first answered no to do you believe in God,
I think it was like 19%. Half of them, when asked a follow-up question, said, oh, they do believe in a universal spirit that governs the universe. Right, exactly. Half the atheists believe in, well, what really is the classical definition of theism?
Actually, to correct myself, that study was done in 2018 by the Pew Research Center, and the numbers were as follows. Almost half of Americans who say they don't believe in God also say they do believe in a higher power or spiritual force at work in the universe, which sounds like God to me.
Among the religiously unaffiliated, that's the famous nuns we've been talking about, nearly three quarters, 72%, believe in some form of higher power. And 17% of those who are unaffiliated believe in God as described in the Bible, they say. Among self-described atheists, a full 18% said they believe in some form of spiritual higher power.
Institutional Christianity is most certainly waning, but belief itself continues and grows, even in the most unlikely of places. We'll find out where after this quick break.
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68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.
and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation. Give people like Tarrat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.
Well, I think there's a religious revival going on in China. The first 30 odd years of economic reforms saw people get wealthy, but now people are looking at other issues, finding deeper meaning, finding new values for their life. Religion is part of that. So we're seeing an expansion of all the established religions in China.
That's a clip from a New York Times short documentary from 2014. There was a spate of stories like this one, tracking the growth of Christianity in China after the world's leading expert on religion in China, Professor Yang from Purdue University, predicted that China would become the largest Christian country in the world by 2030. Yet,
Yang said the number of Chinese believers would swell to 160 million by 2025 and would likely exceed 247 million by 2030, placing it above Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian nation in the world.
Mao thought he could eliminate religion, Professor Yang told the UK Telegraph. He thought he had accomplished this. It's ironic they actually failed completely, he said.
I mean, you hear wildly different statistics. I know. 50 million to 100 million Christians today in China. That's the range I hear today. Do you have any confidence in any number between those two polls? We do. I do have confidence in it because a lot of the standard demographic methods for tracking the size of Christian communities don't pick up what's happening on the grassroots level.
So China is a very difficult place to do survey work. There are very few surveys of religiosity in China. And so you can't, and of course the government census doesn't ask what your religious affiliation is. So if you don't have a government census and you don't have a survey, then
Some sociologists will say there's, quote, no good data. So therefore, nothing is happening. We just don't think that's true because we have 57 years of history of talking to Christians all around the world and asking them. That's the David Barrett method. Go to a place, make the connections, build the network and say what's happening in your local communities.
So for our previous book, the World Christian Encyclopedia, third edition, we created a new taxonomy of Chinese house churches, which we estimate are around 50 or 60 million Christians. And we circulated that among Chinese house church leaders and said, does this look like your networks?
There's no way they don't know. They know how many people are in their networks. They know who is coming and who's not coming. There's a lot of knowledge. So, yeah. So you're thinking about 60 million in the house church movement and maybe another 10 to 15 in the.
the Three-Self, the official church? - Yeah, I think we come in around 100 million. And also there's Catholics. - Yeah, of course. - There's state sanctioned Catholics and there's underground Catholics. So between all those communities, we come in at around 100 million. But we're always willing to talk to anyone, take in new data and adjust as needed, especially in these scenarios. You just have to be honest about how they fluctuate. I think there are two wild cards in world Christianity that I mentioned before, which is India and China.
Really, any small change in a country of a billion people has major ramifications for world Christianity as a whole.
So one of these uncertainties is related to the Chinese house church movement is, are they going to denominationalize? So I just said earlier that institutional Christianity is on the decline in the West. And yet the largest quote unquote denomination in the world, the Chinese house church movement, is thinking about becoming Presbyterian or Methodist.
So that's going to have very interesting implications. And right now, the signs point towards that happening. So that's going to be an interesting dynamic to watch over the next 20 years is what the Chinese house churches do.
In a fascinating series of articles called The Great Awakening in China, the same Purdue sociologist, Professor Yang, says you can compare religion in China to a market. You have five major religions in the country. Five products, you might say: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestant Christianity.
