God Is Not One Read online

  In the nineteenth century, Christianity made a similar advance among English speakers, expanding even more rapidly than it had in the first Christian centuries. In 1800, less than one-quarter (23 percent) of the world’s population was Christian. By 1900, that figure had jumped to more than one-third (34 percent). The most extraordinary growth came in North America, which saw the total number of Christians jump tenfold between 1815 and 1915. In the process, the portion of Christians among the overall U.S. population expanded from about 25 percent to about 40 percent. In Canada, the advance of Christianity was even more dramatic—from roughly one-fifth of the overall population to roughly one-half.21

  But evangelicalism did not just change the quantity of Christians; it changed the quality of Christianity. As evangelicalism expanded its footprint, experience and the emotions trumped doctrine and the intellect. Though more Christians came to see the Bible as the inspired Word of God, fewer seemed interested in knowing what God had to say. Anti-intellectuals such as Methodist revivalist Peter Cartwright and “baseball evangelist” Billy Sunday boasted of their homespun ignorance, and Christians embraced a Scarecrow faith, their hearts overpowering their brains. If Positivism was, in French philosopher August Comte’s words, an “insurrection of the mind against the heart,” evangelicalism was an insurrection of the heart against the mind.22

  Evangelicalism is often confused with fundamentalism, and though each stresses conversion and champions “family values,” they are actually quite different. While both call the Bible the Word of God, evangelicals tend to speak of its inspiration rather than its infallibility, so they do not join fundamentalists in reading it as a geological or historical textbook. Historian George Marsden has famously defined the fundamentalist as “an evangelical who is angry at something,” and what fundamentalists are angry at is modernity.23 Evangelicals are both more friendly to modernity and less shrill. They were early and ingenious adopters of many new communication technologies, from the radio to television to the Internet.

  Today evangelicalism is visible in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, World Vision, and other voluntary associations that cut across old denominational lines. Though U.S. evangelicals are widely associated with figures on the Religious Right such as James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, nineteenth-century American evangelicals were politically progressive, spearheading movements to abolish slavery and to give women the vote. Today a typical evangelical in the United States is opposed to abortion and gay marriage but tilts to the center and even the left on many other public-policy issues, including poverty and the environment. The Evangelical Left is represented most eloquently by Jim Wallis, who has led the Sojourners Community in Washington, DC, since its founding in the early 1970s.

  The Pentecostal Century

  If nineteenth-century Christianity belonged to evangelicalism, twentieth-century Christianity belonged to Pentecostalism, a Spirit-filled faith that in recent decades has steered the Christian ship away from the Greco-Roman West and in a southerly and easterly direction. Christianity continues to be seen as white and Western, and as of 1900 just under 80 percent of the world’s Christians were Caucasian, and just over 80 percent lived in Europe or North America.24 So when Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1920 that “The Church is Europe; and Europe is The Church,” he was more or less right.25 But sometime in the twentieth century, Christianity’s center of gravity leaped across the Strait of Gibraltar—from Spain into North Africa.26 Much of this migration can be credited to Pentecostalism, which was made in America but is now equally at home in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

  A decade or so ago I suggested that American religion seemed to be moving from transcendence to immanence—from a colonial era of God the Father to a Victorian era of God the Son to a new era of God the Holy Spirit. Today this shift seems to be occurring worldwide. Pentecostalism is relocating the divine from “out there” to “in here,” and the Holy Spirit is finally getting its due.

  An outgrowth of the Holiness movement within the Protestant denomination of Methodism, Pentecostalism takes its name from the story in the New Testament book of Acts in which the Holy Spirit, after Jesus’s death, descended on His disciples during the Jewish holiday of Pentecost, and “all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues” (Acts 2:4, NIV). Pentecostalism’s distinctive feature is baptism in the Spirit, an additional experience of grace after conversion often evidenced by ecstatic speaking in unknown tongues, or glossolalia. Pentecostal worship gives free reign to “gifts of the Spirit” such as speaking in tongues, prophecy, and faith healing. And its preachers know how to put on a good show. U.S. president Abraham Lincoln once remarked that, when he sees a man preach, he likes “to see him act as if he were fighting bees.”27 Pentecostalism is replete with bee-fighting preachers.

  Like fundamentalism, with which it is often confused, Pentecostalism is a twentieth-century invention. Unlike fundamentalism, which accents doctrine, Pentecostalism accents experience, insisting (over fundamentalists’ fierce objections) that the miracles swirling around the early church in the book of Acts are still available to people of faith. Pentecostals also allow for direct communications from God that make fundamentalists and other scions of biblical authority queasy.

