Worldwide religious trends

[Diane Vera]

In the thread To Djangojava (Steve Glass), I wrote that the most narrow-minded forms of Christianity are precisely the kinds of Christianity which have been growing the fastest in those parts of the world where people in general are having the hardest times -- as well as here in the U.S.A.

For details about this, see the many articles linked on my page about The growing number of Christians of kinds which inherently fear demons, Satanists, witches, occultists, Pagans, and atheists: Why a new worldwide Satanic panic is likely, given worldwide religious trends. These same kinds of Christians also tend to be rather homophobic, as some of the listed articles point out.

Ditto for Islam, as far as I can tell.

As I said in the above-mentioned thread, human evolution is messy. As just one example, some of the ugliest forms of religion seem to be among the hardiest.

Later, in some further posts below, I'll comment on some of the articles linked on the above-mentioned page.

[Diane Vera]

One well-known article on this topic is The Next Christianity by Philip Jenkins, originally published in The Atlantic, October, 2002.

A major flaw of Jenkins's article is that it underestimates the growth of fundamentalist/evangelical forms of Christianity here in the U.S.A. - largely homegrown, not just a result of immigration from Third World countries. Jenkins portrays Christianity in the U.S.A. as liberal, even though the liberal sector of Christianity has actually shrunk over the past several decades, while the more conservative sector has grown. Furthermore, here in the U.S.A., the political religious right wing is supported mainly by white people, as evidenced by its ties to Republican Party, which is dismissed as a white boys' club by most African Americans, whether American-born or immigrants. Jenkins's impressions of Christianity in the U.S.A. are apparently based on goings-on in the Catholic Church and in the so-called mainline denominations, which are the oldest Protestant denominations, but which have been shrinking. His portrayal of Western Christianity as liberal is more accurate for Western countries other than the U.S.A. Even in other Western countries, fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity has been growing, but not as dramatically as in the U.S.A.

Still, Jenkins's article is an excellent eye-opener on the growth of extreme forms of Christianity in other parts of the world.

[Diane Vera]

An excerpt from Philip Jenkins' article:

The booming Pentecostal churches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are thoroughly committed to re-creating their version of an idealized early Christianity (often described as the restoration of "primitive" Christianity). The most successful Southern churches preach a deep personal faith, communal orthodoxy, mysticism, and puritanism, all founded on obedience to spiritual authority, from whatever source it is believed to stem. Pentecostals — and their Catholic counterparts — preach messages that may appear simplistically charismatic, visionary, and apocalyptic to a Northern liberal. For them prophecy is an everyday reality, and many independent denominations trace their foundation to direct prophetic authority. Scholars of religion customarily speak of these proliferating congregations simply as the "prophetic churches."

Of course, American reformers also dream of a restored early Church; but whereas Americans imagine a Church freed from hierarchy, superstition, and dogma, Southerners look back to one filled with spiritual power and able to exorcise the demonic forces that cause sickness and poverty. And yes, "demonic" is the word. The most successful Southern churches today speak openly of spiritual healing and exorcism. One controversial sect in the process of developing an international following is the Brazilian-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which claims to offer "strong prayer to destroy witchcraft, demon possession, bad luck, bad dreams, all spiritual problems," and promises that members will gain "prosperity and financial breakthrough." The Cherubim and Seraphim movement of West Africa claims to have "conscious knowledge of the evil spirits which sow the seeds of discomfort, set afloat ill-luck, diseases, induce barrenness, sterility and the like."

Americans and Europeans usually associate such religious ideas with primitive and rural conditions, and assume that the older world view will disappear with the coming of modernization and urbanization. In the contemporary South, however, the success of highly supernatural churches should rather be seen as a direct by-product of urbanization. (This should come as no surprise to Americans; look at the Pentecostal storefronts in America's inner cities.) As predominantly rural societies have become more urban over the past thirty or forty years, millions of migrants have been attracted to ever larger urban areas, which lack the resources and the infrastructure to meet the needs of these wanderers. Sometimes people travel to cities within the same nation, but often they find themselves in different countries and cultures, suffering a still greater sense of estrangement. In such settings religious communities emerge to provide health, welfare, and education.

