A Noise of War in the Camp

This chapter discusses the ramifications for Christian belief and practice of the application of human rights ideology to questions of gender and sexuality. It was only in the course of the twentieth century that rights ideology crossed the gender divide, giving rise to the women's suffrage movement and the substantial erosion of previously unquestioned assumptions about the God-given roles and hierarchical relationship of the sexes. From the second decade of the century in North America and Europe, inherited Christian convictions about the theological and ethical legitimacy of restricting ordained leadership in the churches to men began to be questioned. In Protestant and Anglican churches, these convictions were slowly and unevenly abandoned as the century proceeded. The chapter then considers the shifts in popular attitudes to sexual ethics. By the final decade of the century, some of the global denominational forums had become the arena for heated debate between conservatives and liberals. Churches or individuals could be “liberal” on an issue such as the ordination of women and “conservative” on homosexuality.

Contrasting Patterns of Belonging and Believing

This chapter analyzes the strikingly divergent trajectories of Christian belief and practice in Scandinavia and the United States. All Scandinavian countries in the twentieth century experienced a decline in regular church attendance that appears to have been consistent throughout the century, and that may have begun as soon as religious compulsion was lifted in the nineteenth century. This protracted decline mirrored the slow waning of orthodox Christian belief, but this was not a decline from a previous golden age of faith; rather there seems every likelihood that the adherence of many Scandinavian people to Christian faith had been quite tenuous ever since the region was first evangelized. Yet the Scandinavian countries also illustrate in a pointed way the possibility that in certain conditions, stable patterns of religious belonging can exist almost independently of personal religious belief. Meanwhile, the United States in the twentieth century was by some criteria a more “secular” nation than Sweden or Denmark. The American state from its inception has refused to give any religious body privileged status before the law. In consequence, religion in the United States has always been divorced from the apparatus of government and public institutions to a much greater extent than in the Scandinavian nations, and in the course of the twentieth century, that divorce became more absolute in certain spheres, notably in the universities, public education, and the media.

Migrant Churches

This chapter assesses how migratory trajectories in the twentieth century became channels of transmission of southern or eastern styles of Christianity to urban locations in the northern and western hemispheres, so that Latino/a, Chinese, Korean, and—rather later—African churches became for the first time highly visible elements enriching the tapestry of Christian life in North America and Europe. Some of these transmitted Christianities were very ancient—such as the Assyrian Church of the East. Other varieties of migrant Christianity were of much more recent origin. Those that have attracted most contemporary scholarly interest were Pentecostal in character. These include the older black Pentecostal churches that were established in Britain in the decade or so after the arrival in Britain in June of 1948 of the Empire Windrush, the first immigrant ship that transported 492 settlers from Jamaica. From the 1980s onwards, on both sides of the Atlantic, they also included African neo-Pentecostal churches, mostly of Nigerian or Ghanaian provenance. The rapid growth of West African neo-Pentecostal churches in European and American cities since the 1980s has been the subject of a host of recent sociological studies concerned to elucidate the leading role of these churches in the fashioning and sustaining of corporate identities within African migrant communities.

The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Modern World

This chapter details how, in the course of the twentieth century, the position of the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches weakened markedly—and apparently irreversibly—in some of their historic strongholds, such as Egypt and Palestine, while in most of eastern Europe, Orthodoxy came under severe ideological pressure from communist regimes between 1917 and 1989, only to emerge into the post-Soviet era remarkably intact. Perhaps the most striking feature of Orthodox history during the century is the extent of the global diffusion—yet at the same time tendency to ethnic fragmentation—of Orthodox Christianity. By the close of the century, there were more than 3 million Orthodox Christians in North America, who were subject to at least fifteen different ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The primary reason for such geographical and institutional diffusion was the intercontinental migration of diverse Orthodox populations from various parts of eastern and central Europe, but an important secondary reason was the growing appeal that Orthodoxy exerted on Christians who for one reason or another had become dissatisfied with their former Protestant or Catholic allegiance. By the 1990s, the Orthodox Church was one of the very few churches in western Europe or North America that was displaying steady growth, as a result of both immigration and conversion.

Is Christ Divided?

This chapter examines the ecumenical movement. The twentieth century has sometimes been denominated by historians of Christianity as “the ecumenical century.” Narratives of the ecumenical movement typically begin with the World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh in June of 1910, which assembled some 1,215 Protestant delegates from various parts of the globe to devise a more effective common strategy for the evangelization of the world. Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the Edinburgh conference has been widely identified as the birthplace of the formal ecumenical movement. Without it, there would be no World Council of Churches. Yet serious attempts to bridge divisions between Protestant Christians were already under way in India and China before 1910. Furthermore, the World Missionary Conference was precisely that—a gathering of mission executives and missionaries convened to consider questions of missionary policy. Delegates represented missionary agencies rather than churches, and discussion of questions of doctrine and church order was forbidden, in deference to the Church of England, whose endorsement would not have been given if the conference had been expected to discuss matters of faith and order with Nonconformists. The chapter then looks at the failure and success of the ecumenical movement.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

