Beyond Christendom: Protestant–Catholic distinctions in coming global Christianity

Abstract

Using actual and projected population data from the World Christian Database, this article evaluates Philip Jenkins’ argument that the centre of global Christianity is moving from the Euro-American centre (the ‘global North’) to the developing world (the ‘global South’) by disaggregating the different outcomes of this shift for Protestants and Catholics. Over the next fifty years, Catholics will decline much less than Protestants in the North, and will be concentrated in Latin America, not Africa. With the decline of the Enlightenment nation-state, religious authority and identity will become more concentrated in Catholicism but will become more dispersed in Protestantism. This transition from national to global Christianity, I argue, will realign the post-Reformation achievement of balanced tension among three social realities—Protestantism, Catholicism and the nation-state—to produce not just another Christendom but a new, more complex articulation of civil and religious realities that will move beyond the old arrangement of Christendom altogether.