  The distinguishing marks of Pentecostalism appeared around the globe—in Wales, Korea, and India—during the first few years of the twentieth century and popped up in Kansas in 1900. But Pentecostalism’s origins are typically traced to April 1906 and a small black church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. At a series of interracial revivals led by a one-eyed black Holiness preacher named William Joseph Seymour (1870–1922), Christians began to pray, sing, and speak in languages they did not recognize. Many believed that the “gifts of the Spirit” they witnessed at Azusa Street were signs that they were living in the “last days” when God had promised to “pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17, RSV)—a belief made compelling when San Francisco’s Great Earthquake erupted in the midst of the bedlam. The Azusa Street revival, as it is now called, went on to exhibit for years the sort of sacred power that the Yoruba refer to as ashe. Thanks in part to articles in the Los Angeles Times denouncing the goings-on as a “Weird Babel of Tongues,” people visited from across the United States and around the world, and, when they went home, they took this new form of Christian worship with them.28

  Since the 1970s, Pentecostalism has boomed in the Catholic stronghold of Latin America, and many U.S. Hispanics have left Catholicism for Pentecostal churches. Pentecostalism is even growing in some of the world’s most secular societies. On a recent trip to Toronto, I learned of a professor there studying Swedish Pentecostalism. At first I thought this was a joke. “How many people does he study?” I asked. “Five?” But Pentecostalism is alive and well and living in, of all places, Sweden. Stockholm’s thriving Filadelphia Church, the first Pentecostal congregation in Sweden, was until the 1960s the largest Pentecostal church in the world. The Word of Life Church in nearby Uppsala boasts Europe’s largest Bible school.

  Pentecostalism produced denominations such as the Assemblies of God (est. 1914) and “Sister Aimee” Semple McPherson’s International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (est. 1927). It found institutional expression in Oklahoma-based Oral Roberts University (est. 1965) and in the U.S. television ministries of Jim and Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Pat Robertson. Its spirit also animates many nondenominational congregations and the Charismatic Movement that energized Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and Lutherans after World War II.

  From its humble birth on Azusa Street in 1906, Pentecostalism has developed into the world’s fastest growing Christian movement in part because, like the early Christian movement, it appeals powerfully to the powerless and the poor. Today over a quarter of the world’s Christians (roughly 600 million souls) are Pentecostals or Charismatics—not bad for a tradition that wasn’t even on the map at the start of the twentieth century.29 Roughly half of Brazil’s Christians are Pentec
ostals or Charismatics.30 Pentecostalism is also popular in the United States, and in Guatemala, where two presidents have been Pentecostals. Other pockets of Pentecostal strength include Nigeria, the Philippines, China, Chile, Ghana, South Africa, and South Korea.

  One source of Pentecostalism’s success is its ability to address both thisworldly and otherworldly concerns. Another is its ability to abide simultaneously in the pragmatic present and the biblical past.31 Like evangelicals and fundamentalists, Pentecostals view the Bible as the inspired Word of God, evangelize with gusto, and respond to the challenge of death by preaching personal salvation through faith in Jesus. But Pentecostals also attend to the challenge of human flourishing by promising health and wealth here and now. Especially in the Third World, they offer deliverance from demons and witches, and their strict rules about drinking, gambling, and womanizing have improved the lives of women worldwide, while putting more disposable income in the pockets of Pentecostal families.

  Pentecostalism has been criticized as escapist, and in most countries it continues to be associated more with the “prosperity gospel” (which says that Jesus calls us to be rich) than with the Social Gospel (which says that Jesus calls us to help the poor). The fastest growing denomination in Latin America is the Brazil-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. This church, which is now also active in the United States and the United Kingdom, preaches a “name it and claim it” theology that encourages believers to pray not only to get their souls into heaven but also to put cars in their driveways.

  Though almost all U.S. Pentecostals side with Republicans on bedroom questions such as homosexuality, premarital sex, and abortion, many tilt toward the Democrats on other social and political issues. In Brazil, Pentecostals tend toward the “center left.”32 In Venezuela, they have a favorable view of socialist president Hugo Chavez.33 Inspired by Jesus’s description of the poor as “blessed” (Luke 6:20), “progressive Pentecostals” worldwide are working to fight drug abuse, provide shelter for the homeless, feed the hungry, staff daycare centers, counsel drug addicts, fight the AIDS epidemic, and provide microfinancing for entrepreneurs.34

  Pentecostals also have a long history of embracing female clergy, something Catholic and Orthodox churches continue to refuse to do. Most of the kudos for ordaining women have accrued to liberal Protestant denominations such as the Episcopalians, who elevated Barbara Harris to the role of bishop in Massachusetts in 1989 and selected Katharine Jefferts Schori as its national leader in 2006. But Pentecostals have had female preachers from the start.

  The unprecedented rise of this tradition of the dispossessed has many hallmarks of a second Reformation. Whereas Luther liberated Christians from what had become for many a tyranny of good works, Pentecostalism liberates Christians from the tyranny of belief, which, after the Enlightenment, has become a straitjacket for many. One of the smartest and most open-minded graduate students in my PhD program was a Pentecostal. In a seminar on great thinkers in the study of religion, he consistently surprised me by agreeing with many of the theories of Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and others. After I confessed my surprise at his openness to their critiques of traditional Christian doctrines, he told me that his faith did not hang on belief. It hung instead on the sort of intense, personal experience that cannot be denied. Another friend, just before answering the altar call at a black church in the American South, confessed to her preacher that she didn’t really believe in Jesus. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you will.” Her preacher was able to reassure her because in his congregation experience mattered more than doctrine. And experience is Pentecostalism’s bread and butter—the experience of being inhabited by the awesome power of God.

