When Religion and Politics Collide

From the Dallas Morning News:

Editorial: When religion and politics collide

If you consider the rancor within the worldwide Anglican Communion as only being about church politics or gay rights, you’ll miss the larger point. Like nearly all mainline Protestant denominations, Episcopalians in Texas and their Anglican colleagues abroad are indeed facing extreme tensions over homosexuality. But the broader question is why this debate is occurring — and what the why means for global politics.

Penn State historian Philip Jenkins has written widely about the why. As he recently told Dallas audiences, Christianity is experiencing explosive and historically consequential growth in Latin America, Asia and Africa — the so-called Global South. Brazilian Christians, for example, are among the world’s largest buyers of Bibles. Africa is home to half the world’s Anglicans, and Nigeria alone will soon have more Anglicans than England. There is power in numbers, and Third World Christians are starting to exercise it.

Westerners usually err in seeing global Christianity through the lens of our own culture war. But the religious beliefs of Global South Christians, while prescribing a conservative sexual morality, also can lead them into taking economically liberal stances — including radical demands for better health care, schools and jobs. Being largely poor themselves, they take seriously Jesus’ admonitions about treating the poor fairly.

That’s why leftist Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has strong support among Brazilian Pentecostals. And that’s why leaders like him can draw on an army of the Christian faithful to affect economic policies like trade deals and debt reduction.

On foreign policy, booming African Christianity is facing potentially violent conflict with resurgent African Islam, complicating the war on terror for America.

Politicians, policy-makers and other elites sometimes see religion as a hobby for believers.

For the devout, though, it’s not a garnish to life; it is life. If the candidates prepping for the White House miss how the new Christianity is fundamentally changing the Third World, they could get blindsided on the global stage. So could we all.

Posted by Media Team on Monday, March 12, 2007

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