The Triumph of Christianity (46 page)

Liberation Theology failed as a social movement, if for no other reason than that it was an ideological misfit. It lacked credibility to the political Left because of its religious rhetoric and connections to the church. Its emphasis on political goals and tactics made it a nonstarter in competition with religious movements. What remains noteworthy is that, as Anthony Gill demonstrates, Liberation Theology was not initiated primarily in response to the poverty of the masses, but in response to the Protestant threat. National church leaders sanctioned Liberation Theologians and their programs to the extent that Protestant groups were making headway in their nations.
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In remarkable contrast, the second Catholic response to Protestant competition has proved to be immensely popular and effective: the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement (CCR). Often described as Catholic Pentecostalism, CCR involves intense prayer meetings that often include “speaking in tongues.” And just as Protestant evangelists often fill Latin American soccer stadia for revival meetings, CCR also fills these same stadia. In 1999, an album of samba-inspired religious music by CCR television star Father Marcelo Rossi outsold all other CDs in Brazil.
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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the CCR is that, although many priests participate in it, “it is generally a lay movement.”
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In fact, were it not for the centrality of the Virgin Mary, it would be difficult to distinguish the CCR from Protestant Pentecostal groups. Both groups experience baptism in the Holy Spirit, both engage in glossolalia, both are deeply committed to faith healing, and both groups originated in the United States—Protestant Pentecostalism in Los Angeles in 1906, and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1967. CCR was taken south by American priests in the early 1970s.

The fundamental organizational unit of CCR is the weekly prayer group, having lay leaders and an average of about thirty members. These groups gather during the week to pray, engage in spontaneous glossolalia, sing, and contemplate; on Sundays, the CCR members flock to mass. There are tens of thousands of these prayer groups in Latin America, and the CCR has become a very capable competitor in the relatively free-market Latin American religious economy.

Salvatore Martinez, coordinator of CCR in the Vatican, informed me that there probably are more than sixty million official members worldwide and perhaps another forty million belong to independent charismatic Catholic groups. Martinez added that much of the membership as well as current growth is in Latin America. Unfortunately, there are no reliable statistics on membership broken down by nations.
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However, there are statistics that indirectly reflect the energizing effect of the CCR. Table 22.6 shows the percentage of Catholics in each Latin American nation who said “yes,” when asked,
Have you attended a place of worship or religious service in the past seven days?

Table 22.6: Percent of Catholics Who Attended Church in Past Seven Days (Gallup World Polls)

In most of Latin America today, Catholics are attending church at a truly remarkable level. In eight of these nations the weekly attendance rate is 60 percent or higher—72 percent in Guatemala. Four more nations have mass attendance rates above 52 percent. Compare this with Spain where only 33 percent say they attend mass weekly. Argentina and Chile have attendance rates about the same as Spain, and only in Uruguay (16 percent) is attendance at the low level thought to have been typical of Latin nations several decades ago—and Uruguay is a deviant case in many other ways as well.

Entirely in keeping with the expected effects of pluralism, Catholic attendance rates are highly correlated with the Protestant challenge: the larger the percentage Protestant, the higher the rate of Catholic attendance.
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Obviously, the Catholic Church has undergone a stunning renewal in Latin America. Where once the bishops were content with bogus claims about a Catholic continent and a reality of low levels of commitment, the Catholic churches in Latin America are now filled on Sundays with devoted members, many of them also active in charismatic groups that meet during the week. And the source of this remarkable change has been the rapid growth of intense Protestant faiths, thus creating a highly competitive pluralist environment.

This is not the first time such a thing has happened. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, when a massive influx of Catholic immigrants began in America, they brought with them the low levels of participation and concern that prevailed in their European nations of origin. Initially, many of these Catholic immigrants defected to Protestant groups that aggressively missionized among them. But the American Catholic clergy quickly adjusted by adopting Protestant recruitment techniques (including revival meetings) and soon the American Catholic Church was far stronger and more effective than any in Europe.
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In Latin America, the Catholic Church has reached these amazing heights of member commitment by adopting the major elements of their Protestant Pentecostal competitors with the result that the illusory Catholic continent is truly becoming a Charismatic Christian continent. Thus, the churching of Latin America.

Christians in China

T
HROUGH MUCH OF THE
twentieth century, the prevailing view among Western intellectuals was that the Chinese were immune to religion—an immunity that long preceded the Communist rise to power. When in 1934 Edgar Snow quipped that “in China, opium is the religion of the people,” the media “experts” chuckled in agreement and dismissed the million Chinese claimed as converts by Christian missionaries as nothing but “rice Christians”—cynical souls who had frequented the missions for the benefits they provided. Then in 1949 Mao Zedong came to power and it was widely agreed that China soon would be a model of the fully secularized, postreligious society.

But, it wasn’t to be. Instead, faith in a coming postreligious China proved to be the opium of Western intellectuals as well as of Marxist ideologists. It turns out that the Chinese Christians in 1949—those ridiculed in the West as rice Christians—were so “insincere” that they endured decades of bloody repression during which their numbers grew! And as official repression has slacked off, Christianity emerged (partly) from underground and has been growing at an astonishing rate in China.

