CHRISTIANITY
Islam
| Judaism
Where is the religion found today?
by Kendra Hotz
Christianity
has spread across every region of the globe. At first it grew and
flourished primarily in regions that belonged to the Roman Empire:
Europe, the Near East, and North Africa. During the medieval period
(500-1500), Roman Catholicism spread into western Europe, while
Eastern Orthodoxy spread into Russia and the Slavic nations. At
the same time, most in the Near East and North Africa converted
to Islam. The third main subgroup, Protestantism, emerged in Europe
in the 16th-century and spread, as did Roman Catholicism, wherever
European colonialism spread during the modern period.
For
this reason, it is easy to imagine Christianity to be a phenomenon
of the western and northern hemispheres, a faith tradition for Europeans
and North Americans of European ancestry. But the
Christian faith has always been remarkably adaptable. Africans
brought to North America as slaves, for example, fused a new-found
faith with their own cultural traditions to shape a distinctive
African-American expression of Christianity that persists even today.
The
twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen the rapid growth
of Christian faith traditions rooted in indigenous cultures beyond
Europe and North America. The
growth of Christianity in the emerging world represents not so much
an official break with Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, or
European/North American Protestantism as it does a response and
adaptation of the faith to cultural contexts very different from
the ones in which those traditions developed, including experiences
of colonialism and of marginalization by economic structures that
privilege industrialized nations.
We
can gain a sense of the reach of the Christian faith by drawing
on some statistics gleaned from the World
Christian Database, a repository of population statistics related
to religion that is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Global
Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. In places like
Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania, Christianity
dominates the religious scene. 76% of Europeans, for example, and
93% of Latin Americans identify themselves as Christian. In North
American the figure reaches 83%, with 80% of the residents of Oceania
affirming the Christian faith.
In
Africa, nearly half of the population, 46%, is Christian. In Asia,
less than ten percent of the population is Christian; even so, numerically,
there are more Christians in Asia, nearly 351 million, than there
are in North America, which has about 277 million. There are also
more Christians in Africa (411 million) than there are in North
America. Likewise, in spite of the perception of Christianity as
a religion of the northern hemisphere, and in spite of its much
longer historical presence in Europe, there are nearly as many Christians
in Latin America (517 million) as there are in Europe (553 million).
The
Christian faith, then, is both broadly and deeply diverse. There
is more than merely a scattering of Christians outside of Europe
and North America. In fact, the majority of Christians live outside
of those regions. In recent decades, leaders in Christian denominations
in North America and Europe have become increasingly aware of the
breadth and diversity of Christian traditions outside of the North
and West, and have become appreciative especially of how worship
practices that emerge in different contexts might enrich and correct
their own traditions. As a result, it is no longer unusual to find
a congregation in middle-America singing a hymn to a traditional
African folk melody or offering a prayer composed by a Latin American
priest.
Copyright
©2007 Kendra Hotz
Kendra
G. Hotz serves as Adjunct Professor of Theology at Memphis
Theological Seminary. She formerly taught at Calvin College. Hotz
is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and coauthor
(with Matthew T. Mathews) of Shaping
the Christian Life: Worship and the Religious Affections
(2006) and coauthor of Transforming
Care: A Christian Vision of Nursing Practice (2005).
This excerpt from What Do Our Neighbors Believe?: Questions
and Answers on Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Howard Greenstein,
Kendra Hotz, and John Kaltner is used with permission from Westminster
John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky. To
purchase a copy of WHAT
DO OUR NEIGHBORS BELIEVE? visit amazon.com. This link is provided
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