A century ago, the Catholic intellectual Hilaire Belloc wrote: “Europe is the faith”.
Today, conservative Christians, Catholic and Protestant, increasingly say: “Africa is the faith” – because the demographic future and the strongest commitment to traditional teachings are there.
At a time when the American right is strongly opposed to immigration and globalization and the left casually portrays conservatives as racists, many Christians who make up the Republican base – as well as much of the center-right elite – are looking to the developing world for support. ‘hope.
Africa is experiencing runaway population growth, while birth rates in the United States, Europe and East Asia are below replacement levels.
The United Nations estimates that by 2050 there will be 2.5 billion Africans, and the growth won’t stop there.
Nigeria, closely divided and hotly contested between Muslims and Christians, already has a population of nearly 240 million inhabitants, with a birth rate of 4.5 children per woman, compared to 1.8 per woman in the United States.
Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian country, has a population of around 120 million and a birth rate of 3.8.
The United States is also a majority Christian nation — but that majority is shrinking here, with only 64 percent of Americans now identifying as Christian, according to Pew Research Center data.
The numbers don’t tell the whole story: there is also a qualitative difference between the faith in Africa and its nature in the United States and Europe.
African Christianity is, on the whole, more conservative.
American traditionalist Catholics were dismayed by a recent statement from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith allowing blessings for same-sex couples in limited circumstances.
No, the Catholic Church does not approve of same-sex marriage – but conservatives fear the guidelines set out in Fiducia Suppliants is a step in this direction.
Yet if Rome under Pope Francis is a source of consternationAfrica reassures conservatives.
The African bishops issued their own statement: “The extra-liturgical blessings proposed in the declaration Fiducia Suppliants cannot be achieved in Africa,” they announced on January 11.
“We African bishops do not consider it appropriate for Africa to bless homosexual unions or same-sex couples because, in our context, this would create confusion and be in direct contradiction to the cultural ethos of African communities.”
The “cultural ethos” of American – and European – communities is what troubles conservatives: Here, same-sex marriage is widely accepted among mainline Protestants and many Catholics, and some conservative Christians come to feel like outsiders in their own churches.
But they feel at home, in their hearts, within the African Church.
Christianity has always been a global religion, in aspiration if not in scope: Jesus’ disciples not only evangelized the Roman Empire and the northern Germanic tribes, but also sent missions to the east, to India and beyond. of the.
Ethiopia became Christian in the fourth century, and North Africa, under Roman rule, produced Christian leaders such as Athanasius and Augustine.
Yet this story contains a warning that conservative Christians today, with all their hopes for the Global South, must heed.
Belloc could write “Europe is the faith” because outside Europe, Christianity has experienced bitter, often bloody and decisive setbacks.
Islam conquered North Africa, and before the era of European colonialism, Christianity had little permanent presence south of the Sahara Desert.
The growth of Christianity worldwide, in China as well as sub-Saharan Africa, was strongest during the centuries of European and American ascendancy.
Earlier churches planted in Persia, India and further east were tenacious but largely unsuccessful, perishing due to persecution or the perception of being a foreign and exotic faith.
There are millions of Christians in the Middle East and Turkey – lands under Roman rule during Jesus’ lifetime and for centuries after – but Islam is dominant.
And even in Africa, Islam is growing faster than Christianity today.
In places, violence accompanies this expansion.
Between December 23 and Christmas Day, Fulani Muslim tribesmen launched attacks that left hundreds of Christians dead or injured in Nigeria’s Plateau state.
Early Christians believed that the Roman Empire, for all its sins, played a providential role in creating the global conditions necessary for the spread of Christianity, even among the peoples who eventually conquered the Roman West.
Europe and the United States have also fostered an environment in which Christianity flourishes on a global scale.
Will a post-Christian Europe and America maintain this environment – or, if Christianity succumbs to the culture wars here, will Christianity everywhere be in mortal danger?
Conservatives are right to rejoice in the growth of religion in Africa.
Yet if the civilization created by Christianity in Europe and America cannot survive here, the prospects for Christian civilization anywhere are bleak.
The West is not the faith, but it is the moral battlefield on which the future of faith on several continents depends.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
Twitter: @ToryAnarchist
