Philip Jenkins, Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and a prolific author, was recently interviewed by Jeremy Lott, the Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue. Jenkins may be best known for his ground-breaking book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. He has now written over 20 books, including The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. I have on my shelf his book Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way, a useful corrective to a lot of wild stuff currently being written about Jesus.
Jenkins' latest book, God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis, will be coming out in May. Click here for the wide-ranging interview. The points highlighted below represent only some of the many subjects discussed.
You note that birthrates have leveled off in some countries that most readers wouldn't expect. Between 1986 and 2000, average births per woman in Iran have fallen from 6 to 2, which is slightly lower than the replacement rate of 2.1. Indeed, birthrates almost everywhere are plummeting. Why is that?
Jenkins: That's right, across the Middle East. The Middle East in the last 15 years is going through the great demographic transition and that is one of the great facts in world politics. What it should mean is that in about 15 years these countries should be vastly more stable. The next 15 years could be a very rocky ride, but the long-term trend is to underpopulation. These countries will have to figure out how do deal with all those old people. Sometimes-and I'm not speaking about Steyn particularly here-when people talk about these astronomical birthrates, they're using pretty dated figures.
Jenkins: . . . Increasingly, the U.S. looks like a very weird society on the global stage. On religious affiliation, it's half way between Europe and Africa and in some ways it looks like that in demography too. It's not a European society, it's not a Third World society, it's something very distinctive. So there I am back to American exceptionalism.
A substantial subset of recent immigrants to Europe is not Muslim but Christian. What effects are these immigrants having on religious life in Europe?
Jenkins: There is a huge network of immigrant churches, in Britain certainly, but also in basically every country there are some very large congregations. When people look at immigrant areas in France, they tend just to see Muslims, but a lot of the folks are actually black Christians-there are networks of Congolese churches-and they
really provide a whole alternative religious structure across Europe. In London on an average Sunday, somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of people in church are nonwhite, and a lot of those are very recent immigrants. The best known congregation is probably that one in Kiev in the Ukraine which claims to be the largest congregation in Europe these days, with 30,000 members. It's Nigerian.
Jenkins: . . . As Christianity moves south, it becomes poorer. It becomes more open to supernatural ideas, ideas of healing. Tying that together with the most recent book, that's also the picture you get of immigrant Christianity in Europe itself. That's having something of an effect on "mainstream" white Christianity as well. Healing is more in the public eye in Europe than it has been lo these many years. It's partly an ethnic change and a color change, but it's also a change of styles of worship and devotion.
You argue that Christians in Africa and Asia are very likely to view the Bible differently than many Westerners. How do they see it differently, and why?
Jenkins: Partly because they are coming at it with fresh eyes, when they read the Bible, they read of a society that makes more sense to them. For example, if you're debating the subject of homosexuality, then it's very tough in North America to cite something from Leviticus because Leviticus is obviously written for such an alien world, and it invites so many comebacks, such as: "So you believe the skin of the pig is unclean? Football's out."
In Africa, the main problem is not getting people to take the Old Testament seriously, it's getting them to realize that the New Testament takes precedence. In so many ways the Old Testament describes a world which is familiar. It might not be the world they're living in, but they know about worlds nearby where there is no medicine, polygamy, paganism, blood sacrifice. That means that a lot of the debates in the Bible, about the proper role of sacrifice, ancestors, and so on, are immediately present debates.
Link that to the whole point about poverty and an interest in the supernatural and healing, and people read the book of Acts as if it's not an ancient text but if it's like a current documentary. If you regard a book like that as something that's written for your world, it's easer to take its words as authoritative.