Christianity

Growth and Globalization of Christianity

The Christian religious tradition has proven highly flexible to social change and adaptable to globalization. It has certainly accompanied various [Page 170]periods of globalization not only through missionary activity but also through diverse translocal flows and processes, such as the circulation of relics and ritual artifacts, pilgrimages, wars, immigration, mercantilism, and colonialism. Although Christianity's attempt to take root in different localities has invariably involved the imposition of institutionally sanctioned orthodoxy, Christianity has often cross-fertilized with autochthonous religions, generating new, hybrid symbols, doctrines, practices, and forms of organization. This was certainly the case in the Americas, where an Iberian traditional popular Catholicism built around the cult of the saints and Marian devotions, with all its associated practices and beliefs, such as apparitions, everyday miracles, pilgrimages, and festivals, interacted with indigenous traditions and the religions brought by African slaves, which involved the veneration of ancestors, ritual sacrifice, and divination, to form new religions like Santería and Candomblé.

Christianity's capacity to become “glocalized,” to preserve a universal eschatological message while incorporating the particular, explains Christianity's richness, which ranges from the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego in Tepeyac, Mexico, just a few years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, to the prophetic visions of Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York, in the mid-1800s.

Despite the claims of the secularization paradigm, which predicted the widespread decline of religion in the public sphere and its increasing rationalization and privatization, Christianity is arguably now closer than ever to fulfilling the Great Commission. Relying on a powerful combination of the latest innovations in communication technology, including radio, television, DVDs, and the Internet, and old-fashioned door-to-door evangelization, Christianity has become one of the fastest growing world religions. Nowhere has the growth of Christianity been more explosive than in Africa, where the number of Christians has gone from 10 million in 1900—approximately 10% of the continent's population then—to 411 million in 2005 (46% of the population) (Jenkins, 2007). Christianity's rapid growth in Africa has brought it into tension with Islam, another religion with a strong global vision and a long historical presence in the region.

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