There are 1 billion Evangelicals in the world in 2025, according to the World Christian Database.

I Am Free - Evangelical Pop Culture

Follow us on our social media / Siga-nos em nossas redes sociais: linktr.ee/ImFreePop

Transcript

00:00self-understanding of that. Gina, you represent, like you say, a whole 18-year research that has

00:07become more and more sophisticated in time. I know that you are very excited to share with us

00:13your taxonomy. Please, can you share with us what you have done, what you will do? I know that you

00:20will also join us in our GA in October. So this is a flavor of what there is to come about. So Gina,

00:26over to you. All right. Can you see that PowerPoint slide okay? Yes. Okay, great. Yeah, so I'm so

00:35excited. Can I say that? I'm so excited. I've been thinking about this issue for a long time, and I

00:42welcome the opportunity to share what I've been thinking about global evangelicalism with you all

00:48about how we operationalize it, essentially. And what I'm doing here, which I've said multiple times,

00:54is social science. And the approach of the World Christian Database leans more social science than

01:00theology. So we actually don't use the Bevington Quadrilateral in the same way that Operation World

01:05and some other organizations do. I consider this research on human populations. And when you study

01:13humans, you're going to get gray area. And so what we're trying to do here is come up with

01:18descriptions and definitions and methods that respond to that gray area. And again, the reason

01:25why this matters so much is because of Christianity's shift to the Global South. You can see some charts

01:30here that come from that new compact atlas of Global Christianity, where 18% of all Christians in

01:37the year 1900 were from the Global South, United Nations, continents, Asia, Africa, Latin America,

01:43and Oceania. And today, that figure is 69%. And if we look towards 2075, 83% of all Christians are

01:51anticipated to live in the Global South. And you can see on the bottom, the continental perspective, where in

01:581900, 68% of Christians were Europeans, but by 2075, 47% of Christians will be Africans. So this is a

02:06fundamentally different global context within which evangelicalism operates. And so this new demographic

02:14assessment of global evangelicalism has three parts that make up the whole of what I'm calling

02:19wider evangelicalism. And a lot of demographers have used the term wider to describe nuances in

02:27movements, in religious movements. So at the database, we've done wider Buddhism and wider Protestantism.

02:34The Pew Research Center recently had a report where they described wider Judaism. So this is a very

02:39common term that's used to describe a complex global religious movement. And so within wider

02:44evangelicalism, there are three types of evangelicals. Type one, measurement by denominational affiliation.

02:51Type two, Pentecostal charismatics. And type three, what I'm calling right now, quote, majority world

02:56Protestants. So let's look at each of these and see kind of how they fit together in this new

03:02understanding. So type one is measuring evangelicals by denominational affiliation, which is the same

03:08method that Operation World uses. So this is the historic definition and the starting point for

03:14defining evangelicals in the World Christian Database, which utilizes self-identification via

03:21membership in churches that are members of national, regional, or global evangelical organizations.

03:27So every denomination in every country of the world is coded zero to 100% evangelical. So to be 100%

03:37evangelical means that that denomination holds membership in the World Evangelical Alliance or the

03:43Asian Evangelical Alliance, the African Evangelical Alliance. And any denomination that is not a part of a

03:52global, national, or regional evangelical body is assigned a percent evangelical, zero to 99%. And those percentages

04:00are gathered by expert surveys, polls, things like that. Now, this is a seemingly pretty clean and

04:09straightforward way of understanding evangelicalism. And there's a nice established structure, we can get

04:16membership lists of churches, and we can see who is in them. And then we can assign these percentages. But there are a lot of

04:24downsides of this method. You know, what about congregations that don't tow the denominational line? So what if your

04:32congregation is a part of a of a denomination, that is a member of the WEA, but doesn't really, you know, believe the way an

04:40evangelical should or, you know, might believe. Not everyone who is a member of an evangelical church is

04:46actually an evangelical. So there are complications with this, which is why we need different ways of

04:52describing and defining the movement. So type one evangelicals by denominational affiliation results in 393

05:00million evangelicals. And this is our starting point for measuring evangelicalism. But you can see, there's our

05:07little continent graph there, the colors each representing a different continent, you can already

05:12see that 46% of type one evangelicals are in Africa. This is not a Western movement anymore. And we are going

05:20to say that over and over and over again, in our work, in both the World Christian Database, and us and