Unfortunately, there is a great deal of disagreement over just how astonishing the growth has been: Are there now sixteen million or two hundred million Christians in China? Both numbers have been asserted with great confidence and with claims of being “official,” but perhaps the most widely accepted claim is that there are one hundred thirty million Chinese Christians. That total is often attributed to a survey conducted by the Chinese government.
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But no Chinese scholars or polling agencies know of such a survey and that total is not supported by any of the known surveys. Some of the confusion may arise from the fact that the Chinese government does keep track of how many people belong to Christian groups officially registered under the terms of the Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM). These groups now enroll about sixteen million members. But, as the government frankly admits, there may easily be several times that number of Christians since there are tens of thousands of Christian house churches in China that are not registered with TSPM. How many members do they have?

Unfortunately, thus far the Chinese government will not allow “foreign” survey companies to ask questions about religion. Hence although the Gallup Organization’s branch in Beijing conducts many surveys, these include no questions about religion or other “sensitive” issues. However, this limit does not apply to Chinese firms. So, if treated with caution, some useful conclusions can be drawn from a national survey of Han China, based on 7,021 interviews conducted in 2007 by Horizon, Ltd., China’s largest and most respected polling firm. The data have been made available to Baylor’s Program of Research on China, especially for use by scholars from China who participate in Baylor’s Chinese Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

The survey found that 3.1 percent of Chinese admit to being Christians (2.9 percent Protestants and 0.2 percent Catholics). This suggests that there are about 35.3 million Christians in China. However, this should be regarded as the
lowest
plausible number since there is every reason to assume that surveys greatly undercount Chinese Christians. Many Chinese refuse to participate in survey studies, and it is assumed that Christians are unusually likely to do so (it remains somewhat risky for Chinese to be identified as Christians). In addition, some Christians who do agree to be interviewed are likely to think it unwise to admit being a Christian when asked that question by a stranger. To get an accurate estimate of the number of Chinese Christians requires a correction factor for both of these suppressors.

To address these concerns my colleagues at Baylor and I launched a follow-up study in cooperation with colleagues at Peking University in Beijing (where I am an honorary professor of sociology). Based on contacts in the Chinese Christian community, we were able to obtain samples of members of Chinese house churches from many of the same areas used in the original survey sample. Survey interviewers were sent to seek interviews with these people, all of whom were active Christians (but this was unknown to the interviewers). Of these known Christians, 62 percent refused to be interviewed compared with an overall refusal rate of 38 percent for the original survey. Adjusting for this difference in response rates yields an estimate of 58.9 million Christians sixteen and over.

In addition, of those known Christians who did agree to be interviewed, 9 percent did not admit to being Christians when asked. Correcting for that suppressor, brings the number of Christians sixteen and older to 64.3 million Chinese. Of course, this total is for 2007. Obviously the total is higher now. It seems entirely credible to estimate that there are about 70 million Chinese Christians in 2011.

Moreover, Christian growth is not limited to a few segments of the Chinese population. Based on an analysis of the Horizon, Ltd., survey,
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there are no significant age effects. Christians are equally likely to have grown up in rural and urban areas. Christians are quite evenly spread across all levels of education. And with Communist Party members removed (since they must, at the very least, keep their Christianity a secret), middle and upper income Chinese are significantly more apt to be Christians than are those with lower incomes. Of course, as is true of all religious groups around the world,
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Chinese women (3.8 percent ) are more apt to be Christians than are men (1.6 percent). Even so, there would seem to be no demographic barriers to continued Christian expansion in China.

One reason that so many Western academic observers may have so greatly overestimated the number of Christians in China is that there is such a pronounced Christian climate on the campuses of the leading universities—far more so than even on most sectarian American campuses. Moreover, it has become a common conviction even among non-Christian Chinese intellectuals that Christianity played the essential role in the rise of Western civilization, and hence it might be vital to the economic and scientific development of China as well. As a result, the Chinese exhibit a strong interest in Christian history, to such an extent that large numbers of books on that topic have been translated and published in China, including three of mine, with more to come soon (probably including this one).

Why Christianity Grows

M
ARK 16:15 QUOTES THE
risen Jesus: “And he said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.’” That is the “secret” to Christian growth: Christianity is able to motivate so many of its followers to proselytize on behalf of their faith that it currently is growing rapidly by way of conversions in what historically have been non-Christian regions.

That brings us to a fundamental issue: Why does Christianity have such appeal? Four major aspects will be assessed: message, scripture, pluralism, and the link to modernity.

Message

As Augustine pointed out in his
Confessions,
the basic Christian message is so simple that it can easily be grasped by children, while its theological ramifications are sufficient to challenge the most powerful intellects. This is fully apparent in the Christian conception of divinity. Like Judaism and Islam, Christianity conceives of God as a transcendent, omnipotent, merciful “being,” who is also somewhat mysterious, remote, and awesome. But unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity also embraces the Son, a very human and approachable figure. Consequently, while God dominates the Christian worldview, the Son dominates the affective dimension—adults speak of Jesus having come into their lives, children sing “Jesus loves me,” and Christ and his cross dominate Christian art. When Christians seek to convert others, their emphasis usually is on Jesus, which is facilitated by the fact that the Gospels are the story of Jesus.