The frantic spread of Christianity in its new frontiers

During the year I spent teaching English in a remote Chinese city, I would occasionally hear about the influence of the gigantic church at the edge of town, built very recently on top of what was farmland previously. I taught at a college that was a few blocks away from the church. One time, right outside the college campus, I saw a couple young people distributing flyers with Christian motifs on the front. One time another foreign-born English teacher at the college, a very friendly Hispanic American, told me of an incident where she was walking through town with her student, meanwhile a woman confronted her student and said, in Chinese, "you must buy a bible or you will go to hell."

Let's back track. When I was a naive 18-year-old, I was disappointed to find out that the man chosen to succeed the outgoing Pope in 2005 was a European, and even more strangely, he came from a Protestant-majority country in which religion itself seemed to be headed toward extinction. In Europe generally religion was becoming a thing of the past, and even if combined with the European descendants of Catholics, the Catholics in Europe comprised a very small part of Catholics worldwide. The bulk of global Catholicism was in Latin America, and increasingly also in Africa and Asia. However, there were two things I failed to realize. One that the Papacy would rather not come in contact with a filthy African or Amazonian whose only value is in increasing the number of Catholics in the world. Second, it's Protestant sects that are doing the lion's share of the proselytizing. In particular, it seems the very radical, zealotry-based sects that seem to be sweeping the competition. It says on Wikipedia that the so-called Charismatic movements - namely Pentecostalism, the Charismatic movement and the Neo-Charismatic movement - now number 500 million followers. That's more than the population of every other Protestant sect denomination combined, it's larger than the population of every English-speaking country combined (except for those where people don't really speak it) ... first people thought it would be Hollywood, then they thought it would be McDonalds then Facebook, but it seems Charismatic Christianity is the great American export to the rest of the world, with more influence than possibly any other.

When these radical Christian sects reached non-Protestant countries in very large, rapidly-growing numbers, their arrival created controversy, to say the very, very least. In the Latin American countries where Protestants did not exist in significant numbers throughout most of the country until recently, but where they now represent a large fraction of the population, we can see from the street violence how welcome they are. In Africa, violence between Muslims and the soaring numbers of Christians is manifesting itself in the form of organized warfare, in addition to a constant supply of apolitical violence. In the post-colonial era, Africa has seen more than a dozen wars between Muslims and Christians in which religion was explicitly used as an official justification for the war: the Nigerian Civil War, the First Chadian Civil War, the Second Chadian Civil War along with the Libyan invasion, the First and Second Sudanese Civil Wars (and the “Darfur Genocide”) … in the political conflicts in the Republic of Congo during the 1990s and skirmishes since then, opponents of President Nguesso were significantly abetted by the Ninja militia, a Christian force organized by Frédéric Bintsangou (who went by “Pastor Ntoumi”). In Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army was organized in 1987 with the intention of establishing a state whose founding ideology is the Ten Commandments. Since then the LRA have not succeeded in establishing a state, and instead they have left an estimated 100,000 people killed, 2 million people displaced, 20,000 children kidnapped (most of them girls), and thousands of people with their ears, noses, lips or tongues ripped removed.

Often, the American religious right does not seem remorseful about the problems they are contributing to. In 2011, after the LRA have done their worst for 24 years, President Obama dispatched a contingent of merely 100 troops, and Rush Limbaugh made sure to denounce him for it:

Lord's Resistance Army are Christians.  It means God.  I was only kidding.  Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.  And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them.  That's what the lingo means, "to help regional forces remove from the battlefield," meaning capture or kill.

So that's a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and -- (interruption) no, I'm not kidding.

And in other regions, the problems resulting from widespread Christian zealotry might become far, far greater. China is estimated to have 67 million Christians, most of them Protestants. Approximately ten million of these Christians are affiliated with a state-sponsored church, of which there is a Protestant one and a Catholic one. The rest of these Christians are practicing their religion illegally. Moreover, the Christian missionaries from abroad that are spreading their religion throughout China are doing so in blatant violation of their visas. What should we expect to result from this? And how should the government respond? In the mid-19^th century, the Chinese people lived through the Taiping Rebellion, an attempt to replace the imperial Manchu regime with a theocratic Christian republic. The rebel leader, Hong Xiuquan, was converted to Christianity by an American missionary, then was inspired to action by a series of dreams that he interpreted as omens. He scoured the land looking for recruits, claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ, and within fifteen years he organized a millions-strong army. The result was a civil war that lasted fourteen years at the expense of 20-30 million lives. Meanwhile, the Dungan, a predominantly Islamic people in China’s Northwest, took advantage of the chaos to launch their own rebellion at the same time, which took an additional 14-16 million lives. We can only imagine what to expect if sentiments were stirred up on the same scale in today's China. Since the Taiping Rebellion China’s population has grown fourfold. Moreover, and their government has become more entrenched than in the mid-19^th century, so by toppling the government a modern-day Taiping Rebellion might be a cause of even greater chaos.

To be continued ...