Pope Francis I and global trends

Ross Douthat:

Second, the choice of a Latin American makes a great deal of sense on paper, since Latin America is in many ways the place where the different experiences of global Catholicism converge. The region shares a New World experience with North America, a long record of church-state entanglements with Western Europe, a history of colonial exploitation and stark extremes of wealth and poverty with sub-Saharan Africa. The Latin church faces the same challenges from secularism and sexual liberation as the church in the developed world, and the same explosive growth of Pentecostalist and prosperity-oriented Christian alternatives as the church elsewhere in the global South. A pontiff from the region is thus a natural choice, in ways that an African or Asian pope might not have been, to move the church’s focus away from Europe and North America (and especially Europe) in some ways without cutting the Vatican off from the trends, issues and crises facing the church in a secularizing West.

Walter Russell Mead:

In some ways, Francis was a typically canny choice by the oldest electoral college in the world. The choice of a Latin American, and the first non-European pope in more than a thousand years, made headlines around the world and galvanized many Catholics in developing countries where the Church is strong. But behind the drama is the cautious intelligence of an institution whose traditions stretch back to the times of the Caesars; with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, Latin America is the most European region in the whole global South. Argentina is the most European of Latin American countries, and Pope Francis, whose parents emigrated from Italy in the last century, is one of the Argentinians whose European roots are as strong and deep as they get.

It appears that, among other qualities, he is a compromise between those still nostalgic for the long Italian stranglehold on the papacy (Pope John Paul II was the first non-Italian Bishop of Rome since 1523) and those who want a more globalized leadership in the Church. He is as Italian as a foreigner can be.

With all this, though, comes political baggage. Most Cardinals from Europe these days have not had to cope with the political monsters running loose in much of the world. The selection of Benedict XVI, who came of age in Hitler’s Reich, raised some eyebrows, but generally speaking most European prelates these days haven’t had to exercise their ministries in countries run by murderous thugs.

That isn’t the case with people from much of the developing world. Cuba’s bishops must somehow work with the Castros; the bishops of Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Rwanda and many other countries have had to make choices that people from stable and democratic places know little about. In Pope Francis’s case, he lived under the horrible Argentine military government of the 1970s when disappearances and torture were business as usual. Those of us who haven’t had to navigate those treacherous waters should be careful how we judge those whose experience has taken them through trials we cannot comprehend. Nevertheless, Pope Francis must expect that his record under Argentina’s dictatorship will be carefully combed through, and it is not impossible that a Buenos Aires government with little use either for him or for the Church will engage in selective leaks.

Conversions in the Middle East

Recently, I posted some links to articles about Muslim conversions to Christianity. One of the articles, from Charisma, I referenced but had not read. I read it this morning, and it contains a variety of stories of Muslim conversions. It ends with these statistics:

How the Holy Spirit is rising within the world’s most radical Islamic nations

Mission researchers estimate more Muslims have committed to follow Christ in the last 10 years than in the last 15 centuries of Islam. Yet Islamic governments make up some of the worst persecutors of Christians, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Despite the persecution, reports indicate God is moving dramatically in Islamic strongholds such as Indonesia, Pakistan and the following Middle East hot spots:

Iran: At the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 there were only about 500 known Muslim converts in the country, according to missions almanac Operation World. By 2000, there were a reported 220,000 believers, including Muslim converts. Even children of government ministers and mullahs have been converting to Christ, missions agency Open Doors reports.

Iraq: It’s estimated that before 2003 there were only about 600 known born-again followers of Jesus Christ in the country. By the end of 2008, Iraqi Christian leaders believed the number had risen to more than 70,000. Meanwhile, millions of Arabic New Testaments and Christian books have been shipped into Iraq since the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Egypt: Revival is reportedly widespread among nominal Christians within the nation’s historic Coptic Church, whose members number about 10 million. Yet Coptics are under severe attack, according to Voice of the Martyrs. Also, the USCIRF’s list of “Countries of Particular Concern” now includes Egypt, where since January 400 Christians have been murdered, hundreds more injured and multiple churches burned.

Peter Leithart rounded up some of the things that he has read about this issue in a recent column for First Things. Here’s an excerpt about the reasons for conversions:

The reasons for conversion vary. Many of the converts say that Islam failed to meet their spiritual needs. No matter how faithful they were in fulfilling Islam’s demands, they had no confidence that they were saved, no assurance that they would spend eternity in paradise. Formulaic prayers left others spiritually dry, and they were surprised by and attracted to the intimacy of Christian prayer. Women find in Christianity a refuge from belittlement and abuse. Many converts claim that Isa Masih, Jesus Messiah, appeared personally in visions or dreams to call them to follow him.