This sort of alternative social system, which played an enormous role in the earliest days of Christianity, has been a potent means of winning mass support for the most committed religious groups and is likely to grow in importance as the gap between people's needs and government's capacities to fill them becomes wider. Looking at the success of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the historian Peter Brown has written, "The Christian community suddenly came to appeal to men who felt deserted ... Plainly, to be a Christian in 250 brought more protection from one's fellows than to be a civis Romanus." Being a member of an active Christian church today may well bring more tangible benefits than being a mere citizen of Nigeria or Peru.

Often the new churches gain support because of the way they deal with the demons of oppression and want: they interpret the horrors of everyday urban life in supernatural terms. In many cases these churches seek to prove their spiritual powers in struggles against witchcraft. The intensity of belief in witchcraft across much of Africa can be startling. As recently as last year at least 1,000 alleged witches were hacked to death in a single "purge" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Far from declining with urbanization, fear of witches has intensified. Since the collapse of South Africa's apartheid regime, in 1994, witchcraft has emerged as a primary social fear in Soweto, with its three million impoverished residents.

The desperate public-health situation in the booming mega-cities of the South goes far toward explaining the emphasis of the new churches on healing mind and body. In Africa in the early twentieth century an explosion of Christian healing movements and new prophets coincided with a dreadful series of epidemics, and the religious upsurge of those years was in part a quest for bodily health. Today African churches stand or fall by their success in healing, and elaborate rituals have formed around healing practices (though church members disagree on whether believers should rely entirely on spiritual assistance). The same interest in spiritual healing is found in what were once the mission churches — bodies such as the Anglicans and the Lutherans. Nowhere in the global South do the various spiritual healers find serious competition from modern scientific medicine: it is simply beyond the reach of most of the poor.

Disease, exploitation, pollution, drink, drugs, and violence, taken together, can account for why people might easily accept that they are under siege from demonic forces, and that only divine intervention can save them. Even radical liberation theologians use apocalyptic language on occasion. When a Northerner asks, in effect, where the Southern churches are getting such ideas, the answer is not hard to find: they're getting them from the Bible. Southern Christians are reading the New Testament and taking it very seriously; in it they see the power of Jesus fundamentally expressed through his confrontations with demonic powers, particularly those causing sickness and insanity. "Go back and report to John what you hear and see," Jesus says in the Gospel according to Matthew (11: 4-5). "The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor." For the past two hundred years Northern liberals have employed various nonliteral interpretations of these healing passages — perhaps Jesus had a good sense of the causes and treatment of psychosomatic ailments? But that is not, of course, how such scenes are understood within the Third Church.

Today, as in the early sixteenth century, a literal interpretation of the Bible can be tremendously appealing.

[...]

Alongside the fast-growing churches have emerged apocalyptic and messianic movements that try to bring in the kingdom of God through armed violence. Some try to establish the thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ on earth, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. This phenomenon would have been instantly familiar to Europeans 500 years ago, when the Anabaptists and other millenarian groups flourished. Perhaps the most traumatic event of the Reformation occurred in the German city of Münster in 1534-1535, when Anabaptist rebels established a radical social order that abolished property and monogamy; a homicidal king-messiah held dictatorial power until the forces of state authority conquered and annihilated the fanatics. Then as now, it was difficult to set bounds to religious enthusiasm.

Extremist Christian movements have appeared regularly across parts of Africa where the mechanisms of the state are weak. They include groups such as the Lumpa Church, in Zambia, and the terrifying Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), in Uganda. In 2000 more than a thousand people in another Ugandan sect, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, perished in an apparent mass suicide. In each case a group emerged from orthodox roots and then gravitated toward apocalyptic fanaticism. The Ten Commandments sect grew out of orthodox Catholicism. The Lumpa Church began, in the 1950s, with Alice Lenshina, a Presbyterian convert who claimed to receive divine visions urging her to fight witchcraft. She became the lenshina, or queen, of her new church, whose name, Lumpa, means "better than all others." The group attracted a hundred thousand followers, who formed a utopian community in order to await the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Since it rejected worldly regimes to the point of refusing to pay taxes, the Lumpa became increasingly engaged in confrontations with the Zambian government, leading to open rebellion in the 1960s.

