Christianity & crisis.

Landscapes of the Soul
The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life
Douglas Porpora
Oxford University Press, $27.50, 356 pp.

The Next Christendom
The Coming of Global Christianity
Philip Jenkins
Oxford University Press, $28, 272 pp.

The fear that was ignited in the American soul last September may have been the fear of God--but it seems unlikely. Although the attackers did not hesitate to present themselves as the avengers of the Most High, most Americans have been reluctant to find traces of the divine hand in any of the events that transpired in New York, Washington, or Afghanistan since then. I will offer only one anecdote to illustrate this ambivalence. In the undamaged but now-abandoned subway station beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center, someone hung a banner that proclaimed "God Save America." Very quickly, however, the banner was taken down and replaced with an American flag.

I was reminded of this as I read Douglas Porpora's somewhat ramshackle jeremiad, in which he proclaims that "my call is for us to return to the Most High." A Catholic sociologist, Porpora is simultaneously a believer and a skeptic, and he is perplexed by a well-known contradiction in American life: "How and why is it that while most Americans profess a belief in God, many nevertheless seem strangely disconnected from the God they believe in?" In an attempt to answer this question, Porpora interviewed hundreds of Americans and integrated their anecdotal accounts into his book, along with data taken from surveys and recollections of the author's own teaching experiences.

The portrait that emerges is depressingly anemic. The overwhelming majority of Porpora's subjects are profoundly inarticulate on the subject of religion, unable to offer accounts of what they believe or why. Invariably, believers of every persuasion reduce the meaning of their religion to moral strictures--doing "good," being "nice," showing "respect" for others. While some (Orthodox Jews) emphasize public religious observance, and others (fundamentalist Christians) speculate on the fate of souls after death, most seem to view their religion as a private affair that is no one else's business. Naturally this attitude is carried over into their view of the meaning of life, typically summed up by one of the author's students as "To be good to people and just live a good life and be happy."

No one who has ever watched daytime talk shows or ended up sitting next to the cleric at a wedding reception will find much surprise in Porpora's account, but part of the problem is in his approach. Sociology brings its own assumptions to any examination of religious commitment, as the author himself admits, and traditionally looks upon religion as a species of experience rather than reality. Porpora is at pains to correct this prejudice, but he can only go so far: much of his methodology and jargon (he says, for example, of a woman who has told him about a Jewish study group, "Hannah is describing the creation of a mini-community of discourse") is bound to bring down the level of discourse. After all, it is perfectly legitimate (and even, in some ways, helpful) to say that Jesus Christ or Karl Marx became the focal points of meta-narratives. Had they ever spoken that way of themselves, however, it is unlikely that we would have heard of either of them.

A very different view is offered by Philip Jenkins, who looks far beyond these shores and well into the future. Stepping gingerly into the same waters that have been muddied recently by everyone from Francis Fukuyama to Samuel Huntington to Patrick Buchanan, Jenkins extrapolates current trends into the years to come and offers a strikingly different picture of the new world order: "If there is one thing we can reliably predict about the twenty-first century, it is that an increasing share of the world's people is going to identify with one of two religions, either Christianity or Islam, and that the two have a long and disastrous record of conflict and mutual incomprehension."

Jenkins's account, while disturbing in many regards, has little to do with the United States and Al Qaeda, since whatever conflicts he envisions will arise far from the North Atlantic waters that served as Christendom's frontier for more than a millennium. The Christianity of the future, in his view, will be an affair of the South: of the Philippines, of sub-Saharan Africa, and of Latin America above all. The populations of the prosperous European and North American Christians will continue their decline, but this will be more than made up for in the Southern Hemisphere.

The effects, on both the churches and the nations, are bound to be enormous--and they will not correspond to what many Westerners now expect. Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, is a careful scholar not given to overstatement, but he is able to offer a rough sketch of the many varieties of Southern Christianity--from the enthusiastic Pentecostal sects of Brazil to the beleaguered Copts of Egypt to the mega-churches of South Korea--and what they portend. The Christianity of 2050 will tend to be more charismatic, more traditional, and more militant than it is now. Although Catholicism will increase enormously in numbers, there will be fewer clergy (even in the expanding regions) to direct the believers. Consequently, folk piety (especially in Latin America) will assume a greater importance in the formation of religious practice. And many of the concerns that now preoccupy Western liberals in the church, such as the ordination of women or the legitimization of homosexuality, are positively anathema to Catholics of the Southern regions and thus seem less and less likely to be addressed in the future. As the author puts it, "Of course the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church are so very conservative: they can count."

