JIHAD V. CRUSADE

Marching as to War (R. Scott Appleby, New York Times, 5/12/02), reviewing The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Philip Jenkins).

Across the Southern Hemisphere a new wave of nondemocratic states with theocratic pretensions, some of them openly repressive, will compete for regional dominance. When they are not fighting among themselves, these Christian regimes will unite against their common foe, Islam. In 2050, almost 20 of the 25 largest nations will be predominantly or entirely Christian or Muslim; at least 10 will be the sites of intense conflict.

Although Christians will continue to outnumber Muslims, Islam may have the upper hand in the third-world wars. The deciding factor may well be the support provided to oil-producing Muslim regimes by the nations of the industrialized North, whose sentimental attachment to Christianity will be outweighed by economic considerations. Extremists in both religions, meanwhile, will continue to guarantee the absence in the South of women's rights, freedom of worship and other misbegotten ideas of the secular North, even as Asia and Africa develop significant military capacity, perhaps based on chemical or biological weapons. The coming havoc, in short, will make the bloody religious wars of the 16th century look like calisthenics.

These startling and gloomy predictions are served up in ''The Next Christendom,'' by Philip Jenkins, a budding futurist who, having written on pedophiles and priests and on mystics and messiahs, knows disasters in the making when he sees them. A professor of history and religious studies at Penn State, he sketches the contours of a new Christendom emerging from the convergence of third-world demographic explosion, Muslim and Christian missionary zeal and the hunger of millions of newly urban poor for supernatural deliverance. . . .

It has been claimed that the current correlation between democracy and a Christian population demonstrates a Christian taste -- most forcefully, a Christian drive -- for liberal, capitalistic democracy. Across the great span of history, this has not been true, but if we are now arrived at the end of history, mightn't that end be the necessary union of the two most powerful forces now loose in the world?

But trends are not mechanisms. What mechanism would drive Christian populations to democracy or democratic populations to Christianity? A respect for the dignity of the individual, inherent in Christianity, does coexist comfortably with democracy, but democracies aren't alone in showing that respect. In some ways, as is often argued forcefully here, respect for the individual can decay into a bourgeois individualism that is destructive of society and its institutions, including the Church. While the Church may have accepted democracy, it is not clear that democracy will long put up with the Church.

Protestant sectarianism has been a driving force behind democracy in the United States. The United States at formation, however, was faced with the situation of different sects in power in different states, each of which wanted to be left alone. That led, in part, to the federal system and buttressed our determination to try democracy. This experience is unique, and can't provide any general mechanism, though Weber, of course, felt that capitalism was an offshoot of protestentism and many people believe that democracy is an offshoot of capitalism. My take, though, is that capitalism is an offshoot of liberal democracy.

In the end, I can't see any necessary drive from Christianity to democracy. Jenkins, though, is much too pessimistic and too hostile to religion. In the end, Christianity, and other religions, add to cultures in which democracy is by no means inevitable, but is possible because of the limits they place on human action and the trust they engender between citizens.

Posted by David Cohen at April 9, 2004 3:55 PM