On the rise of Pentecostal Christianity

Most interesting essay over at First Things. An excerpt:

God may have (and I believe that He does have) a special love for the poor, but that does not mean that the poor get sophisticated religion. They get strong religion and hot religion more than they get subtle religion and sophisticated religion. Pentecostal preachers all over the world are casting out demons, speaking in tongues, healing the sick and in some cases raising the dead. While many African Christians have broadly positive views of Muslims, I have heard African Pentecostals describe Muslims as demon-possessed; I have heard Nigerian Christians (in a country where interfaith violence has taken thousands of lives) singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in a very non-metaphorical sense. The Muslims across town are getting a similar version of their faith; stripped of nuance, ready for combat. The backwoods Nigerian imams who tried to block a polio vaccine on the grounds that the vaccine was a western plot against Muslims were no more learned or sophisticated than some of the neighboring Christian pastors who tell their flocks that if they will only believe, God will bless them with good jobs and fancy cars.

Many western observers have a ‘pox on both your houses’ attitude toward the competition between these two versions of the great monotheistic faiths. Whether it is a judge in predominantly Christian Malawi sentencing an engaged homosexual couple to a jail term for public indecency or Muslim theologians in other parts of the continent claiming that the sexual mutilation of young girls is sanctioned by the Koran, many westerners find both traditions so distasteful that there is nothing to choose between them.

Whether that is true morally and spiritually I do not venture to say. But when it comes to politics and to the future of American foreign policy, the competition matters a great deal.