A Catholic priest offers Mass in N’djamena, Chad.

The year 1640 marked a low period in Western civilization. Protestants were killing Catholics, Catholics were killing Protestants, and Christians were killing Jews. Vincent de Paul, the French saint who devoted his life to the poor, made a prophecy. Jesus said his Church would last until the end of time, de Paul declared, but he’d never mentioned Europe. The Church of the future, said de Paul, will be the Church of Africa, of South America, of China and Japan. If we take Japan off his list, that was a pretty good prophecy (though some people do say that the greatest Christian writer of the 20th century was the Japanese Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo). Christianity’s center of gravity is moving decisively south.

Currently there are some 2.1 billion Christians in the world. The largest single contingent is still found in Europe, with roughly 530 million. Latin America is not far behind, with around 510 million. Africa is in third place, with nearly 390 million. But roll the film forward even a few years, and we will find indications of an ever-growing proportion of the world’s Christians living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By 2025, Africa and Latin America will be jostling for the claim of continent with the most Christians. By 2050, without a doubt, Christianity will be foremost a religion of Africa and the African diaspora. With Christian Asia and Latin America also continuing to grow disproportionately, non-Hispanic whites will represent by then maybe one-sixth or one-fifth of the world’s Christians.

In what countries will the largest Christian populations be found 50 years from now? At the head of the list will still be the United States, followed in no particular order by Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, the Congo, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and China. Notice who’s not on that list: Britain, France, Spain, Italy. Taking into account only Roman Catholics for a moment, last year saw more Catholic baptisms in the Philippines than in France, Spain, Italy, and Poland combined. At present, three countries—Mexico, the Philippines, and Brazil—account for almost 30 percent of the world’s Catholics. By 2050, Africa and Latin America alone will contain some two-thirds of all Catholics.

What does this mean in practical terms? A lot. In the global south—in Africa, Asia, and to some extent Latin America—Christians see the world, and the word of God, in a different way. Though generalizations are never thoroughly true, it is fair to say that southern hemisphere Christians tend to have what we in North America and Europe might regard as a literalistic, traditional, very orthodox approach to belief, especially with respect to Scripture. This is true across the denominations, from Seventh Day Adventists to Lutherans to Catholics.

Can you imagine such a thing, reading the Bible as fiction?—so asks the African feminist theologian Musimbi Kanyoro. The error occurs most pervasively, she observes, among people living in “those cultures which are far removed from biblical culture.”

In Africa, the biggest challenge for Christian proselytizers is not convincing people that the Old Testament is relevant, but convincing them that it is in some way less important than the New. With its nomadism, polygamy, and blood sacrifice, the Old Testament describes a social, economic, and cultural world that resonates with a great many Africans. To be sure, most Africans do not live in such societies now, but they don’t have to range imaginatively far beyond their immediate circumstance to recognize them and to appreciate the plight of, say, a community of believers surrounded by pagans. As the South African feminist theologian Madipoane Masenya has said, Africans who find it “difficult to be at home” with the Old Testament should examine themselves to see if they might not have “lost their Africanness.”

Christianity is a religion of the poor, and the average Christian in the world today is a very poor person. Consider for a moment how the Bible might be read with hungry eyes. In the revolutionary tract the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in Luke 1 (46–55), for instance, God fills “the hungry with good things” and sends “the rich away empty.” Early Christians envisioned the Lord’s second coming as a messianic banquet, at which the impossible would happen and everyone would have enough to eat. Indeed, the grace commonly said today by rural Christians in China could as readily have come from the Middle East of Christ’s time: “Today’s food is not easy to come by. God gives it to us. After we eat it we’ll be protected from sickness. God protects us so we can have the next meal.”

One of the most popular books of the Bible in Africa and much of Asia is the Book of Ruth. It is an account of a society all but destroyed by famine, where the men go away to the cities because they are able to, the women remain behind with the children, and the social web is held together, insofar as it can be, through kin obligations. As always in a time of famine and refugees, the brunt falls on women. In the global south, Christianity is a women’s movement.

In conversation with a group of Nigerians one day, I asked what parts of the Bible resonated with them that they thought would not resonate with Christians in the United States. They soon proposed Psalm 126, which reads in part, “Those who sow the seed in tears reap with shouts of joy.” In America, the psalm is often recited at funerals, in the context of resurrection, but its meaning in a practical sense is murky. Why does someone sow in tears? And my friends said, “It’s obvious. There is a famine. You have seed corn. You can feed your family now and have nothing to eat next year and cease to be a farmer and be reduced to beggary. Or you can take the corn from your crying children and sow it, so next year there will be something to eat.”

Martin Luther disliked at least three books of the Bible that he thought were not authentic and wanted removed from the sacred text. It turns out to be almost a rule of thumb that what Luther didn’t like now goes down well in Africa and Asia. The Epistle to the Hebrews, for instance, is often described by West Africans as “our epistle.” It is about the dilemmas of living in a society that practices blood sacrifice and trying to convince people that Jesus now fulfills that role. Another is Revelation, a somewhat spooky book written for Christians living—so they believed—under the rule of demonic forces who were manipulating the currency and wielding the imagery of power in order to control and deceive. For most southern hemisphere Christians, Revelation reads like a political science textbook with a message of final liberation. Its elements—the altar, the lamb, the throne, sacrifice, atonement—are familiar, and it is one reason that the evangelical forms of Christianity are doing well, particularly in much of Africa.