Another prophetic Alice appeared in Uganda during the chaotic civil wars that swept that country in the 1980s. Alice Lakwena was a former Catholic whose visions led her to establish the Holy Spirit Mobile Force, also pledged to fight witches. She refused to accept the national peace settlement established under President Yoweri Museveni, and engaged in a holy war against his regime. Holy Spirit soldiers, many of them children and young teenagers, were ritually anointed with butter on the understanding that it would make them bulletproof. When Lakwena's army was crushed, in 1991, most of her followers merged with the LRA, which is notorious for filling its ranks by abducting children. Atrocities committed by the group include mass murder, rape, and forced cannibalism. Today as in the sixteenth century, an absolute conviction that one is fighting for God's cause makes moot the laws of war.

[Diane Vera]

This post previously contained info which I've now moved to the separate thread Eastern European Churches vs Human Rights.

[Steven E. Webster]

Diane,

You raise interesting issues here.

My brother is a United Methodist missionary in Africa. He is a progressive politically and theologically (although I'm sure most folks here would say he "sounds like" an evangelical). His main focus is helping hungry people improve their agricultural practices so they can feed themselves better. He is an agriculturalist first, but he is also a preacher.

He has seen first hand the ugly side of the African belief in witchcraft. One of the family members of one of his parishoners was stoned to death for allegedly being a witch--this is a common occurrence in Africa. My brother preached a sermon against this practice and required the whole congregation to confess their complicity in this man's death. It was pretty dramatic.

On the other hand we have many more western missionaries who encourage the belief in evil spirits and witchcraft. The right wing of my own denomination (United Methodist) in this country harbors people who believe in evil spirits and witchcraft (in the bad sense of evil forces allied with the "Christian" Satan). These people believe that homosexuality is caused by demonic possession, for instance. Although I do not mean to attack all Pentecostalism, a lot of these nutty folks seem to be part of the Pentecostal movement. (Seems to me that belief in works of the Holy Spirit should not automatically lead to irrational belief in and fear and panic of all sorts of evil spirits.)

The aspect of the witchcraft belief which is endemic in Africa which my brother is confronting is the way this belief is used and manipulated to scapegoat "enemies." I'm not saying belief in spirits is inherently wrong--but it is wrong when it becomes the basis for irrational and violent attacks on perceived "enemies."

It seems to me that these beliefs cease to be Christian when they lead to fear, panic, irrationality and violent attack on perceived enemies.

Steven Webster

[Diane Vera]

Originally Posted by Steven E. Webster

My brother is a United Methodist missionary in Africa. He is a progressive politically and theologically (although I'm sure most folks here would say he "sounds like" an evangelical). His main focus is helping hungry people improve their agricultural practices so they can feed themselves better. He is an agriculturalist first, but he is also a preacher.

He has seen first hand the ugly side of the African belief in witchcraft. One of the family members of one of his parishoners was stoned to death for allegedly being a witch--this is a common occurrence in Africa. My brother preached a sermon against this practice and required the whole congregation to confess their complicity in this man's death. It was pretty dramatic.

Thanks for sharing this with us.

Originally Posted by Steven E. Webster

On the other hand we have many more western missionaries who encourage the belief in evil spirits and witchcraft. The right wing of my own denomination (United Methodist) in this country harbors people who believe in evil spirits and witchcraft (in the bad sense of evil forces allied with the "Christian" Satan). These people believe that homosexuality is caused by demonic possession, for instance.

Please see my reply to you in the thread GLBT-friendly Christians and belief in Satan, demons, and angels?