World Christianities

This week's session of "After Religion" was initially entitled "Provincializing Christianity" but its new name - while also using an unfamiliar word! - is better: "After Christendom." Leaning on John Thatamanil I described this as a "postcolonial and post-Constantinian" moment in Christian history (explaining those terms too). The frightening fantasies of Christian nationalists notwithstanding, Christianity today is in a space more like that of its earliest centuries, when it was neither dominant nor confused with political power or community, a time when exchange with other forms of "comprehensive qualitative orientation" (Thatamanil's proposed new definition of the religious) was neither avoidable nor avoided.

Our course materials included part of Thatamanil's book, a video on "reverse missionaries" (the priests from formerly colonized countries now helming largely white Christian congregations in Europe), and conversation with my friend Eros Shaw, a young Chinese gay leader involved in the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics - the text of an interview he gave to a gay Catholic group in Rome (reverse missionary!!) and a zoom chat with me, recorded for the occasion.

It all added up, I trust, to a profoundly unfamiliar image of Christianity, a point I drove home with the question "Is Christianity a western religion?" and some speculation about what the Christianity section of a Museum of World Religions one hundred years in the future (if any such there be!) might look like. Perhaps its European adventures will be presented as a long digression, glorious and grim, perhaps necessary but certainly not sufficient, only one chapter in an ongoing story which was unfolding in Africa and Asia all along. 

This isn't a place I planned to wind up: "Provincializing Christianity" would have been a more deflationary project! But telling the world Christianities stories this way, its protagonists more like my seeking but/and (not) (also) students than the supposedly uniform armies of the faithful of Christendom (and in a way translatable to other traditions), made me unexpectedly giddy. The Spirit moves!