The third book Luther didn’t care for was the Epistle of James, a brief, strange text seemingly lacking in standard Christian doctrine. It includes a verse that is among the most popular sermon texts in West Africa: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” The passage continues, “Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’” Imagine hearing a passage like that in a community where most members of the congregation are in their early twenties, the pastor is a graybeard elder of 28 or 29, and the average age of death is 36.

We live today in what is probably the greatest age ever of Christian hymn-writing. But few Europeans and Americans comprehend the languages of the new compositions—created in Zulu, Luganda, Swahili, and so on. One of the most widely adopted of these hymns is “Tukutendereza Yesu” (“We Praise You, Jesus”), which is for East African Christianity what “Amazing Grace” is for American Protestantism. “Tukutendereza” is a hymn entirely about blood, the blood of the lamb, the blood of sacrifice (“Jesus Lamb of God / Your blood cleanses me”). Another hymn, by a Ghanaian woman named Afua Kuma, a composer esteemed on the continent, gives us these words: “If Satan troubles us, Jesus Christ, you who are the lion of the grasslands, you whose claws are sharp will tear out his entrails and leave them on the ground for the flies to eat.” If we were to take out of the Bible all the references to demons, exorcisms, healings, and other miracles, we would be left with a pretty thin pamphlet. And for an African or Asian, it is to a large extent these elements—which have become a puzzlement and embarrassment to northern Christians—that provide the main attraction and greatest reason for converting to the faith. As one contemporary hymn from the Transvaal explains it, Jesus Christ, by his resurrection, “overcame magic. He overcame amulets and charms. He overcame the darkness of demon possession. He overcame dread. When we are with him, we also conquer.”

Not long ago, I was talking with an American clergyman of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a youngish white man, conservative and well dressed. He was describing for me his visit to an Adventist church in southern Africa. In America, a church of its size would have held a hundred congregants, he said, but this being Africa, there were about 800 people trying to get inside. It was located in an area regarded as dangerous for whites, and so people asked him who he was. Word that an American minister was in the hall quickly went up to the platform at the front, and the minister in charge of the service made an announcement: “My friends, I have wonderful news. Pastor ‘Smith’ has come to visit us all the way from the United States. I’m going to ask him to conduct tonight’s exorcism.”

Demonology is credible and essential to African (and Asian) churches in a way it is not for their European and American counterparts. In most of the southern hemisphere, religions that won’t accommodate to that fact and deal with witchcraft, ancestors, and possession may as well move into a new business. Witness another scene, from a church in central Africa: In the midst of the Sunday service, a woman announces that she has been healed of a spinal complaint. Immediately, other people want to report how they’ve been healed, and testimonies follow upon testimonies. Everyone is trying to speak. Finally, to stand a chance of finishing the service, the deacon says, “All right, everyone who wants to report being cured of this kind of disease, put your hands up. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight—right, down.” And so on through a range of ailments. After rounds of hand-raising, the service proceeds. This incident took place not in a small fringe Pentecostal denomination, but in a Roman Catholic church; the watershed miracle of the spine occurred during the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.

How will the differences between northern and southern understandings of Christianity play out? Not necessarily as expected. Northern liberal Christians, for instance, cast a suspicious eye on the south’s conflicts with demons, seeing them as a distraction from more pressing injustices in the region’s social and political structures. But their concern misses the direction in which those supernatural battles, in a Christian setting, seem to lead—toward a reliance on faith that nurtures self-reliance (witness the women’s liberation movement in Africa). What’s more, there are in the Bible many passages that to northerners seem almost bland, but that from a southern perspective are explosive. There is the story of Jesus sitting by a well in discussion with a Samaritan woman, for instance—an action that in some societies even today could bring down censure on the woman. And the many passages in which Jesus sits with people of all kinds—we take these scenes for granted, but imagine reading them in India under the caste system and taking them at their word. Literal readings may yet produce liberal results.

To some extent, however, the differences between Christians of the north and south have begun to play out already and quite sharply in one particular denomination, in a way that may point to future disharmony in others. I’m referring to recent exchanges between the American Episcopal Church, which is a fairly liberal assembly, and the Anglican Communion to which it belongs (whose numerical weight is now centered in Africa). When the Episcopalians consecrated an openly gay bishop in 2003, it was much to the horror of Africa’s Anglican bishops, who five years previously had overwhelmingly approved a declaration that homosexual behavior is “incompatible with scripture.” The Nigerian Anglican Church compared the U.S. Episcopal Church to “a cancerous lump in the body that should be excised if it has defied every known cure.” A schism seems at least possible.

Another incident comes to mind, a contentious meeting in a Bible study session a couple of years ago between an Anglican bishop from Africa and an Episcopal bishop from America. The American was explaining how he read the Bible in a culture-relevant way, how in his understanding, Scripture didn’t always mean exactly what it said. The African was reading the Bible for precisely what it said. Tension grew until finally the African could stand it no more and raised himself up and said, “If you don’t believe the Bible, why did you bring it to us in the first place?”

Philip Jenkins is a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University and the author of The New Faces of Christianity (2006). His essay is drawn from the February 22 Lowell Lecture, cosponsored by the Church in the 21st Century Center.