These religious organizations have legally approved religious sites, official organizations and activities. You could say they're in the red market. That's the legally allowed and tolerated market. But they have to follow certain party state instructions. The number of these official approved churches has increased. Then there's the black market in religion with new religious movements or sects that are banned in China.
The communist government has carried out severe crackdowns on these religions, but they continue. Then Yang says there's a grey market where activities are neither legal nor illegal. So preaching outside religious venues and teaching religion to children under 18 years of age is officially prohibited. But what if people are doing that in their own home? What about teaching their own children? Is that okay?
What if they have some friends and relatives join them? These are the home gatherings that are called house churches. And these house churches have been incredibly effective in evangelism, the communication of the Christian faith to those who don't believe. Over the years, though, many of these so-called house churches have become
They started renting halls and office space, factories even. They refused to join the official Christian Chinese churches in the red market, but they're now really big. And the Chinese government has simultaneously tried to tempt them into the formal system, you know, so they could become approved churches. And if they choose against that, the government clamps down on them.
Churches are shut down, bank accounts are seized, and sometimes pastors go to jail. Yang says the extraordinary rapid growth of Christians in China hasn't been well studied or widely enough reported. He reckons it's perhaps the biggest hidden story in the 21st century.
The second most populous country in the world also has a story to tell about Christianity's hidden growth. And this story has a huge impact on Gina's overall global Christianity statistics.
India is home to so many creative contextualization movements of insider movements within Hinduism, within Islam. And a lot of white Western Christians don't like these movements because they perceive them to be too far out there theologically. Yet when you talk to these people, they are authentically Christian while still publicly being authentically Hindu, according to their Indian culture.
So in the next few decades, I would like to see more study of these kinds of movements and more awareness of these of these background believer movements to come to the West to encourage more dialogue there. And I hope and think that might happen.
These creative contextualization efforts Gina is talking about are basically Christians in India trying to live out their Christian faith in a way that somehow accords with Indian culture and even religious expression.
Christianity in India carries strong connotations of Western imperialism, so becoming a Christian can look like turning your back on thousands of years of Indian culture. It's also the case that Christians are more likely to come from the lowest caste in India, so conversion to Christianity actually adds a burden to already difficult lives, because if you say you're a Christian, you are likely to be ostracized.
This partly explains these insider movements Gina is talking about.
People in these movements have a vibrant faith in Christ as the crucified and risen Lord of all, but they choose to remain within their Hindu or Muslim home cultures. It's a kind of churchless Christianity. They call themselves devotees of Jesus, Yesu Bhakta. The word Bhakti, you may know, is the key Hindu term for being devoted to your favorite or family god.
these Jesu Bachta won't call themselves Christians because of the strong cultural associations with that word. It's pretty controversial in the mission studies field, and we'll put a link in the show notes for more information on it.
Why is this important to our story? Because Gina and her colleagues in their global Christianity book estimate India's Christian population at 4.9% of the total population of India. That means 67 million Christians.
Now that is significantly higher than other estimates you're likely to read. The Pew Research Center, for example, puts Christians in India at just 2.3%. But Gina says that number is only based on census data. Her research goes much further. She gathers information on the ground with researchers visiting and talking to key community members.
That's where they come into contact with these insider movements, devotees of Jesus, within Hinduism. More than that, they've also discovered that a huge number of Christian communities in India tick Hindu on the census. This isn't because they're part of the insider movement. It's because they feel local pressure to tick Hindu, or because in some regions it's actually dangerous to tick Christian.
The real number of Christians in India, in other words, might be double what you read over at Pew or on Wikipedia. China and India are the two largest countries in the world. They're also in what's called the Global South.
The terms global north and global south are debated. We're going with the terminology Gina and her team use, and they describe it geopolitically, with the global north comprising Europe, including Russia, and North America, and the global south is basically everywhere else. Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.
