Grim's Hall

Richard Fernandez: The Age of Faith:

We talk about America and China competing for influence in Africa, but the Belmont Club points out that we thereby miss the real story.

In a process largely unnoticed in the West, billions of people in Asia and Africa have swapped out their indigenous faiths for either Christianity or Islam. And to an even greater astonishment of Western intellectuals most have chosen Christianity. Now the equalization of numbers has caused a fault line to appear through the Third World at about the tenth degree of latitude where the two aggregations face each other “at daggers drawn”.

The word “Christian”, associated in the 19th and 20th centuries with the missionary enterprises of Europe, has now come to mean something different in political terms. Today Christianity is a religion of the Third World. Europeans have largely converted to some soft and watered-down variation of the West’s only indigenous creed, Marxism, as represented by John Lennon’s “Imagine” song. Christianity can no longer be associated largely with the West. Ex oriente lux a phrase which once described the belief that all great world religions rose in the East is now truer than ever. With Marxism shrinking to the margins of the Guardian, the monotheisms have reclaimed the field....

The US is more deeply Christian than Europe, but a large percentage of its ruling class belongs to the "Imagine" religion instead.

Still, the real disadvantage here goes to China. China cannot market itself to Muslims in Africa as the competitor to America. To the degree that Africa is Christian, it will not look to China for leadership -- though there are millions of Chinese Christians, the state is in theory opposed to the faith. Muslims will not look to China for leadership either: worse than Christianity for Islam is polytheism (e.g., Chinese folk religion, certain variations of Buddhism) or the rejection of god (e.g, scientific atheism, other variations of Buddhism).

We may yet see the right in America build a unity on Christian grounds, and so adapt itself to the increasing percentage of Americans who are coming from the Catholicism of Latin America. If we do, America's leadership position within Africa -- and as a potential source of admiration for Chinese Christians -- will increase.