In his many interviews with converts and leaders in Christian ministry to Muslims, [Joel] Rosenberg found that Islamic radicalism has been a paradoxical preparatio evangelii. When the Ayatollah Khomeini led the Islamic revolt in Iran in 1979, Muslims suddenly saw Islam as the rest of the world sees it. An evangelist told Rosenberg that Khomeini exposed Islam “not just to the Christian populace but to the Muslims themselves. . . . it’s as if God used that man, the Ayatollah . . . to expose Islam for what it is and for Muslims to say to themselves, ‘That’s not what we want; we want something else.’”

September 11 had the same effect. Many Muslims joined Americans in horror as they watched the airliners slam into the World Trade Center towers. Their sadness and shock turned to anger when they saw other Muslims rejoicing at the carnage. “Is this who we really are?” they began to ask themselves. “Is this what it really means to be a Muslim?”

The uprooting of North Korean Christianity

In my last post, I quoted Thomas Kidd’s assertion that the North Korean regime has “so effectively eliminated Christianity that most escapees have virtually no knowledge of the religion.”

Peter Leithart recently posted an item about this development:

In her numbing account of North Korea, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick observes that what set Kim Il-sung apart among twentieth-century tyrants was his sensitivity to the uses of faith: “His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that it was called the ‘Jerusalem of the East.’ Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self-promotion.”

See the rest of his short post for examples of how the regime appropriated Christian rhetoric for its purposes.

Chinese Christians aiding North Korean refugees

Thomas Kidd recently wrote about Melanie Kirkpatrick’s book Escape from North Korea. He noted the role that Chinese Christians play in helping those who flee the Hermit Kingdom:

The North Koreans have so effectively eliminated Christianity that most escapees have virtually no knowledge of the religion. Until they escape, that is. But small, quiet networks of Christians — some formally associated with the underground railroad, some not — wait for the refugees on the other side of the Chinese border. (China is shamefully complicit in forcibly returning many North Korean runaways to their certain doom.)

Kirkpatrick tells the story of one abandoned, starving boy named Joseph who scrambled across the Tumen River into China in February 2005, risking the chance that he would be captured or shot on sight. (Virtually all escapees go north into China — crossing the demilitarized zone into South Korea is effectively impossible.) In the Chinese village across the river, he found no one to help him until he knocked on the door of a Christian, who fed him and told him to go to the nearest town. There an old woman advised him to find a church, because Christians helped escapees. “What’s a church?” Joseph asked. “Look for a building with a cross on it,” she told him.

He did find a church, connecting with a network of Chinese Christians that eventually helped him find refuge at the American consulate in Shenyang and, miraculously, political asylum in the United States. “The first survival tip a North Korean learns when he reaches China,” Kirkpatrick writes, is to “find a Christian.”

Untold numbers of North Koreans have converted to Christianity following their escape, and some brave ones have even returned to North Korea, at extraordinary personal risk, to serve as witnesses to their countrymen.

Christians in Iran and Iraq

I’ve read and listened to a few things recently about Christians in the Muslim world. I’ve heard from several different sources over the last few years that ex-Muslims report having dreams that persuade them to become Christians. Here are some things that I have read recently:

• Peter Leithart linked to Joel Rosenberg’s blog post about a Daily Caller article, in which an Iranian defector claimed that the Iranian authorities are flummoxed by a large number of Christian converts. You can get all the salient information from Leithart and Rosenberg without making the unfortunate discovery that I made: that the editors of The Daily Caller apparently believe that the only way to gain a readership is to plaster their site with scantily-clad women.
• Leithart also summarized the contents of a Charisma magazine article about Muslim conversions, especially in Iraq and Iran.
• Eric Metaxas and Brian Mattson both wrote about the case of Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-American pastor, who was recently arrested in Iran. Metaxas’ article contains a link to an interview that Breakpoint’s John Stonestreet did with Abedini’s wife Naghmeh and the American Center for Law and Justice’s Tiffany Barrans.

A study of global Christianity

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity by Philip Jenkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While this book first came out around 10 years ago, Jenkins seems to have added quite a bit to the 2011 edition. He offers a clear and comprehensive look at the trends shaping Christianity on the different continents of the world, charting the explosions in Africa and Asia and the emergence of Protestantism (of both the evangelical and Pentecostal varieties) in Latin America along with the trends (of both growth and decline) in Europe and North America.

It’s an excellent book and a fascinating look at the shift of Christianity’s center from the affluent First World to the Third World. Jenkins writes clearly and seems to have an impressive breadth of knowledge about Catholic and Protestant movements around the world.

