The New Faces of Christianity: Reading the Bible in the Global South

Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Reading the Bible in the Global South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). x + 252 pages, ISBN 0195300653.

Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). ix + 340 pages, ISBN 0195313956.

The two books under review are part of what Jenkins calls “The Future of Christianity Trilogy,” which was begun with his The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2002, with second expanded edition published in 2007). (For more on Jenkins’ overall project, see also the periodical review of his “Companions of Life: A Supple Faith” by Tony Richie in The Pneuma Review 10:3 [Summer 2007].) Between them, Jenkins extends the analysis of his initial volume, first by focusing on Bible-reading trends in especially Asia and Africa (although Latin America is not entirely absent), and then by exploring emerging trajectories of Christian-Muslim relations in the European continent. Together, these latter two books provide a kind of template for anticipating future global developments, although our author is much too nuanced and sophisticated in his prognostications for alarmists on any side, even as he is too riveting in his narration for those who might be otherwise complacent about the present and future of Christianity in its global contexts.

For example, Pneuma Review readers might almost be able to read New Faces of Christianity as an updated response to the questions posed in 1994 by Harvey Cox in his book Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (Addison-Wesley). There, Cox wondered if world pentecostalism would continue wedded to fundamentalism or if it might expand in other (especially more socially progressive) directions. Jenkins’ New Faces also begins with the question (the title of chapter 1), “Shall the fundamentalists win?” The rest of the volume provides a spectrum of responses to this query by discussing how southern Christians read and use the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, amidst existentially experienced realities like poverty, sickness, persecution and martyrdom, witchcraft practices, gender roles developments, economic crises, political turbulence, and other issues. And the verdict remains out: southern Christians are both more fundamentalist and less fundamentalist than anticipated, although in different (and perhaps surprising) respects.

From a pentecostal perspective, however, one way to read Jenkins on this matter is that the category of “fundamentalism”—as well as those of “liberal” or “conservative”—just doesn’t fit well when talking about Christianity in the global south. Rather, southern Christianity, replete with pentecostal and charismatic variations and trajectories, exhibits new Bible-reading and Bible-enacting tendencies which are perhaps best understood as “post-fundamentalist” (as well as “post-liberal” and “post-conservative”). Yet at the same time, if we follow Jenkins we also may not be able to claim that the mushrooming Christianity of the global south is either “pentecostal” or “charismatic,” at least not in simplistic terms defined according to the North American versions of these phenomena. Instead, North American Pentecostals will learn a great deal about the diversity of global Christianity in general and about the many tongues and practices of southern pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in particular. Those of us classical Pentecostals who have been enamored by the over 500 million number bantered around by demographers and statisticians of global pentecostalism will need to realize that embracing these numbers brings with them many whose beliefs and practices are rather different than our own. In some ways, such realization may lead to a reinvigoration of biblical Christianity in our own North American Pentecostal context; in other ways, New Faces of Christianity may result is our being more circumspect about claiming too much regarding “renewal Christianity” in global context.

Turning to God’s Continent might seem to take us away from specifically pentecostal or charismatic concerns. On the surface of it, yes: Jenkins is focused here on deconstructing two stereotypes about Europe—that it has become “godless” under the onslaught of modernization and secularization, and that the new threat to the European side of the First World is Islam and the forces of Islamization. In twelve chapters, Jenkins presents the “scare” rhetoric and then complicates the account both by presenting evidence for new forms of Christian vitality, including what is happening within Roman Catholic Europe, and by elaborating on the wide spectrum of European Islam. His discussion of the latter includes socialization and assimilation trends, generational transitions, and reconceptualizations of gender notions among European Muslims. While on the one side multiculturalism is insufficient as a response to Muslim life in “white” Europe since such a non-assimilationist strategy may actually perpetuate Christian-Muslim antagonisms, yet on the other side rejecting multiculturalism completely is also unacceptable since that stance will only further alienate minority ethnic groups, including Muslims, in pluralistic Europe. Against the backdrop of a number of tensions like this one, Jenkins does not avoid dealing with terrorism and extremism in Europe but deftly locates such movements within wider religious and socio-cultural realities. The result is that while the “Muslim threat” is not to be simplistically dismissed, it is also not to be overblown given the dynamics of Muslim-Christian relations. Hence the transformation of Christianity, Islam, and Europe are inherently unstable: trajectories can be discerned, but not predicted.

What Jenkins’ analysis will do is to caution pentecostals against any uncritical apocalyptic or dispensational “reading” of the European Union, of Islam, and of the Christian encounter with Islam. Instead, those of us who might be concerned about the re-evangelization of Europe need to pay attention to the class, race, social, and economic conditions amidst which our missionizing efforts proceed since the underlying causes of terrorism are fundamentally intertwined with such realities. On the other hand, for those who might think about “reducing” the Christian mission to social justice activity, Jenkins’ analysis also calls attention to the importance traditional women’s roles and family values for a just and stable society. In other words, pentecostal mission theology focused on Europe can be neither self-congratulatory nor self-flagellating; rather, there is a need for a careful re-assessment of mission perspectives against both the biblical witness and the cultural (European) realities in order to discern the way forward.

Somehow since completing his PhD in history at Cambridge University in 1978 and while teaching at the Pennsylvania State University since 1980, Philip Jenkins has found time to write over twenty scholarly histories of nations (like the USA and Wales), crime (e.g., pornography, child molestation, pedophilia, serial homicide), cultural phenomena (like the “extreme right,” moral panics, Cold War tensions, cults/new religions, and terrorism), and prejudices (like anti-Catholicism), among other topics. Not only does he write books faster than most of us can read them, but he brings the accumulations of his prodigious learning, astute analyses, and tempered judgments into each successive volume. “The Future of Christianity Trilogy” and the two books in review in particular are no exception to these “Jenkins’ rules.” Pentecostal nay-sayers and yea-sayers would be well advised to read these volumes so that the criticisms of the former can become more informed and the triumphalism of the latter can be checked by reality.

Reviewed by Amos Yong