Philip Jenkins’ new book on the incredible growth of Christianity outside of the industrialized West in recent times has captured the imagination of even the most strident secularist. With appearances on major national radio programs and coverage in major monthly magazines, Jenkins has become the harbinger of the next wave of "the West verses the rest" ideology sweeping the post-9/11 United States. For Jenkins, the emergence of a powerful, dynamic, and growing form of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America, characterized as "traditionalist, orthodox and supernatural" (p.8), is all too often overlooked by those of us in the West caught in the fault lines of the current "clash of civilizations." The author concludes that the rise of Christianity in the Third World will exacerbate the confrontations between "jihad" and "crusade" around the world while drastically challenging the presuppositions, power and politics of declining liberal churches in the West.

Jenkins adroitly uses demographic data to describe the emergence of the Third Church (the churches in the Third World) and to make predictions about its continued growth in the first half of the 20th century. He emphasizes that by 2050 only about one-fifth of the world’s 3 billion Christians will be "non-Hispanic Whites." As the author imaginatively states: "Soon the phrase ‘a White Christian’ may sound like a curious oxymoron, as mildly surprising as ‘a Swedish Buddhist.’ Such people can exist, but a slight eccentricity is implied" (page 3).

The centerpiece of The Next Christendom is Jenkins’ attempt to describe the contours and characteristics common to the next Christendom in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For Jenkins, the growth of such churches as the Brazilian-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, or The Full Gospel Central Church in South Korea, or the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ on Earth of the Prophet Simon Kimbangu in Congo, is directly connected to the healing power of the sprit of God in the midst of difficult and oppressive circumstances. The promise of the new churches is that the emphasis on access to the Spirit of God, the reliance on strong charismatic leadership, and a clearly articulated set of beliefs and/or social mores help new Christians to find a sense of direction, connection, future promise and life in otherwise unsettling and difficult lives.

A corollary to the generalization that most of the churches of "the next Christendom" are Pentecostal of one stripe or another is Jenkins’ assertion that many of these churches follow a more conservative theological trajectory with a close and even literalistic reading of the Bible, what the author often characterizes as "fundamentalist." Jenkins thus sees a gulf opening up between older churches in the industrialized West with their biblical criticism and cultural accommodation and the new churches and sects in the South that "are fundamentalist and charismatic by nature and theologically conservative, with a powerful belief in the spiritual dimension, in visions and in spiritual healings" (p. 137).

And if this fault line between the West and the next Christendom is not bad enough, the real battle lines for religious strife in the near future will be the armed conflicts between Christians and Muslims in the swelling countries of Africa and Asia. Jenkins posits: "In one possible scenario of the world to come, an incredibly wealthy although numerically shrinking Northern population espouses the values of humanism ornamented with the vestiges of liberal Christianity and Judaism. ... Meanwhile, this future North confronts the poorer and more numerous global masses who wave the flags not of red revolution, but of ascendant Christianity and Islam" (pp. 160—161).

Jenkins draws heavily on the clash of civilizations theory advanced by Samuel Huntington. This theory posits that future world conflicts will not be between the power-blocs and military axes that we have known in the 20th century but rather between cultures and "civilizations" with radically different world and religious views. The "clash" between Christian civilization and Islamic civilization is one of the most acute and risky before the world today. While appropriating and supporting Huntington’s theory, Jenkins does point out that Huntington has underestimated the rising force of Christianity in the South (p. 5). He then goes on to describe the ethnic and religious warfare taking place on the fault-lines between Christianity and Islam in Africa.

As an Episcopalian/Anglican, Jenkins was first drawn to the story of the emergence of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America while reading news reports of the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion. This decennial meeting of all the bishops from across the worldwide Anglican Communion was characterized in both the secular and religious press as the comeuppance of Western liberal bishops and their liberal stands on homosexuality by their brothers in the South. Jenkins points out that the conflict has only become more acute as Archbishops from Anglican churches in Rwanda and Southeast Asia have begun to consecrate American conservatives as "missionary bishops" to advance traditionalist causes and concerns in the U. S. Episcopal Church.

In his critique of Samuel Huntington’s "clash of civilizations" theory and its proponents in post-9/11 discourse, the Palestinian, Christian-raised, post-colonial thinker Edward Said states: "Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make ‘civilizations’ and ‘identities’ into what they are not; shut—down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that ‘the clash of civilization’ argues into reality" (The Nation, October 22, 2001). Philip Jenkins’ embrace of Huntington’s theoretical constructs leaves him open to the same critique.

I find Jenkins’ descriptions and conclusions about the emergence of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America to be too simplistic. To wash together Latin American Pentecostalism and African Initiated Churches as being uniformly charismatic and fundamentalist does not give due credence to the many and various ways that the Holy Spirit is working in the lives of Christians in the diverse cultures, languages and peoples of these great continents. As difficult as Christian and Islamic relations are, to say that these two great Abrahamic faiths cannot coexist is to overlook profound efforts, often exercised at the grassroots and in unseen and unacknowledged ways, toward reconciliation and the struggle for human dignity and community. And to say that there is a normative Southern Christianity, that speaks with a unified conservative voice consumed with and committed to chastising the errant West over issues of human sexuality, does not give full credit to the depth and breadth of the many diverse voices in the South and the particularities of their own cultural and ecclesiological contexts. Even among Archbishops and Primates who head Anglican Churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America there are differing perspectives on the West’s hot-button issue of homosexuality.

Why is it that policy-makers, pundits and politicians, both inside and outside of the Church, latch on to the ideas of such thinkers as Samuel Huntington and Philip Jenkins? Could it be that their theories fit the worldviews of those who rely upon the oppositional constructs and dualistic either/or thinking of the modern mind? Whether it be the "evil empire" or the "war on terrorism," modern man (and I use this non-gender-inclusive description deliberately) needs to objectify the other, the different, as some kind of normative, unified, problematic to be subdued, overcome, terminated. To see the other, or more appropriately "the others," as a whole constellation of multi-voiced, multi-cultural, pluralistic realities, undermines the project of modernity.

The emergence of the many and diverse voices of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America is not "the next Christendom" but rather a new Pentecost. The amazing growth of these churches is not dependent upon, and cannot be fully explained, by the categories of the past, those of Christendom or some other form of the project of modernity. Rather God is indeed doing a new thing in Africa, Asia and Latin America as the power of the Holy Spirit is blowing over these regions making all things new. Consistent with the experience of the early followers of Jesus, as recorded in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, God’s ongoing revelation and intervention in the world is being made real in the many and diverse tongues and cultural realities of a new Pentecost.

This review is excerpted from a longer version which first appeared in The World and I , a monthly publication of The Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), www.worldandi.com.