Brics of Faith: New Categories in Religious Geography

It is no surprise to anyone in this audience that in the past century or so, worldwide Christianity has definitively moved South. In 1900, Christianity firmly rooted in Europe and North America, while by the mid-21 century it will find by far its greatest strongholds in Africa and Latin America. But while so much is familiar, it’s still tempting to position North and South in the familiar terms of a generation ago, as rich and poor spheres, of developed and developing worlds. Arguably, such views no longer make much sense, as the world’s economic and political arrangements have moved far beyond such simple dualities. Alongside the traditional developed world are now a series of rising nations that should by 2050 or so be matching or overtaking the familiar Euro-American leaders. So much is well known to global observers, but no commentators, to my knowledge, have absorbed the religious implications of this new geography. Most tellingly, we are not here studying a stark dichotomy between advanced, wealthy North and impoverished South, but rather the categories inbetween. My goal here is limited: briefly, I would like to describe a new category for research; to outline an agenda for approaching it; and to suggest why the emerging economic order matters so much for students of global Christianity.