Christianity has been shifting to the global south for many, many decades now. And we estimate that around the year 1982 is when world Christianity became a majority global south faith, meaning Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania. That's pretty recent. That's in most of our lifetimes.
So what does it mean for Christianity to shift to the global south? Okay, demographically, there are more Christians living in one area than another.
But what my question is, what else is or is not shifting? Is theological education shifting? Is the missionary movement shifting? Is money shifting? No one likes to talk about money. It makes people sweat a little bit. But there are, you know, the way we write history, Christian history, is that shifting? And more often than not, the answer to all those questions is no.
That stuff's not shifting because the global north still has way more financial resources than the global south does. So I think a lot of people don't quite understand what the ramifications are, the social, the theological, the political ramifications of Christianity being a majority global south faith.
In the year 1900, the top 10 countries with the most Christians were the US, Russia, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Spain and Brazil. Nine of the 10 countries in that list are classified as the global north.
Wind forward to 2020 and the list is very different. US, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, China, Philippines, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and India. The US and Russia are the only global north countries in the new list. The face of Christianity is changing. But there are subtleties and also contradictions we have to confront.
There are 2.6 billion reported Christians in the world today.
And Christianity is growing by 1.17% per annum. And the curious thing is that's faster than the rate of increase of non-religious people in the world. That's growing at just 0.52%. In other words, Christianity's growth rate is more than double that of the nuns. And it's actually five times that of atheism, which is 0.18%.
But it's slower than the growth that Hinduism is experiencing, 1.21% per annum. And it's significantly slower than Islam. Islam is growing at a rate of 1.93% per annum.
And that means, according to Gina, that Christianity's losses are outpacing its gains as a percentage of the global population. So Christianity is growing, yes, but it's not growing to the point where its percentage of the world's population is increasing.
So in 1900, Christians made up 34.5% of the global population. In 2020, that number has dropped slightly to 32.2%, a drop of 2.3%.
Before Christians get depressed about that, none of this is linear. The unusual growth of Christianity in the global south, especially in the wildcard countries of India and China, mean that Gina and her colleagues are confidently predicting that Christianity will be back up to 34% of the world's population by 2050.
And the cool thing is one key to Christianity's probable brighter demographic future is women. Stay with us. ♪
Here's a quick shout out with a difference. Support for this episode was given to us by Scott's Church in the heart of Melbourne. They love what we do here at Undeceptions. And as a church with members from all over the world, they can really get behind this type of global Christianity that we're talking about in this episode. I'm really grateful for the support. I know the pastor there, G'day Phil. And I know that they're all about helping Melbourne make sense of the Christian faith.
It's a church that's full of history and full of life. And it has really great music too, with a highly renowned choir. So why not check them out at scottschurch.com. That's scottschurch.com. Think Christianity is dying? No, Christianity is shifting dramatically. That's Director Mark again doing his Washington Post voice, reading an article that appeared in 2015.
While Christianity may be on the decline in the United States, the world is becoming more religious, not less. While rising numbers of "nones" claim the attention of religious pundits, the world tells a different story. Religious convictions are growing and shifting geographically in several dramatic ways.
In 1980, more Christians were found in the global south than the north for the first time in 1,000 years. Today, the Christian community in Latin America and Africa alone account for one billion people. That's the Washington Post reporting as news something that had been true for more than three decades. There are more Christians in the global south than in the global north.
Just take Africa. Christians made up just 8.9% of the African population back in the year 1900. By 2020, that number is 49.3%, nearly half of all Africans. I asked Gina why she thinks the media tends to focus on the story of Christianity's demise, not its growth.
If Christianity is actually growing, why the narrative, so common narrative, that Christianity is on its way out? I mean, that wasn't just a Peter Berger thesis in the 60s. The person on the street in Sydney just thinks, oh, well, Christianity's maybe got another 20 years.