05:26Operation World, I know agrees with this, even type one evangelicals measuring by denomination affiliation, the

05:32majority are African. So let's go to type two. So type two includes all Pentecostals and

05:41charismatics that weren't already included in type one. So there's no overlap between the three types, we're

05:47essentially building upon each other, right? It's been long observed that most Pentecostals identify closely with

05:55evangelicalism, especially concerning personal piety, conversion experiences, the importance of

06:01scripture, missions, evangelism. For example, the Assemblies of God, which is the largest Pentecostal

06:08denomination in the world, was a founding member of the National Association of Evangelicals in my

06:13country, the United States, and is still, I think, its largest member. And in many countries of the world,

06:19Pentecostals are core members of their national evangelical councils. The boundaries between

06:26Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are pretty fuzzy. And in a lot of places around the world,

06:31these terms are being used interchangeably. And I have some quotes up here on the screen from some

06:36scholars of Christianity and Pentecostalism worldwide, who nearly universally agree that all

06:43Pentecostals are evangelicals, but not that all evangelicals are Pentecostals. So it doesn't go the

06:49other way. So for example, you see Jacob Olapuna, who's a scholar of African religion, he says,

06:55one can argue that all Pentecostals in contemporary Africa are evangelicals, though, quote, not all

07:00evangelical churches and movements consider themselves to be Pentecostals. So if we add the

07:06remaining Pentecostals charismatics, which we're calling type two, we add another 242 million

07:12evangelicals. And if we put type one and type two together, we get a definition of evangelical

07:19that probably most closely aligns to that of Operation World. And I'll let Jason comment on that

07:24later. So we end up with 635 million evangelicals in the world when we add together type one,

07:31denominational evangelicals, and type two, all remaining Pentecostals charismatics. And again,

07:36you can see 48% are African, 21% are Asian, 15% are Latin American. But I don't think we can stop

07:45there. I think we need to add one more type, which is what I'm broadly calling majority world

07:50Protestants. I think we need to do this because of the shift of Christianity to the global South and

07:58because of the complexification of the movement. So in my understanding, I think the widest, the widest

08:04definition of evangelicalism could potentially include all mainline or historic Protestant

08:10denominations in the global South, minus Australia and New Zealand, because they more closely resemble

08:16trends in Europe and North America, because of a close connection between Protestantism and

08:21evangelicalism. And included in this are Black churches in the United States and other kinds of

08:27independence. And again, you can see some quotes here from scholars who study Christianity,

08:32Protestantism, evangelicalism worldwide, who see a close connection between Protestantism and

08:38evangelicalism, and even an overlap between the two. And I'll read this one here from Timothy Lee,

08:44who wrote a history of Christianity in Korea, where he says evangelical, and he uses the terms

08:50evangelical and Protestant synonymously in Korea, quote, because evangelicals vastly predominate in

08:57Korean Protestantism. So by doing this, we can address questions like China. So a problem with the

09:06definition of evangelicals by membership in denominations and networks, and if they are members

09:13of evangelical councils, is for churches that cannot become members of evangelical councils. The Chinese

09:20house church movement cannot become a member of the Asian Evangelical Alliance or the World Evangelical

09:25Alliance. And so we have to ask the question is, if they could join, would they? And so I have spent a lot of time

09:35discussing with experts in Chinese Christianity of what percent evangelical do you think these churches are? And for the

09:44three-self patriotic movement, which are the registered churches, these experts estimated between 50 and 90% of the

09:52registered churches they think would be considered evangelical, and then for the unregistered churches 75 to 100%

10:00evangelical. One of them even said to me, if they're not evangelical, what are they? Which I thought was

10:05actually a really good question, right? And so in this wider evangelicalism, we're including all members of

10:14Chinese churches. Another thing to consider is Latin America. So in Latin America, the term evangelical

10:21applies to can refer to all Protestants, to all non-Catholic Christians, or specifically to mainline or

10:29historic Protestants. Protestant and evangelical are often synonymous in Latin American evangelical

10:35discourses, though in some contexts that may be changing with the increase of neo-Pentecostal churches,

10:41which adds a whole other layer of complexity. But if you look at the history of Protestantism in Latin America,

10:46it came through the evangelical mission movement. And I think there is a strong argument to be made that

10:52these Protestants should be considered evangelical. I want to tell one story about the neo-Pentecostal

10:59churches in Latin America, specifically. There's a wide diversity of opinions about whether or not these,

