Dear Spengler,

If Mecca is ever razed by an invading army, it will not be Israeli or American or European, but it will march up from Africa south of the Sahara - though it would take a couple of generations more for the impending Christian transformation of Africa to proceed that far. If I were an Arab, I would be looking anxiously south. The current crisis in the Anglican Communion is revealing. Elan and freshness of thought are actually with the conservatives. The prominent role of the Nigerian Archbishop Akinola is also telling (his province contains many more practicing Anglicans than Britain and North America combined).

The challenge from Islam may produce a number of surprising and unexpected responses in the West, of greater significance than the military conflict. Interesting times ahead.

Sincerely,
Douglas Bilodeau
Bloomington, Indiana, USA


Dear Douglas,

Thank you for bringing this issue forward. Prof Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University predicts an "historical turning point" in Christianity, "one that is as epochal for the Christian world as the original Reformation". In the October 2002 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, he wrote, "In the global South (the areas that we often think of primarily as the Third World) huge and growing Christian populations - currently 480 million in Latin America, 360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia, compared with 260 million in North America - now make up what the Catholic scholar Walbert Buhlmann has called the Third Church, a form of Christianity as distinct as Protestantism or Orthodoxy, and one that is likely to become dominant in the faith." (Click here for the article.)

This may look like a "Third Church" to Catholic eyes, but what I perceive is the proliferation of Anglo-Saxon, that is, American, Christianity, albeit in the patchwork raiment of local peoples. Growth of church membership in the southern hemisphere concentrates in denominations of American or British origin. Observes Prof Jenkins, "it is Pentecostals who stand in the vanguard of the Southern Counter-Reformation. Though Pentecostalism emerged as a movement only at the start of the twentieth century, chiefly in North America, Pentecostals today are at least 400 million strong, and heavily concentrated in the global South. By 2040 or so there could be as many as a billion, at which point Pentecostal Christians alone will far outnumber the world’s Buddhists and will enjoy rough numerical parity with the world’s Hindus."

Samuel Huntington’s characterization of American civilization as "Anglo-Protestant" has merit, but his shot goes astray. No predestination prevents other peoples from adopting the Anglo-Protestant principle as their own. Of the 6,000 languages spoken on the planet, two go extinct every week (Why radical Islam might defeat the West, July 8, 2003). We are well into a Great Extinction of the Peoples, such as has not occurred since the collapse of Rome. Just as the endangered peoples of the 4th century embraced Christianity as a promise of immortality beyond the grave of their culture, so the peoples of the South flock to the same Cross. Seventeen hundred years ago they acknowledged the authority of Rome. Today the source of Christian authority is America.

The secularists who dominate American foreign policy seem to think that they can export the shell of the American system, namely its constitutional forms, without its religious kernel. It seems that the peoples of the South know better. It is no stranger that America’s hold over the world’s imagination should find religious expression first and political expression later, than that radical Protestants should have founded America in the first place. The new Christians of the South will surprise us for ill as well as good. Such matters of the spirit lie beyond anyone’s capacity to predict and well may have huge strategic impact, as you observe.

Spengler