Part two, "The Next Christianity"
If the next Pope is conservative and continues to listen more to the Southern part of the world, do you think the Catholic Church will lose a lot of those who are agitating for liberal reforms?
A lot of people have talked about Catholics leaving the Church, but it's been interesting how few of them have actually done so. Even the quite liberal people who disagree with the Church on lots and lots of different things still very often turn up to Mass on Sundays?though they complain a lot. I don't think we're necessarily talking about a lot of defections, but we're talking about continuing unhappiness and agitation, maybe contributing to further scandals and further emphasis on scandals. But I get myself in enough hot water trying to predict demographic trends. Trying to predict specifically where the American Catholic Church is going to be in five years would be very tough.
You write that "the first Reformation was a lot less straightforward than some histories suggest." In what ways is it more complicated than the story that's typically presented?
The standard idea of the Reformation is that you had heroic figures standing up and making this new statement, launching a revolution, kicking in the door, the door was rotten, and the whole structure fell down. Well, there are a number of things wrong with that picture. First of all, what people were fighting about was nothing like as simple as that?it wasn't just an issue of liberty and the freedom to marry and fighting a corrupt church. One side was as religious and "superstitious" as the other one?the Protestants were just as anti-Jewish and likely to burn witches as the Catholics, in some cases they were even more so. It wasn't a case of the revolution triumphing overnight. The revolution triumphed by employing a great deal of persecution. Protestant countries became Protestant by rigidly repressing the old Catholic ways. They had to kill an awful lot of Catholics in order to become Protestant societies. And the other issue is that the old world did not go away gracefully. The Catholic Church did not collapse, it became a reformed institution by becoming more Catholic, and that's a very successful recipe. Today the Roman Catholic Church is still the largest religious organization on the planet?there are more Catholics on the planet than there are Muslims, for example. We have a kind of simple, heroic vision of the Protestant triumph, which is in terms of Protestant freedom versus Catholic slavery, to put it crudely, and it's just not like that. It's much more ambiguous.
How might a twenty-first-century Reformation?and Counter-Reformation?play itself out?
Moving away from the Reformation/Counter-Reformation terms specifically, the main analogy I see is that of a religious revolution and its aftermath. A liberalizing revolution starts off in one area and instead of sweeping the whole Christian world what it actually does is invite a conservative, traditionalist reaction that proves to be even stronger in the rest of the world. When you look at the numbers in the Catholic world, they are pretty overwhelming. The parts of the world that seem to be tempted by a liberalizing "reformation" are relatively small. But the areas that might be tempted to a much more conservative, traditional Christianity are very large.
There are a number of Catholics around today who speak in terms of Martin Luther nailing the theses on the church door at Wittenberg. Some of them talk about a third Vatican council which would bring about the reforms they want. The idea I play with is that they could end up with something they don't want. Instead of a Vatican council, they could end up with another Council of Trent, which was something that was called to deal with reform and did it by saying, Look, all those things you didn't like, we're bringing them back double. So it became an even more conservative, traditional system than what they were trying to get away from.
Your article hints at some scary scenarios?for instance that a religious revolution coupled with a conservative reaction might result in sectarian violence similar to what Europe experienced during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Sectarian violence could flare up in a number of ways. One of them is the Christian/Muslim issue, which we've talked about and which is a very pressing danger. Another thing to watch for is Protestant/Catholic conflict or rather Pentecostal/Catholic conflict. Pentecostalism has been growing very fast in Latin America, and most people would say that in Latin America one person out of every nine is a Pentecostal. In some of the areas of fastest growth, notably Peru and Mexico, there have been conflicts between Protestants and Catholics which look exactly like what would have happened in France and Germany around 1580. They even start the same way?the Catholics have a procession of the Virgin, the Protestants gather round and make fun of it, the Catholics go off and burn down the local church. At the moment that's largely at the level of rioting, except in some areas of southern Mexico where it really does look like civil war. That's a worrying issue for Latin America. It's not so much an issue in Africa, where Catholics and Protestants still have lots of space between them, and lots of other people to convert.
I've been interested in some of the responses I've gotten to my books. People tell me that the things I write about are really scary. You know, I don't intend them to be scary. People say, Oh, this is a terrifying book, it suggests that we're going to have all this fundamentalism and all this traditional Christianity. But I don't think that's necessarily scary. It's just a different kind of Christianity. If people are shooting at each other, that frightens me. But if people are just believing differently, that doesn't.
But some of the implications of your book?the religious clashes we could see in the future?do seem fairly apocalyptic.
Oh, sure. The most worrying areas, as I said, are in the Muslim-Christian interaction. Those do worry me. When U.S. soldiers find themselves in the southern Philippines, for example, I'm not sure how many policy-makers realize that what they're doing is walking along one of the key religious fault lines in the world.
Some of the tensions in U.S. society?between separation of church and state and Christian fundamentalism, between liberal Protestant denominations and movements such as Pentecostalism, which are reminiscent of a more radical, conservative brand of Christianity?seem to reflect the growing rift between Northern and Southern Christianity. Do you see the U.S. as in some ways an anomaly in the North/South picture you draw?
