Book Review

New gospel of health and wealth

The Next Christendom: the coming of global Christianity

Philip Jenkins tells us that he dispatched the corrected proofs of the first edition of this book on 10 September 2001, the day before everything changed. In that first edition Jenkins had warned that we ignore the religious dimension of world affairs at our peril. We must, he argued, contemplate the possibility of global religious conflict. Jenkins had to labour these points to counter the amused scepticism of those who held that to talk today of religious wars was to hark back to the Middle Ages. Twenty-four hours after his book had gone to the printers, Jenkins' warnings were most terribly vindicated.

The thesis of the second edition of this deservedly highly acclaimed book is unaltered. It is that religion's future lies in the South, in those parts of the world that are both the poorest and the most populous. Jenkins calls our attention to the phenomenal growth of Christian churches in Africa and in Latin America. The vast majority of believers in the twenty-first century will be "neither white, nor European, nor Euro-American". Current demographic trends suggest that the proportion of people who live in the so-called "advanced" nations will continue in steep decline. Rich families in rich countries have far fewer children than poor families in poor countries. Moreover, in Europe at least, they are much less inclined to go to church.

The Churches of the South are booming. Theirs, Jenkins argues, is "the next Christendom". Many readers of his book will be disturbed to learn what goes on in some of these Southern mega-Churches. We are told that at the services of the El Shaddai Church in the Philippines, for example, worshippers are invited to raise their passports to be blessed to ensure that they will secure the visas they need to work overseas. This hugely successful Church has much in common with the Pentecostal Churches that flourish throughout the Third (or two-thirds) World. What makes El Shaddai unusual is that it is in fact a lay Catholic movement.

A common characteristic of the Churches of the global South is their emphasis on material prosperity as the reward of faith. If you obey God - and pay your tithe to the Church - he will reward you with good health and financial success. It is not a point that Jenkins makes, but in preaching this health-and-wealth Gospel these Churches can properly claim to be squarely within a scriptural tradition, that of the book of Deuteronomy, with its catalogues of rewards and punishment. The blessings it promises to those who keep God's law and the curses - including, alarmingly, "the boils of Egypt" - it reserves for those who do not.

The "prosperity Churches" are already a powerful presence in Britain. In Hackney, where I worked as an Anglican priest, there are more people at the Sunday evening service of the Kingsway International Christian Centre than at all the services held that day in Hackney's "mainstream" Churches. Jenkins' thesis, of course, is that in "the next Christendom" it will be such Churches as this that will be "mainstream".

What will the Christians of "the next Christendom" be like? They will emphasise the supernatural and the miraculous. Their worship will be charismatic. They will exorcise demons. Their traditional customs will be accommodated. In many Churches ancestors will be honoured; in some, animals will be sacrificed. These Christians will be conservative in their moral teaching and basic beliefs. The majority of them will be neither liberally minded nor intellectually inclined. Few of them, Jenkins might have added, will read The Tablet.

Philip Jenkins examines rather than grasps the nettle of authenticity. How far will the Christianity of "the next Christendom" be truly Christian? As Christianity becomes increasingly Southern it will absorb the habits and thought-worlds of the cultures from which it emerges. Jenkins predicts that we will see a movement of ideas and practices "from the margins or borderlands of the faith to the heartland". But will that movement compromise what is essential to the Christian faith? It would be imprudent to suppose that this question is easily answered.

Jenkins' book must be brought to the debate about what it means to be the Christian Church in the twenty-first century.

The first edition of this important book went to press in the world as it was on the day before the Twin Towers fell. This second is published in a very different world, although it is a world that Professor Jenkins had foreseen. Here he expands on his original and addresses directly the great matter of the relationship of the coming global Christianity to a resurgent and radicalised Islam. Much of Jenkins' book is a sober, scholarly analysis of meticulously marshalled statistics.

One chapter, entitled "The Next Crusade", is far more speculative, although it is still wholly persuasive. Jenkins asks whether "the two sisters", Christianity and Islam, can live side by side. He is not optimistic. He imagines a future in which "Muslim and Christian alliances blunder into conflict". Will this, he wonders, be "the war of the end of the world"?

Jenkins has such an acute eye for what is happening - not least in Nigeria, where, sometimes it seems, the last days are being rehearsed - that the scenario he depicts of what might unfold on the world stage, however apocalyptic it appears, must be taken very seriously indeed.

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