What is Christianity coming to?

** The advent of Christianity changed the world forever. But by the 16th century it had degenerated into a politicized state religion drained of spiritual vision and its original healing genius. The Reformation sought to remedy all that and to re-establish Christianity's original energy and its empowerment of the individual. Alas, it, too, has fallen victim to the drag of materialism.

In The Next Christianity, a longish article in the October 2002 Atlantic Monthly, Philip Jenkins posits a spooky apocalypic conflict between southern Christianity, which is a throwback to the Counter-Reformation -- ultra-conservative, supernaturalistic and antagonistic to the all that is the basis for Western progress and identity -- and northern Christianity, which he sees as the basis for all that the West has become, good and bad.

And yet, at the core of Christianity is an idea so powerful that it will not stay suppressed forever. Perhaps we need yet another Reformation, where the "primitive Christianity" espoused by the south can be expressed within the context of individual freedom of thought and action. It would be regressive to adopt the mob-think of ultra-conservative religionists, and yet Jenkins foresees a clash between the two systems that is anything but a slam dunk for modernity. Here's the precis:

We stand at a historical turning point, the author argues—one that is as epochal for the Christian world as the original Reformation. Around the globe Christianity is growing and mutating in ways that observers in the West tend not to see. Tumultuous conflicts within Christianity will leave a mark deeper than Islam's on the century ahead.

Read the whole article online at: The Atlantic | October 2002 | The Next Christianity

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