I almost see three different demographic trends here?you have Europe, which is de-Christianizing at an amazing rate; you have Africa and Latin America, where Christianity is growing very fast; and the U.S., where Christianity is holding on very well. It's still the default religion for the great majority of Americans. It's as difficult for Europeans to take American God-talk seriously as it is for them to look at, say, Africa or Latin America. I think that's one concept that we tend to misunderstand in the United States. We have this idea that America is becoming a very religiously diverse society. For instance, there's a very interesting book by Diana Eck called A New Religious America , about how America is becoming the world's most diverse society. In fact I disagree. I think it's becoming a more Christian society?a society in which Christians are if anything more numerous and more dominant, because the more Latino a country becomes, the more you get those kinds of religious traditions. One figure I always quote is that by 2050 a third of Americans will probably be claiming Latino or Asian roots. The great majority of those are going to be coming from Christian backgrounds. I do think the U.S. is very odd in terms of where it fits into the world's religious picture. And even odder is the split between the religion of the mainstream and the non-religion of the elite. The sociologist Peter Berger has this famous quote about Indians and Swedes?he says Indians are the most religious people in the world, Swedes are the least religious, and Americans are a nation of Indians governed by Swedes. I wish I'd invented that quote?it's very accurate.
There really does seem to be a split within the U.S. The "Christmas and Easter" Christians seem to be the ones running the media?and looking at the fundamentalist Christians with amazement.
From the archives:
"The Next Church" (August 1996)
Seamless multimedia worship, round-the-clock niches of work and service, spiritual guidance, and a place to belong: in communities around the country the old order gives way to the new. By Charles Trueheart
Or horror. In my book I quoted an article by Brent Staples in The New York Times that begins by commenting how churches across America are deserted and if only they would just come to terms with secular norms about issues of gender and sexuality, maybe they'd have a chance. This shows that Brent Staples has probably never looked inside a church outside midtown Manhattan, because when you go anywhere else in the country, the churches are trying to build ever bigger car parks. I sometimes say that if you want to see the symbols of soaring faith in architecture, you can look at the Gothic spires in the Middle Ages or the church car parks in twentieth-century America.
Do you see the U.S. evolving toward the Swede version or the Indian version? Or do you think it will maintain the current dichotomy?
From the archives:
"One Nation, Slightly Divisible" (December 2001)
The electoral map of the 2000 presidential race became famous: big blocks of red (denoting states that went for Bush) stretched across the heartland, with brackets of blue (denoting states for Gore) along the coasts. Our Blue America correspondent has ventured repeatedly into Red territory. He asks the question?after September 11, a pressing one?Do our differences effectively split us into two nations, or are they just cracks in a still-united whole? By David Brooks
As far as I can see, I think it will continue very much as it is?ideally with Indians and Swedes blissfully unaware of each other's existence. We leave them alone, they leave us alone.
Do you travel extensively to do the research for your books and articles? If so, are there any personal impressions that jump out at you from having witnessed different versions of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere?
I've traveled a fair amount, but oddly, the best impressions I got were actually in Europe. When you're in Mexico, for example, you tend to see some things as part of the context. But it's where you see the two cultures coming together that you're really struck. One impression that leapt out at me happened was something I observed in Amsterdam a couple of years ago on a Sunday. You realize that you are in a completely different city from an American city, because there is virtually nothing you would call church life anywhere in the downtown. The churches are non-functioning or empty?Amsterdam is as secular a city as you can find. And then you move into the poorer suburbs, and you can see the churches filling up, and they're entirely made up of Africans. You think of all the lessons this has in terms of stories of colonial empires, and you think of all these Dutch missionaries going out to Africa or Asia to convert. This is an example of the obvious phrase the empire strikes back. Seeing these Africans who are clearly not the world's richest people, but who are very sober, respectable folk, you think, Well, that's the future of Christianity. It's a very powerful visual statement.
Many of the characteristics of Christianity as it's practiced in the global South?a belief that God will intercede on a personal level, a belief in using prayer to exorcise demons or witches, a certain apocalyptic worldview?seem to hark back to earlier versions of Christianity in the North, as it might have been practiced during the Middle Ages, or perhaps in Colonial America. Do you think what we're seeing in the South is part of a natural progression, and that in two or three hundred years Southern Christianity may look a lot like Northern Christianity does now?
I'd say two things. Firstly, you'd be amazed how many Americans practice the kind of Christianity you just described. You would not have to go far from where you are now to find a church where people believed those things. They could be Latinos, they could be African-American, or they could be white. Just because religion moves on to a more liberal, more secular approach doesn't mean that everyone else gives up the older ideas.
But I think it is important to say that African or Asian Christianity will become a lot more diverse. Something like that is already happening. If you look at South Africa, for example, which is probably the most socially advanced country on the continent, you have a very wide range of religious belief?everything from very liberal academic intellectual folk associated with mainstream churches like Anglican and Methodist, over to some of the independent churches, the Pentecostal churches. Will the Christianity of the South liberalize? Yes, I think that's happening already. But that won't necessarily shut out some of the older ideas and practices. Built into Christianity, I think, is a kind of cycle, in which the further people move toward secularism and intellectual approaches to religion, the more at least some people will be drawn back to the idea of an original "primitive" religion. Wherever you have a religion based firmly on a scripture, you'll always get that cycle. That's why fundamentalism has always been around and always will be, under different names. People will always be trying to get back to the pure ideal, as they imagine it. It's a very Newtonian system?for every action, there's a wildly disproportionate reaction.
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