The Global South

The shift

The single biggest change in Christian history over the last century is geographical. Look at the chart below. In 1900, roughly 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. By the 2020s, about two-thirds lived in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania. Christianity, which began as a Middle Eastern faith and became a European one, is becoming a faith of the Global South.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's history repeatedly reminds readers that Christianity was never only European (see Countries of the Sunrise and Churches Beyond Chalcedon). In a sense, the 20th century returned it to its global roots. Shelley's later editions also highlight this "southward shift" [check]. The historian Philip Jenkins called the emerging reality "the next Christendom."

Where the world's Christians live, 1900 vs. today (approximate %)

Africa: the great harvest

Africa's Christian growth is one of the most remarkable stories in religious history. From perhaps 10 million Christians in 1900, about 9 percent of the population and mostly in Ethiopia, Egypt and South Africa, it grew to roughly 700 million by the 2020s. Africa now has more Christians than any other continent.

Much of the growth came after the colonial era ended around 1960. Many observers expected Christianity to decline when the missionaries' colonial protectors left. Instead it exploded. Why?

• Translation: Missionaries had translated the Bible into hundreds of African languages. Africans read it for themselves and found in it a world close to their own: one of spirits, dreams, healing, ancestors, sacrifice and community. Scholars such as Lamin Sanneh (from Gambia) and Kwame Bediako (from Ghana) argued that this "translatability" allowed Africans to make Christianity their own, and even that it revived African cultures.
• African evangelists: Africans themselves, not foreign missionaries, did most of the evangelizing. The Liberian prophet William Wadé Harris, dressed in white robes and carrying a cross, a Bible and a gourd, walked along the coast of the Ivory Coast and Ghana in 1913–15. Perhaps 100,000–200,000 people abandoned their traditional shrines and were baptized.
• Healing and power: African Christianity took seriously spiritual power, prayer for healing, and protection from evil, concerns that Western missionaries had often dismissed.

African Initiated Churches

Many Africans formed churches independent of missionary control, known as African Initiated (or Independent) Churches. Some broke away in protest against missionary racism. Others arose around prophets and healers. In the Belgian Congo, Simon Kimbangu began a healing ministry in 1921. Colonial authorities, fearing unrest, imprisoned him for thirty years until his death. His followers founded the Kimbanguist Church, now millions strong. In South Africa, Isaiah Isaiah Shembe founded the Nazareth Baptist Church, with its own hymns and sacred dances. The Aladura ("praying people") churches of Nigeria and the Zionist churches of southern Africa also flourished. Today, Pentecostal megachurches in Lagos, Accra and Nairobi draw tens of thousands each Sunday. Nigeria's Redeemed Christian Church of God holds gatherings of over a million people.

Faith and politics in Africa

African Christians played major roles in independence movements and in public life, for good and ill. In South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church long provided theological justification for apartheid. But other Christians, Black and white, led the resistance. Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. After apartheid ended in 1994, he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, grounded in the Christian idea of forgiveness. Rwanda, one of Africa's most Christian countries, suffered a genocide in 1994 in which church members killed fellow church members, sometimes inside churches. It was a terrible reminder that baptism does not automatically transform society.

Latin America: liberation and Pentecost

Latin America has been mostly Catholic since the 1500s (see The Reformation Goes Global). Today it is home to about 40 percent of the world's Catholics. In the 20th century, two great movements transformed it.

Liberation theology

After Vatican II, Latin American bishops meeting at Medellín, Colombia (1968), committed the church to a "preferential option for the poor." The Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation (1971) argued that theology must start from the experience of the poor and oppressed. Salvation includes liberation from unjust social and economic structures, and the God of the Exodus sides with the oppressed. Thousands of "base ecclesial communities," small groups of poor Christians, read the Bible together and applied it to their lives. Brazil's Archbishop Hélder Câmara famously said: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."

The Vatican, under John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, criticized some liberation theologians in the 1980s for relying on Marxist analysis, while affirming concern for the poor. Under military dictatorships, the cost of standing with the poor was high. In El Salvador, Archbishop Óscar Romero, once a cautious conservative, was transformed by the murder of his Jesuit friend Rutilio Grande. He used his Sunday radio sermons to denounce government death squads. On 24 March 1980, he was shot dead while celebrating Mass. Pope Francis declared him a saint in 2018.

The Pentecostal boom

Meanwhile, Pentecostal and evangelical churches grew explosively, especially among the urban poor. In Brazil, Guatemala, Chile and Central America, Protestants (mostly Pentecostal) grew from a tiny minority to roughly 20–40 percent of the population. Some observers summed it up this way: liberation theology opted for the poor, but the poor opted for Pentecostalism. In 2013 the election of the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Francis, the first pope from the Americas, symbolized the southward shift of Catholicism itself.

Asia

Christianity remains a minority in most of Asia, but there are dramatic exceptions:

• The Philippines is overwhelmingly Catholic, with around 85 million Catholics.
• South Korea went from a tiny Christian minority in 1900 to about 30 percent of the population, Protestant and Catholic. Korean Christianity was associated with resistance to Japanese colonialism, education and modernization. Korean churches now send thousands of missionaries abroad.
• China, despite persecution, has seen spectacular growth (see Christianity Under Communism). The evangelist John Sung led revivals across China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s.
• India has perhaps 30 million or more Christians, many among Dalits (formerly "untouchables") and tribal peoples, who found dignity in the Christian message. Indian Christians like Sadhu Sundar Singh, a Sikh convert who wandered as a Christian sadhu (holy man), and Bishop V. S. Azariah expressed the faith in Indian forms.
• Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Singapore and Malaysia have substantial and often growing Christian minorities.

What kind of Christianity?

Global South Christianity tends to be:

• Theologically conservative on the Bible, miracles and sexual ethics. This has created tensions with liberal Western churches, notably in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality.
• Charismatic, with emphasis on the Holy Spirit, healing, prophecy and spiritual warfare.
• Socially engaged in practical ways, through schools, clinics and microfinance, and often politically influential.
• Missionary. African, Korean, Brazilian and Chinese missionaries now work across the world, including in secular Europe ("reverse mission"). Some of the largest churches in London are led by Africans.
• Often persecuted, especially in parts of the Middle East, North Africa, India, China, North Korea and the Sahel.