11:06you know, mega churches, neo-Pentecostal, third wave, whatever term you want to use,

11:10churches in Latin America should be considered evangelical. Probably the most controversial

11:16of which is the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil. And this church has spread to more

11:23than 200 countries in the world. They claim over 8 million members worldwide. It's theologically

11:30conservative, it emphasizes individual salvation, personal piety, the centrality of scripture,

11:35but it also promotes the prosperity gospel and has been criticized for shady financial practices

11:41and emotional manipulation of its members. So who decides whether the Universal Church of the Kingdom

11:47of God is evangelical or not? So in a visit to Sao Paulo in 2015, my colleague Todd Johnson and I

11:54met with roughly two dozen Brazilian evangelical pastors and mission leaders to discuss trends in world

12:01Christianity, mission and evangelism and evangelism. And we asked them how evangelical is the universal

12:07church of the Kingdom of God? And the estimates ranged from 0% evangelical to 100% evangelical. So who gets to

12:17decide? And the last example I want to talk about are the Black churches in the United States or the

12:22African-American churches in the U.S., which in the World Christian Database are classified as independent,

12:27not Protestant, because of how these churches essentially broke away from racist white-led churches

12:35in the creation of the independent Black church movement. A lot of Black Protestants look like

12:41evangelicals in belief and practice, but often do not self-identify with that term

12:47because of the sociological, historical, and political differences that exist between white evangelicals

12:54and Black Protestants in the USA. So we've included Black Protestants in Type 3 wider evangelicalism for

13:01the same reasons we are including these Protestants of the Global South, who may, quote, look like

13:06evangelicals, but may not use that term specifically. So this Type 3 majority world Protestants adds another

13:15302 million evangelicals to the total. And you can see again, Asia and Africa, 38% of these are Asian

13:22because of the Chinese churches, both registered and unregistered, which brings us to wider evangelicalism as a whole.

13:31So if you add together Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3, you get 937 million evangelicals in the world.

13:39And you can see 47% are African, 26% are Asian, 12% Latin America, and 11% North America.

13:46Now, of these three types, we can track change over time, we can see the growth of evangelicalism

13:54over the last several decades, and we can see that Type 3, majority world Protestantism, has grown quite a lot

14:01in the last 50 years. And we can even look at each of these types and the total of wider evangelicalism

14:09together in terms of their north-south distribution. Now, for a long time, the United States has been

14:15the country with the most evangelicals in the world, but that's just not true anymore in this new

14:19demographic assessment of global evangelicalism. And this is really important because the United

14:25States has dominated the contours of evangelical identity, belief, and practice. And it is time to look

14:33at the rest of the world for guidance on what it means to be an evangelical in the 21st century.

14:38In this widest definition of evangelical, the country with the most evangelicals is China.

14:43So that's a very different context. Likewise, we can look at the continental breakdown, which you can

14:50see the trend very, very clearly here, that it is no longer a Western movement. It hasn't been a

14:56Western movement for a long time. And now we have the data, however you want to define

15:00evangelicals. It's not Western. And that is a really important finding. And this is why counting

15:05matters. No matter what your understanding of an evangelical is, it is not people who look like me

15:11that should be defining the contours of this movement. So just to leave us with this question,

15:17right? This is the question that we are talking about. How many evangelicals are in the world?

15:21Well, there's somewhere between 393 million and 937 million. And that's, I get it, maybe an

15:28unsatisfying answer. That's a pretty big range. So I understand if that's frustrating. But I think

15:35most of us will realize that this is a complex, this is a complex movement that is evading

15:41definition. I think we should be talking about description more than definition. Definitions

15:46imply very strong boundaries. And I don't think evangelicalism globally has such strong boundaries

15:54because of everything we've talked about. Terminology and culture and history and politics and race and

16:00ethnicity and gender, right? It's a complex thing. So I think in this new understanding that I've been

16:08experimenting with, however defined, I think we're seeing that we need new histories. We need

16:15new definitions, descriptions and data to show a shared family resemblance among evangelicals

16:23worldwide. I think the shared family resemblance is the direction that I want to move in about how

16:29we talk about global evangelicalism. So I'm happy to stop there. And thanks for letting me show my

16:35graphs and stuff because we love graphs and stuff.

16:37Thank you very much, Gina. I hear your excitement and your let's do this. It's great.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended