Christianity is rapidly reverting to its normal and proper place in the world. After some curious centuries in which the faith was largely the preserve of Europeans and their offspring overseas, Christianity is once more returning to its ancient homelands, in Africa and Asia, as well as to Latin America and Oceania. The fact of that modern-day global spread is no longer surprising, but many still do not appreciate the historical context. So grounded is Christianity in the Western inheritance that it seems almost revolutionary to contemplate this globalization, with all its potential impact on theology, art, and liturgy. Some even ask whether this new global or world Christianity will remain fully authentic, as European norms seem to represent a kind of gold standard.
But such questions appear quite ironic when we realize how unnatural the Euro-American emphasis is, when seen against the broader background of Christian history: another, earlier global Christianity once existed. For most of its history, Christianity was a tricontinental religion, with powerful representation in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and this was true into the 14th century. Most conventional histories of Christianity omit a thousand years of the story, at least as it affected vast stretches of territory—several million square miles, in fact. Christianity became predominantly European not because this continent had any obvious affinity for that faith, but by default: this was the continent where it did not fall to ruin. As Andrew Walls noted, “it was not until comparatively recent times—around the year 1500—that the ragged conversion of the last pagan peoples of Europe, the overthrow of Muslim power in Spain, and the final eclipse of Christianity in Central Asia and Nubia combined to produce a Europe that was essentially Christian and a Christianity that was essentially European.” And at that point, some believe, there began the North Atlantic Captivity of the Church.
Inevitably, then, as thoughtful people contemplate the modern state of Christianity, there is a growing market for histories of the faith as it really existed in its fullness. The picture that emerges is startling in its diversity and geographical spread, and the immense range of circumstances in which Christians have lived in various times and places. Major recent contributors include Lamin Sanneh, in his splendid Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity, and now Martin Marty offers his global account of The Christian World.
Even Marty’s chapter titles, his “episodes,” suggest the scale of the departure from more traditional surveys, which commonly hurry to get the faith to Europe, and then largely ignore the rest of the world until the arrival of those Europeans. Marty, however, pursues a symphonic approach, in which different regions serve as themes and motifs, heard at the beginning and perhaps falling away during later movements, but never forgotten, always ready to recur at significant points of the performance. For Marty, the church of course begins in a Jewish environment, followed by a First Asian Episode, a First African, and a First European. A second European Episode then follows (roughly covering the years since 1500), and then a North American; but then the earlier motifs surface once more, with a Second African Episode and a Second Asian. A thoughtful conclusion stresses the “irrepressible” quality of the Christian venture, and its ability to recoup in one region catastrophic losses suffered in another.
I mean no disrespect to Marty’s work when I say that little of the material presented, few of the examples, will come as any great surprise to readers with any background in Christian history. Its value lies instead in its overall construction, and the relative importance allotted to different times and regions, and he has clearly exercised enormous restraint in limiting coverage of Western-centered topics that he knows and loves—the Reformation, the 18th century Awakenings—in order to give due credit to non-Euro-American issues. Many will find the results startling, and that is very much to the good. To take an example, his North American chapter uses a sparse 28 pages to span the whole experience of Christianity in that region since 1492. In comparison, modern Africa receives 19 pages, modern Asia 18, both quite rational allocations in terms of the numbers of believers in those regions today and of their likely importance in the development of the faith in coming years. The Christian World is a bold attempt to make people rethink their basic assumptions of the where and when of a history they may assume they know all too well. To use a rather ugly word, it is a classic exercise in defamiliarization. Marty incidentally, as is well known, never employs ugly words or jargon, and writes throughout in admirably clear, intelligent prose.
Reading a book like Marty’s raises many questions, especially about the amount of attention we devote to cherished topics. In a fair and balanced survey of Christian history, for instance, would the great revivals of the 18th-century Atlantic world deserve more attention than the very comparable movements of 20th-century Africa? Or is that a question that can only be answered by historians yet unborn?
In rethinking these diverse Christian worlds, furthermore, we need to reconstruct our sense of geography no less than of history, of space as well as time. Though maps rarely lie, in the sense of cartographers presenting data they know to be false, the way we choose to visualize information can give a radically distorted impression of reality. As an example, suppose we think of the first half of the Christian experience, the first millennium or so. Where would we properly look for the heart of Christian experience? When we think about the spread of Christianity, we commonly use maps focused on Europe and the Mediterranean, as we know intuitively that this was the scene of the most intense and important activity. If the Christian world has always been a largely European reality, then it makes sense to use Europe-centered maps, with the Levant off to the distant right-hand fringe. The message offered is that beyond the colored margins, Christianity never existed, or at least never mattered. Our maps don’t include South America, because it is irrelevant to the story before 1492; by the same token, why should we include Asia or Africa?
As a useful alternative image, we can turn to the symbolic world maps that Christians commonly used through the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, which depicted the three continents as fairly equal lobes joined together in Jerusalem. Depicting the world in such simple geometric forms did not mean that early cartographers were ignorant or incompetent, as they were quite capable of drawing up highly accurate charts for practical navigation, but these maps rather carried a higher truth: Jerusalem was the center of the world, the natural site for Christ’s act of self-sacrifice and redemption. These images also reflected a world in which Christianity had a strong presence across Asia and much of northern Africa. Criticizing traditional visual concepts of Christian history, Andrew Walls has suggested that, instead of placing a vital early Syrian Christian center like Edessa on the distant eastern fringes of Europe, it makes at least as much sense to locate it at the far west of an Asian map, in the lower left hand corner. He was not of course suggesting that such an Asian-focused interpretation would be complete or comprehensive, but it would no less accurate than the Eurocentric vision. Leaving Europe out of the story makes as much, or as little, sense as omitting Asia.
Marty’s work must also make us think about the education and training needed by anyone seeking to understand Christianity. In the Western context, we recognize the intimate relationship between faith and politics, and the need to appreciate the secular contexts of Christian history. We know that Christianity was profoundly shaped by the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and by the Enlightenment of the 18th. But equally, we can scarcely hope to explore the Christian histories of Africa, Asia or Latin America without knowing something of their secular politics, their distinctive disasters and triumphs—to say nothing of their indigenous cultural achievements. Conversely, Christianity has been so critical in those regions that it is idle to explore their broader histories without knowing something of that faith. Christian history makes no sense without Africa; African history makes no sense without Christianity.
In the contemporary academic world, professors often urge the adoption of global perspectives, to break the stranglehold of Dead White European Males. Let me then offer a modest proposal for the creation of a non-Eurocentric humanities curriculum that is at once global, diverse, polycentric, multicultural and multiracial, one that incidentally tells the story of the wretched of the earth in terms of their deepest aspirations, and in their own voices. Let us study Christianity.
Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Religious Studies and History at Penn State University. He is the author most recently of God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (Oxford Univ. Press).
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