Maybe in Australia, it only has another 20 years. But I think part of it is a lack of global consciousness. It's really, oh, in my community, I perceive that Christianity is declining. And perhaps it really is, right? You can say the same for Boston, where I am. And I think
Most people have very localized perspectives on religion, and it's very difficult for people to take that global snapshot. And that's what we tried to do here is to show people the global reality with data and with story and with history, too. So and I think the other problem is most academic research in this area is done by white Westerners.
who have an implicit bias that religion is declining because that's what they perceive in their context. And we don't have a lot of quantitative researchers from Sub-Saharan Africa studying trends in Christianity from a data perspective. If we had more of those voices participating in our conferences and putting out books and podcasts and all that kind of thing, the narrative would begin to change, I think.
The typical Christian today globally is a poor, young, uneducated woman in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's the typical Christian today. And that's totally different from what it was 100 years ago when it was an affluent, upper class, educated, white, Anglo-Protestant male. Are you able to drill down on why there is growth where there is growth? Or is that just too difficult?
Yeah, we do. And we are a part of several research projects that look at the drivers of religious change, because if we're going to make good demographic projections, we have to take all of this material into consideration because we're not just going to draw a straight line from 2020 to 2100. We're going to try to use our brains to think, well, if X happens, then Y might happen. And if this happens, then that might happen. So I think, yeah,
Over and over, the research shows a few things. One is that women are more likely to convert than men. Women are more likely to change their religious affiliation because of a relational tie or a network. There's, quote, women are, quote, more spiritual than men are. There's whether that's socialization reasons, whether it's biological reasons, lots of debate there.
So we do find that where women have greater freedoms, where they have more mobility, where they have more education, they have more opportunity to explore other religious options. So that's one thing that we look at pretty closely are the gender dynamics.
But really, a lot of change is that relational network. It's your parents, it's your grandparents, it's your community. So how mobile is someone in a community to be able to work, live, experience life outside of their home community? Those are the people who are more likely going to encounter Christianity, Christian teachings in some way, and more likely to become a Christian.
So in the places where we could get hard data, we found things like churches were 75% female, 90% female. I mean, really outrageous inequalities or imbalances of what's happening, that women make up a huge majority of churches on the ground. But when you look at the governmental census data, it says Christians in Africa are 52% female.
And you tell any scholar of African Christianity that I say it's 52% female and they'll say, "You're wrong." We all know it's more than that. I had a Nigerian Anglican bishop sitting in my office recently and I told him this project that I was working on and he said to me, "If anyone in Nigeria tells you that his church is majority male, he's lying."
And this is a bishop, right? This is an Anglican bishop saying, "We know our churches are pretty much run by women on the grassroots level, not necessarily from the pulpits or not necessarily as the pastors, but women are really a driving force of churches around the world, but you wouldn't know it because they don't get talked about that much." So I think that's one of the trends that is occurring in world Christianity that isn't really getting a lot of airtime.
Did you catch that? The future of the church is female. And if you happen to be playing along in our August competition, the hidden code for this episode is, you guessed it, female.
Yeah, great. So you've already said that Christian women are the key story going forward. I'm fascinated not just so much by the numbers, you know, that there's a majority of Christians who are women, but that they're also more religious. Is that right? They're like, they're praying more. They read their Bible more. They go to church more. Absolutely.
Absolutely. If you look at the Pew Research Center study of gender and religion that came out a few years ago, they found across the board for Christianity, women attend church services more, they pray more frequently than men do, and they self-identify as religious with more frequency than men do. So those are really the three standard sociological questions as it comes to religious observance. And women
tick the box of all three. In every way, shape or form, women seem to be more committed to Christianity than men are. I mean, in some ways, this is a return to the first few centuries of Christianity, where lots of intellectual pagans criticized Christianity for being a religion full of women. But how weird that the perception today is that actually Christianity is just this male patriarchal thing.
Yeah, I have encountered that quite a lot in my research on women in world Christianity, that the churches are run by men and it's all about the patriarchy. But the thing about women is that
they capitalize on their invisibility in really unique ways. It's a little bit like my big fat Greek wedding, the man is the head, but the woman is the neck. There is an element of truth to that. And evidenced by the fact that there are not that many movements that are advocating for women's ordination.
where you might think there would be. So like in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, among Protestants, of course, there aren't huge movements that are protesting and writing decrees for women to gain ordination. Because I think women perceive...
maybe being at the top seems like the most influential place, but really isn't the most influential place. The most influential place is in the family. It's in the community. It's in the neighborhood where you talk and share ideas and raise your children. And that's really much more influential than who's the public facing person. So I think women in these areas have perceived that
And there are some, of course, right? Like, for example, in just two years ago, the first female Assemblies of God in Brazil woman was just ordained. Great. And she's the only one. As far as we know, that there's one woman in a denomination of 26 million people in Brazil as a female pastor. So there's just not a huge movement towards it because I think women know they can gain influence in other more effective ways. Yeah.
Yes. And is it right that Catholic sisters outnumber the priests and brothers in the Catholic church? Yes, not only in the Catholic church, but in every single country of the world, there are more Catholic sisters than priests and brothers. Catholic sisters, you don't want to talk about people running the world. It's Catholic sisters. They are everywhere. They do everything. They're in peace building. They're in education. They're on the front lines of famines. I mean,
Anywhere that people need help, Catholic sisters are there. And they're just an amazing testimony to what the church should be in the world. That's Pope Francis offering a blessing for Sister Luisa Dell'Orto, an Italian nun who was serving in Haiti. Sister Luisa was shot and killed in Port-au-Prince last month.
"For twenty years," said Pope Francis, "Sister Louisa lived there, dedicated above all to serving children on the streets. I entrust her soul to God. Sister Louisa made a gift of her life to others, even to martyrdom." Now, it's not exactly my theology, but it is an important insight into the complexion of global Christianity.
We should be like Catholic sisters who just sacrifice their lives for the sake of others. They're the most self-sacrificing people I think I've encountered.
That's the Spanish version of the song This I Believe, The Creed, written by Hillsong's Matt Crocker and Ben Fielding. In a small way, the song marks a significant moment in modern Christianity, as the ancient Apostles' Creed, believed and declared for centuries by mainstream churches in the Western tradition, was now embraced and sung by Pentecostals around the world.
it hints at a kind of coming of age for Pentecostalism. The thing is, if a woman of colour is the future face of the church, then according to the data, Pentecostalism is likely to be her brand of Christianity. Now, for a boring Reformation Anglican like me, this is a little challenging. I, of course, think everyone should love scholarly, liturgical, creedal, biblical, historical forms of Christianity.
But Pentecostalism is the Christian story to watch. So what is it? Pentecostalism refers to a wide collection of Christian traditions that look back to the original day of Pentecost in the New Testament book of Acts, chapter 2 if you want to read it, where the first Christians were filled with the Holy Spirit in demonstrative, miraculous ways.
And so they burst out onto the world stage with zeal and energy to proclaim Christ, fully expecting their Lord supernaturally to support them. Now,
Now, academics would trace Pentecostalism only as far back as the late American 1800s, when there was a growing reaction against traditional nominal religion, coupled with a revival of enthusiasm and expectation of God's miraculous intervention in our lives.
But Pentecostals insist this 19th century movement was just a renaissance of the original Christianity in the Book of Acts. And academics have been taking notice of this phenomenon because it's changing Christianity worldwide.
Just the other day in preparing for this episode, I was listening to a lecture from Peter Berger, the revered sociologist we've mentioned a few times already. He was distancing himself from Pentecostalism personally, it was a lecture series at Georgetown University of course, but he admitted that his study of the movement in various parts of the world had caused him to take it very seriously.
These are not just wacky supernaturalists, he said. They're at the forefront of social services among the poor, whether in Africa or Brazil or wherever. And wherever they go, they tend to reflect the ethnic diversity of their context in ways that few other social movements can match. When the nerdy inventor of the secularization thesis says Pentecostalism is the story to watch, it gives even this Anglican pause.
What is the fastest growing movement within Christianity? Is it still Pentecostals?
Absolutely. Pentecostal charismatic movement is growing by leaps and bounds. It's around 26% of all Christians now, and increasingly so. And there's some research that suggests where you have, say, Catholic majority countries in Latin America, people adopt Pentecostalism, and you have a generation of Pentecostals, and then perhaps they
become more secular. So you have kind of this movement from Catholicism through Pentecostalism to a secular society. So that's one thing that some researchers are exploring. That remains to be seen. Talking about future trends, that's one we're watching. And do we know why? I mean, the cliche, I guess, is they're just more excited and that's more attractive. But is there something deeper than that?
I think so. I think so. The Pew Research Center did do a religion in Latin America survey in 2014, and they asked the question of former Catholics, why did you leave the Catholic church? And the number one reason was people wanted a more personal relationship with God. And that is the thing with Protestant Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, they really get after that heart religion, um, perhaps a little more than Catholicism. And that's not to say, um,
The Catholic Charismatic Movement is a whole other beast on its own, right? So the Catholic Charismatic Movement in Latin America in particular is massive, highly influential, tons of people participating in a very personal faith through the Catholic Charismatic Movement. So I think a lot of people thought in the 80s and the 90s that Latin America would turn Protestant, but I just don't think that's happening. I think we underestimated the strength of Catholicism there.
That's the thing. Pentecostalism isn't really a denomination. It's an amorphous spiritual movement found in both Protestantism and Catholicism. Wherever there is a perceived cold formality in religion, Pentecostalism seems to win hearts and minds.
Which isn't to say that Christianity will all be Pentecostal in the future. Far from it. Boring Reformation Anglicans aren't going anywhere. Christianity isn't a monolith. Yeah, I think the perception that Christianity is a monolith could not be any further from the truth. I mean, the motto of unity and diversity really is, I think, the motto of world Christianity. It's so diverse and
that Christianity can transcend any culture, any language, any people, any geographical place, right? Anyone can become a Christian anywhere at any time. Not every religion is like that. That's actually pretty unique in terms of where religions go.
But there is something, I think, that hangs it together as something called world Christianity, which is belief and faith in Jesus Christ. No matter what your theology is or how you pray or whether you speak in tongues or not, everyone believes in Jesus. That's the thing that holds world Christianity together. Let's press pause. I've got a five minute Jesus for you.
The global reach and diversity of Christianity aren't just demographic questions or marketing issues. They're part of the DNA of Christianity from the beginning. It's one of the controversial and to some even perverse elements of Christianity that it is a universalizing missionary religion. It's eager to win hearts and minds in every corner of the globe.
A lot of people don't like that. Years ago, I was having a coffee with a friend in a cafe at my local beach. I was explaining to him what our church was doing to promote Christ among the residents of this suburb. At one point, I noticed this woman a few tables away looking inquisitively at me, and I assumed she was like a fellow Christian or something interested in listening to our conversation. So I just kept on talking. A few minutes later, the woman got up from her table, paid her bill,
walked straight across to me and at what seemed like the top of her voice said, "So you want to convert the world? How dare you?" And off she stormed.
I realized at that point she probably wasn't a Christian after all. I thought of the perfect comeback about an hour later, but at the time I was dumbfounded. For a moment, I even wondered, maybe our mission is presumptuous. Perhaps promoting the news of Christ is the stuff of fanaticism rather than a reasoned modern faith.
But the fact is, promoting the faith to every nation goes back to the beginning of the Bible and was endorsed in the most emphatic way by Jesus. So way back in the first book of the Bible, Genesis chapter 12, the whole point of God selecting Abraham and the Jewish people is said to be, quote, "...and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."
The logic was simple: if there's one God, monotheism, it makes sense that the one God is keen on everybody, regardless of location. The biblical God is not a tribal deity like you find in Egypt or Babylon or even Greece and Rome. There is something inherently universalistic and missionary about believing there is one eternal mind behind the universe.