The great difficulty, of course, will be religious conflict, especially with Islam. Jenkins is not an alarmist, rightly pointing out that Christianity and Islam have managed to coexist peacefully in the past, but he sees little to be encouraged by in recent years. Religious violence tends to dog the footsteps of religious revivals, as European Christians learned to their regret during the Crusades and the Thirty Years' War. For the past three decades, Islam has been undergoing such a revival, and some of its fruits have proved very bitter indeed. Will the Christians of Indonesia and Nigeria flourish in the same poisoned soil? To an American mind it is madness, pure and simple, to make an appeal to God by force of arms. But if Jenkins is to be believed, the standards that will be carried into battle in the years to come will more likely be the emblems of a religion than the flags of a nation.

I must confess to a certain final disappointment with Jenkins's and Porpora's accounts--namely, that both of them seem to underestimate the extent to which believers are influenced by belief rather than culture (as Porpora implies) or history (in Jenkins's view). This may seem an unfair criticism, as a sociologist or a historian will naturally be expected to take a sociological or historical view. But neither author seems to question the modern assumption that religion is the product of human aspiration rather than divine truth.

The underlying premise on which the whole of Porpora's project stands is that religious communities are held together by the common beliefs of their members, and when the members of these communities can no longer agree on their beliefs or put them into words, the communities themselves will weaken or come apart. This is true only up to a point. Religions are indeed sustained by the faith of their members, but faith is something distinct from belief. (Very few Catholics, to give one example, would be capable of saying a great deal, if anything, on the meaning of the Holy Trinity--but this does not mean that their faith in the doctrine is nonexistent or meaningless.) Moreover, the beliefs of most organized religions are largely defined by the leaders of those faiths rather than the adherents, who usually hold to these doctrines imperfectly at best.

Jenkins, too, seems to spend so much time in the nave of the church that he is often oblivious to what is happening in the apse. Most of his analysis is compelling, but his reliance on demographics is open to question. Like Porpora, he seems to view religious doctrines as the product of popular consensus (speculating, for example, on the acceptance of polygamy by African churches), rather than the fruit of revelation and tradition as interpreted by a clerical hierarchy. This greatly weakens his speculations on the future of the Catholic Church, where the acts and pronouncements of high officials (as at Vatican II or the Medellin conference) can truly change the course of history. Neither does he adequately address the question of what role European and American Christianity will play in the future, within either the universal church or the individual states.

When faced with a turbulent present and an uncertain future, there is a great temptation to look for familiar landmarks. Porpora, who admits that the 1960s were perhaps the most formative years of his life, laments (and seems unable to understand) the passing of the prophetic stance (as in the civil rights movement, the peace demonstrations, etc.) taken by many of the churches and the believers of that era. He does not seem willing to entertain the possibility that the activism of that time was, in fact, a symptom of decay rather than vitality within the mainline churches (which, it could be argued, lost their sense of divine mission during the postwar years and threw themselves into secular causes in search of a raison d'etre)--even though this would provide a far better explanation of the tepidity of contemporary American religious life. Jenkins, on the other hand, looks to the Southern Hemisphere for the future revitalization of Christianity--without really considering the likelihood that these regions are just as capable of undergoing the same process of secularization that Europe underwent during the last two centuries.

Prognostications aside, the diagnoses that both authors render are useful and largely beyond dispute. Religion in the United States has indeed been internalized to an unhealthy degree (for the religions themselves, that is), and the center of gravity within Christianity is undeniably shifting southward. But what this presages for the years to come is difficult to say. The history of Christianity provides a chronicle of strange revivals and sudden declines. The "modern" age that was so hostile to Christianity in the West is now over. What follows may be even worse--but it may not be. And as far as the Southern churches are concerned, they may well have to contend with their own "modernity" much sooner than expected.

James J. Uebbing is a New York editor and writer.