This chapter suggests that the consequences of the First World War for patterns of Christian belief and the life of the churches were indeed great, but that they stimulated, not an immediate loss of faith, but rather the emergence and increasingly distinct self-definition of some of the most characteristic themes and divergent styles of Christianity in the modern world. It then identifies the main implications of the war for Christianity on a world stage. First, the war came close to destroying the spirit of Protestant internationalism that had been so powerfully symbolized and fostered by the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in June of 1910. A second consequence of the war was the gradual erosion of credibility of the European ideal of “Christian civilization,” and consequent softening of the antithesis between “Christian West” and “Non-Christian East.” Third, the war led some theological interpreters to question the more facile expressions of Christian liberalism and social optimism to which sections of the Protestant churches had succumbed since the dawn of the twentieth century. A fourth spiritual consequence of the war was the stimulus it imparted to forms of religion that emphasized the suprarational, and hence the limits of rational human capacity to change the world.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Christianity in the twentieth century. The twentieth century has suffered comparative neglect at the hands of modern Western historians of Christianity, who have, on the whole, remained more interested in the intellectual and social challenges posed to the European churches in the nineteenth century. Yet it was the twentieth century that shaped the contours of the Christian faith as it is now, a culturally plural and geographically polycentric religion clustered around a number of new metropolitan loci in the non-European world. The majority of its rapidly growing number of adherents found the post-Enlightenment questions that preoccupied the churches of the North and West to be remote from their pressing everyday concerns of life and death, sickness and healing, justice and poverty. In Islamic regions of Africa and in almost all of Asia, they were also intimately concerned with the implications of living as religious minorities in a context dominated by the majority religious tradition. Their theological priorities and ethical perspectives differed accordingly from those of Christians in the North. The twentieth century thus set the agenda for the theological and ethical issues that now constitute the fault lines dividing Christians and churches from each other. The twentieth century has thus made it necessary for students of ecumenism to redraw the map of Christian unity and disunity.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter argues that the twentieth century was indeed a period of extraordinary and sustained Christian growth in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. Yet it also witnessed a serious recession from Christian faith in most of Europe, Australasia, and parts of North America; the continuance and even intensification of serious obstacles to the progress of Christianity in the Islamic world and in most of India; and an accelerating and tragic exodus of Christians from those parts of West Asia and the Middle East that had once constituted the heartlands of Christianity. In some of its manifestations that have become increasingly prominent since the 1980s, the fabric of Christian doctrine and spirituality has been so fundamentally redesigned in the interests of the pursuit of individual material prosperity that the question becomes whether Christianity has converted indigenous religionists or whether indigenous religious and cultural perspectives have succeeded in converting Christianity. The Christian history of the twenty-first century may provide an answer. If the gravest challenge faced by Christianity in the twentieth century was the repeated subversion of Christian ethics by a series of tragic compromises between Christianity and ideologies of racial supremacy, the most serious challenge confronting the religion in the twenty-first century looks likely to be the preparedness of some sections of the church in both northern and southern hemispheres to accommodate the faith to ideologies of individual enrichment.

The Spirit and the spirits

This chapter examines Pentecostal or charismatic Christianity, which constituted the most vibrant features of the Christian landscape in Latin America and Africa, as well as in many parts of Asia, Oceania, and eastern Europe. The global Pentecostal movement throughout the twentieth century drew its most numerous adherents from the ranks of the poor, in a variety of urban and rural contexts. But as the century proceeded, it became apparent that this was not a faith for the poor alone, but rather a religious chameleon that had an extraordinary capacity to adapt itself to a wide range of social and economic contexts and ecclesiastical traditions. Pentecostalism has found a home amidst prosperous business families in Seoul or Singapore as well as among the favela dwellers of São Paulo or the Dalits of South India. The respective histories of Pentecostal culture in Ghana and Brazil both reveal a gradual but incomplete shift in style from the modest aspirations to social respectability and economic improvement characteristic of the Apostolic churches in Ghana or the Assembléia de Deus in Brazil to the sophisticated middle-class materiality and exhibitionist style typical of modern Ghanaian neo-Pentecostal churches or of the third-wave metropolitan churches in Brazil.

Doing Justice in South Africa and Canada

This chapter highlights the impact on the churches of the human rights agenda in its application to issues of racial justice and the treatment of indigenous peoples. Most discussions of human rights discourse in the second half of the twentieth century begin with the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the consequent adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Third General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris in December of 1948. Ecumenical leaders, influenced by concerns arising from mission field experience in Asia and Latin America, were determined that the Declaration should go further still, incorporating a full statement of freedom of religion, including the increasingly contested right to convert to another religion. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, human rights discourse acquired a sharper edge. Alongside its older Cold War use as a weapon against communist totalitarianism there developed a radical human rights tradition that addressed the condition of oppressed groups and spoke the language of liberation. This alternative human rights tradition confronted the churches with a choice—either to realign themselves with the demands for liberation, or to pay the price for their apparent collusion with the status quo.