  Brown Christians

  Just as historic as the rise of Pentecostalism is the related story of the browning of Christendom. Europe was the homeland of the old Christendom, and white was its color. But today the overwhelming majority (63 percent) of Christians live in Asia, Africa, or Latin America.35 There are now more Catholics in the Philippines than in the homelands of the last two popes (Poland and Germany) combined.36 And though Christianity was illegal in China as recently as 1970, there may now be more people in the pews on any given Sunday in China than in all of Europe.37 The LDS Church epitomizes this global shift. Though many perceive Mormons as lily white—the faith of the pop singers the Osmonds and of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney—most Mormons live outside the United States. Roughly a third live in Latin America, and the tradition is particularly strong in the South Pacific, where Mormons claim between a third and a half of the populations of the island nations of Samoa and Tonga.38

  Since colonization benefited Christian missions, you would think that the decolonization process that set in after World War II—independence for India (1947), Indonesia (1949), Ghana (1957), and Nigeria (1960)—would have hurt and perhaps even crippled Christianity. But the withdrawal of European powers from outposts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has instead bolstered Christianity. Most churches on these continents are now led not by foreign missionaries but by locals, and Bibles, prayer books, hymnals, and catechisms are all accessible in local languages.

  Thanks in large measure to the global appeal of Pentecostalism, between 1900 and 2000 the portion of Christians in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, skyrocketed from 1 percent to 45 percent, while growth in South Korea was almost as dramatic—from less than 1 percent to 41 percent. Over the same period, the Christian population in Asia jumped more than tenfold—from 27 million to 278 million. This all happened while Europe was rapidly dechristianizing, suffering losses not only in Christian market share but, more important, in the fervency of faith and the frequency of churchgoing. The portion of Christians among the overall population fell between 1900 and 2000 in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, and France. Today only 52 percent of European adults profess belief in God.39

  The browning of Christianity may seem to be a new departure, but it is actually a homecoming. During its earliest centuries, Christianity was nearly as multicultural as Los Angeles today. Breaking beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, the Christian movement spread in its infancy to Ethiopia and India. When Christianity gained insider status under Constantine, only one of its five church centers was in Europe (Rome). The others were in Asia (Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem) and Africa (Alexandria). Many of the greatest thinkers in the early church were Africans, not least Saint Augustine (354–430), the author of the world’s first autobiography, the Confessions, and the most influential Christian thinker between Paul and Martin Luther. In 500 C.E., two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in either Africa or Asia. Not until medieval times would the church come to be largely European.40

  The “next Christendom” is making its home in Anglican churches in Uganda, Pentecostal churches in Korea, Catholic churches in Brazil, and Han house churches in China.41 It is also visible in African independent churches, Spirit-filled congregations untainted by affiliations with the traditional denominations that cozied up to colonial regimes. Christianity is even browning in its old haunts. Some of the most visible pastors in the United States are African Americans, and Western Europe’s largest congregation, the London-based Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC), is a black church run by a senior pastor of Nigerian descent.

  Jaws still drop in the United States over the magnificence of evangelical megachurches—Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, T. D. Jakes’s The Potter’s House in Dallas, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, California—which often feature live bands, jumbotrons, basketball courts, espresso bars, and architecture that evokes your local shopping mall more than your grandmother’s sanctuary. Neither the United States nor Europe, however, claims any of the globe’s top twenty megachurches.42 The biggest of the big congregations—all Protestant and many Pentecostal—are found in countries such as South Korea, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast.

  Highlighting the fact that Christianity
is now an Asian religion, South Korea has dozens of megachurches in Seoul alone. These megachurches include the planet’s largest congregation, Yoido Full Gospel Church, which occupies a prime piece of real estate facing the National Assembly, a reminder of the rising political power of Pentecostalism in Asia and worldwide. This church has over 500 pastors and 800,000 members and draws over a quarter of a million parishioners (and gawkers) on an average weekend. But not all megachurches are Pentecostal, or even Protestant. The Cave Cathedral, a sanctuary carved out of rock hard by a garbage dump in Cairo, Egypt, blasts praise, prayers, and preaching over its massive sound system every Sunday to twenty thousand or so Coptic Orthodox believers.

  All this is to say that the face of Christianity is getting darker, epitomized not by Pope Benedict but by the South African Anglican archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu. Or, more precisely, by a not-so-famous woman in Brazil or China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, since, as church historian Dana Robert has observed, the typical Christian today is “no longer a European man, but a Latin American or African woman.”43

  The most widely reproduced image of Jesus, Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1941), depicts Jesus as a white man with blond hair and an aquiline nose—the sort of guy who, with a haircut and minus the beard, could represent Utah in the U.S. Senate. But this marshmallow Jesus now seems as out of date as Mr. Rogers. Today artists are increasingly portraying Jesus as Asian or African, and as a woman too. Just before the turn of the last millennium, the National Catholic Reporter sponsored a contest called “Jesus 2000” that challenged artists to produce a twenty-first-century Jesus. The winning entry, Janet McKenzie’s Jesus of the People, depicted a character of indeterminate gender and race but with dark skin and thick lips suggestive of a Native-American or black Christ.