That's why there was even a tendency in ancient Judaism before Jesus at least to hope and pray for the conversion of all the nations.
My own doctoral research cut across the consensus of historians in the early 2000s that was saying at the time that Christianity had really invented the notion of universal mission and that Judaism was simply content to leave all the nations to their own pagan ways. One important Jewish historian from Oxford, Martin Goodman, had described the Christian mission in the ancient world as, quote, a shocking novelty.
But that's not quite right. There was certainly a new passion and organization in the Christian mission. But in text after text in the Judaism of the centuries around the time of Jesus, we find clear evidence of a mission mindset. Many Jewish writers spoke of a miraculous day in the future when all the nations would turn to the one true God of Israel.
One of the most famous Jewish teachers of the period, Philo of Alexandria, who lived right around the time of Jesus, was saying he reckoned one of Israel's great tasks in the world was to pray for the conversion of the pagan nations. And there is even evidence from both the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire that some individual Jewish teachers actually sought out pagans to teach them how to worship the one true God.
For the two or three of you that might be interested in this topic, you can check out my published dissertation under the title Mission Commitment in Ancient Judaism. My point is, when Jesus famously said to his apostles, go therefore and make disciples of all nations in Matthew 28,
This wasn't a shocking novelty. It was the fulfillment and intensification of the ancient Jewish monotheistic hope to be a blessing to all the peoples of the world. I know the terms proselytizing and even evangelism are almost dirty words for some. Certainly the woman I met in the cafe years ago thought so. And I don't deny there can be imperialistic bullying versions of evangelism.
But there is a logic and a beauty to the core idea. And if you're a skeptic listening, it's worth at least trying to see things from the perspective of a Christian. There is a unifying reality to everything according to Christians. His name is Jesus Christ, the embodiment of the one God who died and rose again for all of his beloved creatures.
Wanting everyone, everywhere to know about this is rational and lovely. It's a bit like science. A bit. I hope I don't annoy anyone here. If you come to know and love science, you realize it's a unifying reality. It applies as much in China as it does in outback Australia. And it blesses everyone equally.
To the degree you can, and without becoming a creepy science nerd, you'll want to advocate for the public understanding of science. Well, Christ is the ultimate unifying reality. In him, said the Apostle Paul in Colossians 1, all things hold together.
He isn't just the material explanation of stuff, as science is. He's the reason there is stuff in the first place. He's the reason there's something rather than nothing. He was in his historical life the very incarnation of the God behind the universe. His teaching is the manufacturer's instructions.
His death and resurrection are why everyone in the world can be forgiven for their shared failings and why we can know there is life beyond the grave for all who want it. You, dear listener, may not believe any of this, and that's fine.
But if you can imagine what it's like to believe it, you'll at least be able to see the logic and beauty of Christian mission. And you'll have a partial explanation of this weird and wonderful and growing phenomenon we call global Christianity. You can press play now and end the show.
If you like what we're doing, please head to Apple Podcasts and give us a review and let your friends know about our episodes. While you're there, send us a question and I'll try answer it in the upcoming Q&A episode. Just head to the show notes and you'll see where to send them either by voicemail so we can play your lovely voices on the podcast or you can just send us a good old fashioned email.
While you're there, you'll also see links to Laurel Moffat's beautiful, reflective podcast, Small Wonders. I'd love to think you'll listen to that. And Michael Jensen and Megan Palde-Detoise, excellent, with all due respect. Both of these are part of the growing Undeceptions Network. Next episode, we're tackling one of the big, controversial, ethical issues of our time, euthanasia. See ya.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark away on holidays Hadley. Editing by Richard Humwee. Social media by Sophie Hawkshaw. Administration by Lindy Leveson. Our librarian is Siobhan McGuinness. Special thanks to our series sponsor Zondervan Academic for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast.