Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective

Building from a behind-the-scenes case study of Kenya's Nairobi Chapel and its "daughter" Mavuno Church, Dr. Wanjiru M. Gitau's book expands their story into a narrative that offers analysis of the rise, growth, and place of megachurches worldwide in the new millennium.

The author helps us rethink what African megachurches can be – and what we can learn out of the American framework.  Gitau shows that recognizing the psychological, spiritual, and social destabilization of modernizing societies is the first step to valuing the place of megachurches in contemporary Christianity. The book won the 2019 Christianity Today’s book of the year award in the Global Missions category.

A must-read.

Link

Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies

David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, Chair of Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam, and Senior Research Fellow, International Baptist Theological Study Centre. 

Surveying global politics and modern history, he analyzes in Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies how "Christians have discarded their commitment to democracy and bought into authoritarianism". David Gushee urges his readers to fight back by reviving their "hard-won traditions of congregational democracy, dissident Black Christian politics, and covenantal theology". 

This very important book has been motivated by the shocking events in the U.S. that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. A must-read !

Link.

French-speaking research to be read

Friendly reminder to our dear english-speaking colleagues : there is a great deal of french-speaking research done every year.

Do not forget to try to read it and quote it, as french-speaking scholars make effort too to read and quote your valuable work.

If not, our social science lenses will not work well, and may make us sometimes almost half blind. No valuable synthesis on religion in Africa, for example, could be done without reading extensively the huge french-speaking scientific knowledge produced by Historians, Anthropologists, Sociologists and so on.

Let me take the occasion to share this link to the new version ot Theses.fr portal, which helps to locate all the Ph.D completed in France.

Link

Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics

 Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics, political scientists Anand Edward Sokhey and Paul A. Djupe bring together a wide range of scholars and writers to examine the relationship between former President Donald Trump and white American evangelical Christians.

They argue that, while this relationship―which saw evangelicals supporting a famously unfaithful, materialistic, and irreligious candidate despite self-defining in opposition to these characteristics―prompted many to wonder if Trump himself transformed American evangelical religion in politics, this alliance reflected both change and the outcome of dynamics that were in place or building for decades.

In this book, oppotunity is given to find a welcomed balanced and fair view of the very complex issue of the relationships between White Evangelicals in America and Donald Trump.

A must-read.

Link.

Gen Z in Europe: more devout than their elders?

I recently found this article in Evangelicals Now Magazine:

The Global Religion 2023 survey, conducted by market research service Ipsos, interviewed 19,000 people in 26 countries. It has revealed that ‘in countries where religious practice is high, older adults tend to engage in it more than the young, while in countries where religious practice is low, young people tend to have higher engagement.’...

Let me confess I missed this European survey 10 months ago. But it is better late than never.

 

The whole IPSOS findings can be read here (IPSOS, GLOBAL RELIGION 2023).

 

Among the data, 5% of non-catholic Christians in France, including Evangelicals

Oxford University Press releases a new book on Christian Zionism

"In Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century authors Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin draw on three original surveys conducted in 2018, 2020, and 2021 to explore the religious beliefs and foreign policy attitudes of evangelical and born-again Christians in the United States (...)

Inbari and Bumin demonstrate that a generational divide is emerging within the evangelical community, one that substantially impacts evangelicals' attitudes toward Israel. They also show that frequent church attendance and certain theological beliefs have a profound impact on the evangelicals' preference of Israel over the Palestinians. Throughout, the authors aim to add nuance to the discussion, showing that contemporary evangelical and born-again Christians' attitudes are much more diverse than many portrayals suggest".

 

Just published by Oxford University Press (link)

Birthing Revival

The nineteenth century witnessed a flurry of evangelical and missionary activity in Europe and North America. This was an era of renewed piety and intense zeal spanning denominations and countries. One area of Protestant flourishing in this period has received scant attention in Anglophone sources, however: the French Réveil.

Born of a rich Huguenot heritage but aimed at recovering the religion of the heart, this awakening gave birth to a dynamic missionary movement—and some of its chief agents were women.

To know more about this 2022 scholarly book (Baylor University Press) written by Michèle Miller Sigg, click here

And for a review (in english) of Birthing Revival from French scholar Valérie Duval-Poujol, click here

Missionaries and US Diplomacy in the Nineteenth Century

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East.

Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?

To know more, read Emily Conroy-Krutz ,Missionary Diplomacy Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Congrats Emily!

Link

 

Read La Croix International

LA CROIX is Europe’s pre-eminent Catholic daily providing quality journalism on world events, politics, science, culture, technology, economy and much more. La CROIX which first appeared as a daily newspaper in 1883 is a highly respected and world leading, independent Catholic daily.

Published in english, LA CROIX international is the premier online Catholic daily providing unique quality content about topics that matter in the world such as politics, society, religion, culture, education and ethics.

Some of the chronicles I am honored to publish in the French version have been translated for LA CROIX international.

Check here (link)., for example "Pan African impulses inspired by Christianity".

TB Joshua unmasked long ago by Bisola Hephzi-Bah Johnson

Leading the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) based in Nigeria, late Prophet T.B. Joshua (1963-2021) has been one of the most prominent African neopentecostal prophet of the last 40 years. The recent BBC documentary reveals he committed systemic abuse on some women and disciples.

 

To the people who challenge BBC's timing and European/white angle, let's remind them that huge evidence was already revealed 4 years ago by Lady Bisola Johnson in a very long TV interview in Abuja to Asabe Afrika TV (a purely African TV) by Lady Bisola Johnson (link).

Evangelist Bisola Hephzi-Bah Johnson, who escaped T.B. Joshua's cult after heavy involvement in the Prophet's first circle, wrote also a very revealing and long 2017 book with enormous evidence (link).

 

Protestant History: new Digitalized prints (BPF, Paris)

In 2023, the brand new BPF documentary portal (French Protestant Historical Library in Paris) has been enriched with some 500 digitized prints worth to be seen.

Discover some of them here (link), including this 1736 depiction of an Anabaptist Communion service (Last Supper service), from Jacok Van Schley.

 

Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood

There are not that many authors who publish significant History books over a period of more than 25 years. Professor Douglas Carl Abrams is one of them.

I remember having reviewed in 2001, for the "Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions", a very good book released by this Historian of contemporary Evangelicalism in USA. It was Selling the Old-Time Religion. American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2001 (link).

In this year 2023, this lover of France has released another very valuable piece of research related to the same fields (mass culture and US Evangelicalism). It is Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Race, Gender, and Spirituality on the Big Screen (Springer, Palgrave MacMillan, 2023).

Congrats and thank you Douglas Carl Abrams.

Link

Evangelicalism in Spain (2023) : new data

"The number of evangelicals in Spain, as well as the amount of churches planted, continues to increase, according to figures for 2023 published by the ministry Evangelism in Depth (EVAF), which studies the statistical evolution of evangelicalism since 1996."

Over 1,000 Spanish municipalities include at least on evangelical church.

To read further, click here (link)

Christianity's American Fate

Christianity’s American Fate (2022) situates the ascendancy of conservative Evangelicalism within the broader transformation of American religion.

"How did American Christianity become synonymous with conservative white evangelicalism? This nuanced and informative work by a leading historian of modern America traces the rise of the evangelical movement and the decline of mainline Protestantism’s influence on American life.

In Christianity’s American Fate, David Hollinger shows how the Protestant establishment, adopting progressive ideas about race, gender, sexuality, empire, and divinity, liberalized too quickly for some and not quickly enough for others. After 1960, mainline Protestantism lost members from both camps―conservatives to evangelicalism and progressives to secular activism".

This book may be also taken as a contribution to the polarization thesis defended, in France, by Philippe Portier, Jean-Paul Willaime and Alain Dieckhoff.

A must-read.

CAIRN INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Do you know CAIRN international ?

"Founded in 2005 by four Belgian and French academic publishers, Cairn.info offers the most comprehensive online collection of francophone publications in social sciences and humanities. In 2023, more than 600 journals and 18 000 eBooks from major French, Belgian and Swiss publishers can be accessed by students, scholars and librarians worldwide on www.cairn.info. To make this invaluable content accessible to a non–francophone readership, Cairn.info launched Cairn International Edition, an English-language platform where abstracts and selected articles from key journals on Cairn.info are translated from French into English, enabling users to search, browse and read this content without speaking a word of French".

Here is an sample of articles (Evangelicalism and postcolonial christianity) translated in english from this amazing scholarly collection (link)

 

Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity

"In the decades following the era of decolonization, global Christianity experienced a seismic shift.

While Catholicism and Protestantism have declined in their historic European strongholds, they have sustained explosive growth in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

This demographic change has established Christians from the Global South as an increasingly dominant presence in modern Christian thought, culture, and politics. (...)

Contributors argue that the collapse of colonialism and broader cultural challenges to Western power fostered new organizations, theologies, and political engagements across the world, ultimately setting Christianity on its current trajectory away from its colonial heritage."

Thank you  Elizabeth A. Foster and Udi Greenberg for this major collective work.

Link

 

Christian Missions and the Construction of South Sudan (AfCo)

What kind of impact did have the French on the long history of South Sudan (a land which became independant in 2011) ? 

This article, originally published in french in 2013, is available in english (full-text)

Christianity has been a driving force in the process of nation building in South Sudan. Focusing on the city of Wau (Bahr el-Ghazal), this study considers the impact of Catholicism. Starting with the legacy of the French Marchand Mission, which originated in the modern city of Wau, Catholicism expanded initially through the work of the Comboni Mission.

Following the horrors of the first civil war (1955–1972), Wau became a diocese in 1974, and the Catholic Church established a major medical center there headed by a white missionary, Father Hubert Barbier. In spite of the destruction wrought by the second civil war (1983–2005), the work continued against the backdrop of an international awareness-raising campaign led by Father Barbier in France.

Link

A major book on the Geneva Revival

The nineteenth-century international religious movement known as the Reveil had a major impact on Protestantism, and particularly on Evangelicalism. That impact is still evident today. Yet as a multi-faceted phenomenon, this movement has not received its due share of scholarly attention. This book offers a collection of essays exploring the international dimensions of the Genevan strand of the Reveil, providing an overview of events and trends, outlining the careers of some of its key figures, and highlighting some of the areas in which it made a contribution to contemporary society.

COngratulation to Jean Decorvet and the whole team for this major book.

Link.

Black is a church ?

Black Is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life

The title of this new Josef Sorett's book may be questionable. However, the content is largely worth reading.

"Across four chapters that proceed as chronologically organized episodes, Black is a Church maps the ways in which black American culture and identity has been animated by a particular set of, often unmarked, Protestant logics. In doing so, the book charts the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity constitutive of the content and forms of blackness."

Link

Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria

Ebenezer Obadare examines the overriding impact of Nigerian Pentecostal pastors on their churches, and how they have shaped the dynamics of state-society relations during Nigeria's Fourth Republic. (...)

In contrast to rapidly eroding pastoral authority in the West, pastoral authority is increasing in Nigeria. This engaging book will appeal to those who want to understand the far-reaching political and social implications of religious movements―especially Christian charismatic and evangelical movements―in contemporary African societies. 

A Book to read ! Link (Notre Dame University Press, 2022)

Have a look at the GSRL's new website

The Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (GSRL) remains today Europe's biggest social science research centre working on contemporary religion.

 

Based in Aubervilliers (Campus Condorcet), it upgraded this year its website. 

The brand new GSRL website is available here : GSRL Link

Religion and Francophonie (French speaking world)

A GSRL program led by Pascal Bourdeaux and Sebastien Fath (GSRL)    

 321 million people worldwide are able to express themselves in French (OIF data 2023).  

From a social sciences perspective, these French-speaking spaces lead us to think differently about religious interaction and dynamics. The French-speaking global framework (including Africa, Americas, Asia, Carribean isles, Pacific islands....) invites to reshape analysis beyond a hexagonal prism (French-centered) that remained hegemonic for long.

 

Deploying the analysis of religion in society in this French-speaking and postcolonial space-time, such is the purpose of this program “Religion and Francophonie (French-speaking world)”.  

The Other Evangelicals (Eerdmans, 2023)

For many, the answer is "white," "patriarchal," "conservative," or "fundamentalist"--but as Isaac B. Sharp reveals, the "big tent" of evangelicalism has historically been much bigger than we've been led to believe. In The Other Evangelicals, Sharp brings to light the stories of those twentieth-century evangelicals who didn't fit the mold, including Black, feminist, progressive, and gay Christians.

Though the binary of fundamentalist evangelicals and modernist mainline Protestants is taken for granted today, Sharp demonstrates that fundamentalists and modernists battled over the title of "evangelical" in post-World War II America.

In fact, many ideologies characteristic of evangelicalism today, such as "biblical womanhood" and political conservatism, arose only in reaction to the popularity of evangelical feminism and progressivism.

 

Link

MISTIC, a research program to discover

This blog gathers information related to the MISTIC research program (Migrations of religious specialists and transnational construction of competence) financed by the French Collaborative Institute on Migrations (CNRS).

This research program focuses on the migration and transnational circulation of religious specialists of various faiths.

 

Link

Evolution of religious landscape (Switzerland)

According to the new study juste released by the Federal Statistical Office (Switzerland)...

Between 2010 and 2021, the proportion of Roman Catholics and Reformed Protestants fell slightly (by 6 and 7 percentage points respectively), in contrast to that of Muslims and other Islamic communities (+1 point). The proportion of Jewish communities has hardly changed whereas that of persons without religious affiliation has risen by 12 percentage points.

And Evangelicals themselves may represent about 2,5% of the Swiss population.

Link

Studies in World Christianity, 9.2

This issue of Studies in World Christianity includes a look at some of the papers from the 2022 Yale–Edinburgh Conference on ‘World Christianity: Legacy and the State of the Field’.

• Kyama Mugambi, ‘The Gospel beyond the West: The Sanneh–Walls Legacy and Emerging Conversation Partners in World Christianity Studies’
• Jackie Jia Chyi Hwang, ‘Longing for Belonging: Forwarding Andrew Walls’ Thoughts on Migration and Mission through an Ethnographic Study on Diasporic Chinese in Singapore’s Christian Communities’
• John Sampson, ‘Unearthing Treasure in Clay Jars: T. C. Chao and the Formation of Chinese Dogmatic Theology

Together, these articles very much pay tribute to the pioneering work of Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh and the Yale–Edinburgh Group. But they also demonstrate the ways in which the ideas which gave birth to the field of World Christianity have been generative across a multiplicity of disciplines to open up new ways of understanding Christianity. 

Link

Caught in the Current

Caught in the Current

British and Canadian Evangelicals in an Age of Self-Spirituality

Evangelical Christianity is known for its defence of traditional Christian teachings and resistance to liberalizing trends. Many Western evangelicals themselves do not yet realize how their faith is being reshaped by the modern zeitgeist.

Caught in the Current explores how and why Western evangelicals are changing. Church attendance is declining, conservative moral positions are unpopular, and young people are drifting away from the faith. Evangelism is avoided, so few are joining congregations. Yet these surface changes are only symptoms of a more profound shift that church leaders have not fully apprehended.

Link

Africa: towards the World's biggest megalopolis

According to a vast global study published in The Guardian,

"By 2100, the Lagos- Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people".

Among these people living in the World's biggest megalopolis, millions and millions of young French-speaking African citizens impacted by post-colonial Christianity and revivalism....in a context of massive Global warming, which is directly threatening the megalopolis, boosting people to leave.

Cf. Howard W. French, "Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century"

Link

Nigerian Gospel and "“Singing in Tongues”

The Nigerian gospel music industry has over the years witnessed the emergence of many artistic, cultural and philosophical movements. One of these movements is the “singing-in-tongues” paradigm, particularly endorsed by the new generation of Pentecostal hip-hop musicians, many of whom seem bent on redefining the boundaries of Nigerian gospel music. Although remarkable, the singing-in-tongues paradigm (as deployed by Nigerian artistes) has remained understudied or virtually non-theorized by scholars.

This paper seeks to fill this apparent gap in knowledge by exploring the singing-in-tongues concept in the light of two philosophical/religious currents, namely esotericism and postmodernism. What has been the place of the singing-in-tongues paradigm in the evolution of the Nigerian gospel music industry? 

Link

Discover the French Collaborative Institute on Migration

As I've just been honored to be accepted as a fellow at the French Collaborative Institute on Migration, let's put some light on this great research structure. 

There are ten « Convergence Institutes » (collaborative institutes) in France that were created in 2016 and 2017 on behalf of an international jury leading the 2nd Programme des Investissements d’Avenir.

The goal is to gather scientific research by gathering 600 researchers from various institutions to combine disciplines and create an original training program. The French Collaborative Institute on Migration (CI Migration) is the only program that brings together social sciences, human sciences and health sciences.

Within the CI Migration, 5 specialised thematic departments and a department dedicated to the academic course (Master’s Degree on Migrations) have been established.

Link