Before The Next Christendom was published in 2002, Jenkins had already made a name for himself as a criminologist and political historian with acclaimed works like Moral Panic, Pedophiles and Priests, and The Cold War at Home. The Next Christendom is one of a series of books  (see Mystics and Messiahs, The New Anti-Catholicism, and Dream Catchers)  that have cemented his reputation as a scholar of religion and given him a wide popular, as well as academic, audience.

The Next Christendom popularized the idea that the future of Christianity lay in the global South. By the new millennium, a majority of the world’s Christians lived in South America, Africa, and Asia. “If we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela.” Jenkins digs into population and religion statistics to show that the shift of Christian predominance from North to South is accelerating, so much so that by 2050 “only about one-fifth of the world’s 3 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic Whites.” (2-3)

Contrary to the popular perception of Christianity as an intrinsically Western religion, Jenkins notes that the spread of Christianity in the global South is in many ways a return to the faith’s roots rather than an exceptional circumstance. During the early church, there were far more Christians in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East than in the West and until late in the middle ages large Christian minorities continued to flourish outside the West.  After the decline of non-Western Christianity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, missions efforts struggled because of the perception of Christianity as a foreign faith tied to “foreign imperial domination.” (30) However, Christianity spread rapidly in former European colonies as it went indigenous in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jenkins further fleshes out this argument in his best-selling The Lost History of Christianity (2008).

These new Southern Christians are an eclectic mix of Pentecostals, Catholics, and independent churches that often blend Christianity with traditional African religions. At the same time, Southern Christians do tend to be far more theologically and culturally conservative than their Western counterparts. They have raised Western eyebrows by sending missionaries to the homelands of their former colonial masters and by welcoming dissident Western conservatives to their denominations. Likewise, Liberal Catholics have been alarmed by the conservative shift at the Vatican, but, as Jenkins notes, “Of course the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church are so very conservative: they can count.” (198)

The rise of Christianity in the global South is accompanied by new tensions with a similarly resurgent Islam. Jenkins does not believe that Islam is necessarily any more violent than Christianity, but the growing populations of both faiths living in close proximity could become a fault line for future conflicts.

Although The Next Christendom is primarily a book about global Christianity, the spread of Christianity in the global South will have major ramifications in the United States as well. Jenkins adopts Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis and argues that the divide between Christians and Muslims (and, in India, Hindus) could erupt into global conflict as Western powers intervene on the behalf of fellow believers. US foreign policy will need to be conscious of religion in a way that was forgotten during the ideologically-driven Cold War. There also exists the potential for alienation between a Christianized global South and secularized North. Already, Jenkins notes, the Western media tends to portray Southern religion as primitive, barbaric, and fundamentalist in its attitudes toward church and state, gender, and homosexuality.

The rise of Christianity in the global South will change the face of American Christianity as well. Missions to the West have already been briefly mentioned and such efforts are likely to increase in the US and elsewhere. Immigrants to the United States are predominantly Christian, including large numbers of Catholics and Pentecostals from Latin America, Christian Arabs from the Middle East, and Presbyterian Koreans. Indeed, Jenkins predicts that America will become an increasingly Christian nation as the rest of the West continues to dechristianize. American Christianity, like the population in general, is headed towards becoming a minority-majority faith. If Jenkins’ predictions are even partially accurate, then historians of religion in America need to widen their understanding of non-white and non-Western Christianity; the next generation of American religious historians will need to read in multiple languages and have a solid understanding of global Christianity.

MARTIN: Were there fights about translations? Because doctrinal differences do have implications down the line, as you were saying, even though, you know, humorously, thou shalt commit adultery. I mean, there really are different consequences to different interpretations. Were there some significant fights?

Prof. JENKINS: Absolutely. For example, there is a word that shows up in the New Testament, and one of the translations is bishop. So if you translated that word as a bishop, then you were saying that this very kind of hierarchical, structural view of the church was right there in the Bible and nobody could argue with it.

Other people who didn’t like the idea of bishops and archbishops, said no, no, no, you can’t do that. You just call it overseers, supervisors, something like that. And also, words about kingship, kingdom, royal authority, this was to be a book about how God was over his church and the king was over his country.

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