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CHAPTER 10

The Worlds of Christendom

Contraction, Expansion, and Division 600–1300

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Yao Hong, a Chinese woman, was about twenty years of age around 1990, when, distraught at discovering that her husband was having an affair, she became a Christian. As a migrant from a rural village to the huge city of Shanghai, Yao Hong found support and a sense of family in a Christian community. Interviewed in 2010, she observed, “Whether they know you or not, they treat you as a brother or sister. If you have troubles, they help out with money or material assistance or spiritual aid.” Nor did she find the Christian faith alien to her Chinese culture. To the contrary, she felt conversion to Christianity as a patriotic act, even a way of becoming more fully modern. “God is rising here in China,” she declared. “If you look at the United States or England, their gospel is very advanced. Their churches are rich, because God blesses them. So I pray for China.”1

Y ao Hong is but one of many millions who have made Christianity a very rapidly growing faith in China over the past thirty years or so. Other Asian countries — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, and parts of India — also host substantial Christian communities. Even more impressively, the non-Muslim regions of Africa witnessed an explosive advance of Christianity during the twentieth century, while Latin America, long a primarily Catholic region, has experienced a spectacular growth of Pentecostal Protestant Christianity since the 1970s. In the early twenty-first century, over 60 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Thus Europe and North America, long regarded as the centers of the Christian world, have been increasingly outnumbered in the census of global Christianity.

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Interestingly enough, the sixth- and seventh-century world of Christendom revealed a broadly similar pattern. Christianity then enjoyed an Afro-Eurasian reach with flourishing communities in Anatolia, Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, Ethiopia, Nubia, Syria, Armenia, Persia, India, and China, as well as Europe (see “The Spread of New Religions” in Chapter 4). But during the next thousand years, radical changes reshaped that Christian world. Its African and Asian outposts largely vanished, declined, or were marginalized as Christianity became primarily a European phenomenon for the next thousand years or more.

During this millennium, Christianity came to provide a measure of cultural commonality for the diverse peoples of western Eurasia, much as Chinese civilization and Buddhism did for those of East Asia and Islam did for the Middle East and beyond. By 1300, almost all of these societies — from Ireland and England in the west to Russia in the east — had embraced in some form the teachings of the Jewish artisan called Jesus. At the same time, that part of the Christian world became deeply divided. Its eastern half, known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium (bihz-ANN-tee-uhm), encompassed much of the eastern Mediterranean basin while continuing the traditions of the Greco-Roman world, though on a smaller scale, until its conquest by the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453. Centered on the magnificent city of Constantinople, Byzantium gradually evolved a particular form of Christianity known as Eastern Orthodoxy within a distinctive third-wave civilization.

In Western, or Latin, Christendom, encompassing what we now know as Western Europe, the setting was far different. There the Roman imperial order had largely vanished by 500 C.E., accompanied by the weakening of many features of Roman civilization. Roads fell into disrepair, cities decayed, and long-distance trade shriveled. What replaced the old Roman order was a highly localized society — fragmented, decentralized, and competitive — in sharp contrast to the unified state of Byzantium. Like Byzantium, the Latin West ultimately became thoroughly Christian, but it was a gradual process lasting centuries, and its Roman Catholic version of the faith, increasingly centered on the pope, had an independence from political authorities that the Eastern Orthodox Church did not. Moreover, the Western Church in particular and its society in general were far more rural than Byzantium and certainly had nothing to compare to the splendor of Constantinople. However, slowly at first and then with increasing speed after 1000, Western Europe emerged as an especially dynamic, expansive, and innovative third-wave civilization, combining elements of its Greco-Roman past with the culture of Germanic and Celtic peoples to produce a distinctive hybrid, or blended, civilization.

Thus the story of global Christendom in the era of third-wave civilizations is one of contractions and expansions. As a religion, Christianity contracted sharply in Asia and Africa even as it expanded in Western Europe and Russia. As a civilization, Christian Byzantium flourished for a time, then gradually contracted and finally disappeared. The trajectory of civilization in the West traced an opposite path, at first contracting as the Roman Empire collapsed and later expanding as a new and blended civilization took hold in Western Europe.