Could American Christianity Fade Away?

I've been reading The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins.  I love his writing. Always makes me think.  This book is turning my map of Christian history upside down.  I remember in seminary I learned Church History out of that textbook by Kenneth Scott Latourette.  He was an evangelical expansionist and missionary, so he gave us Church History from that perspective.  Then later I read Justo Gonzalez' history, an attempt to tell Church History from the underside, the perspective of oppressed people and peasants rather than lords and ladies. Those were the liberation theology years, when I was a 'fellow' student of the Womanists and learning from such greats as James Cone and Cornell West and Kosuke Koyama and Dorothee Soelle.

But Jenkins tells a different story.  Did you know that the Christian faith expanded much more rapidly to the east than to the west?  Nestorian and Jacobite Christians covered Asia Minor (now Turkey) and China and even India.  Korea had a strong Christian Church when Catholics were still evangelizing in northern England and Europe. The Nubian Church in Abyssinia and Ethiopia had more followers than the Coptic Alexandrian Church in Egypt. Christianity had many adherents in northern Africa, with the center of the Church in the 5th century arguably in Carthage, not in Rome or Constantinople.

But then came Mohammed and Islam.  In just a couple of hundred years the Moslem faith spread like wildfire. Arabic replaced Greek and Syriac as the principal cultural and government language across the Mediterranean world.  Moslems had tremendous and positive influence wherever they entered.  But Jenkins points out that Islam was greatly influenced by Christian and Jewish practices.  Religions meld.  Still do.

So now we are increasingly secularized in America, as in Europe in the past several decades.  Less than 40% of Americans are connected to a church, and less than 20% attend. Meanwhile, Islam is growing.  Hinduism is growing.  We have a large Hindu Temple just down the street from our home in Bridgeton.  Thousands gather there for high holy days.  And we are welcome to join them.  Hinduism is remarkably absorptive.

We hear these days that more Christians have been martyred in the last hundred years than any other time in history.  That may be so. Jenkins liturgizes the terrible pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The Turks, apparently, committed more genocide on Christians before World War I than Hitler killed Jews in World War II.  Whole populations of Christians have been wiped off the map.  But Christians have also massacred Moslems.  I did not know that perhaps a majority of the Mongol Horde were professing Christians. They drew no quarter.  Then there was Bosnia and Herzogovinia just fifteen years ago.

My greatest 'take away' from this book is that we are always only a generation away from extinction.  the purpose for us as Christians is to share the gospel, to make disciples.  But my prayer is that in this creative time in which we live we can come to understand that discipleship does not have to include exclusivism and genocide. Can we love one another across lines of religion, and thus demonstrate the power of Christ, without having to declare Him as 'Lord' with 'one way' language?  I think so.