This volume is the first in the “Future of Christianity” trilogy, and this new edition incoroporates his work from the other two: God’s Continent (about Christianity and Islam in Europe) and The New Faces of Christianity (about Africa, Asia, and Latin America). If the subject of world Christianity interests you at all, I’d really recommend this book. There will be trends that excite you and trends that disturb you, depending on your perspective, but you’ll come away with a much better knowledge of global Christianity.

View all my reviews

You can also see Nick Smith’s overview of the Future of Christianity trilogy here.

A persecuted Christian pastor in Iran — now free

Last fall, I posted about a jailed pastor possibly facing execution in Iran. Historian Thomas Kidd writes that he has been freed, and looks at some of the implications:

Pastor Youcef had been in jail for three years, awaiting ‘trial’ for apostasy from Islam. In an earlier, pre-Twitter world, he might easily and quietly have been executed for his crime of converting to Christianity. But he was not. Under pressure from the ACLJ, as well as the State Department and other agencies, Nadarkhani was convicted simply of proselytizing Muslims and sentenced to time served.

Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the ACLJ, should be commended for keeping up a relentless social media campaign, during which almost three million people expressed support for Pastor Youcef. Sekulow intentionally reached out to the international evangelical and charismatic community to build support, particularly among Brazilian Christians (Sekulow was routinely tweeting about the issue in Portuguese as well as English). Observers of trends within global Christianity have speculated about the growing sense of connectedness in the world evangelical community; this seems like a practical case study of that connectedness, fostered both by transnational organizations, and by social media.

Pastor Youcef’s release — assuming he remains free and avoids vigilante attacks — is definitely worth celebrating. But we also must recognize that he is only one case among legions of people around the world deprived of the most basic standard of religious freedom: the liberty to worship God according to one’s conscience. Iranian officials did not, of course, even exonerate Pastor Youcef, they just convicted him of a lesser crime. As Commentary has noted, other Christians still languish in Iranian jails for offenses identical to Nadarkhani’s. Similar stories abound throughout the Muslim world. Moreover, Muslims should remember that there are settings in India, China, and elsewhere, where Muslims also suffer under overt religious persecution and discrimination.

The Bible in Jamaican patois

Tyler Kenney recently wrote an article for Desiring God Ministries about translation, and in it he linked to a BBC article about a controversy in Jamaica about whether the Bible should be translated into the creole language that many Jamaicans use or whether it should be kept in English. At the heart of the dispute is whether patois is truly a language or just an improper form of English. Here’s an example from Luke (in patois, “Jiizas – di buk we Luuk rait bout im”), with an explanation of the cultural goals as well:

English versions read along these lines: “And having come in, the angel said to her, ‘Rejoice, highly favoured one, the Lord is with you: blessed are you among women.’”

“Now compare that with our translation of the Bible,” says Mr Stewart.

“De angel go to Mary and say to ‘er, me have news we going to make you well ‘appy. God really, really, bless you and him a walk with you all de time.”

Mr Stewart says the project is largely designed to bring scripture alive, but it also has another important function – to rescue patois from its second-class status in Jamaica and to enshrine it as a national language.

“The language is what defines us as Jamaicans,” insists Courtney Stewart. It is who we are – patois-speakers.”

The patois Bible represents a bold new attempt to standardise the language, with the historically oral tongue written down in a new phonetic form.

For example the passage relating the angel’s visit to Mary reads: “Di ienjel go tu Mieri an se tu ar se, ‘Mieri, mi av nyuuz we a go mek yu wel api. Gad riili riili bles yu an im a waak wid yu all di taim.”

The New Testament has been completed by a team of translators at the Bible Society in Kingston – working from the original Greek – who intend to publish it in time for the 50th anniversary of Jamaica’s independence from Britain on 6 August next year.

Online Christian resources allowed in China

Desiring God posted an article from World magazine on this topic. It begins:

China’s Christian surge is likely to continue in 2012, with teaching via the internet contributing to it. Type “democracy” or “Tiananmen Square” into Baidu.com, the popular search engine in China, and a message will pop up informing you that you cannot access the page. But type “Christianity” into the same search engine, and you’ll be flooded with links to church websites, personal blogs, and sites about Christianity from inside and outside the country.

A persecuted Christian pastor in Iran

A friend shared a link on Facebook about pastor Youcef Nadarkhani’s examination before Iranian judges. Jordan Sekulow writes about the confrontation, which bore a striking resemblance to the few martyrdom narratives that I have read from the early church:

When asked to “repent” by the judges, Youcef stated, “Repent means to return. What should I return to? To the blasphemy that I had before my faith in Christ?” The judges replied , “To the religion of your ancestors, Islam.” To which he replied, “I cannot.”

It appears that Nadarkhani is in danger of being executed, although it is not certain yet. Here is an update posted after the one above.