T N Ninan: The old order

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

The Roman Catholic Church has been in focus this past week, with the death of Pope John Paul II. Attention has been focused on how he led the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world with his firm religious conviction (while achieving such political goals as bringing down the Iron Curtain).

The truth, though, is that traditional Christianity is in decline and faces multiple challenges. Churches are shrinking in number in Europe, and attendance falling off. This is true of Roman Catholics as well as liberal Protestants.

Various reasons are given for this: the challenges that post-Enlightenment rationality and science pose for religious faith, the growing secular mood, the failure of the church to connect with people's philosophical and religious needs, a male-dominated and patriarchal church system that frowns on contemporary acceptance of full-fledged feminism, birth control, alternative sexuality, and so on.

But what makes the challenge double-edged for the traditional churches is the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity""a phrase that captures beliefs and practices ranging from a focus on personal salvation to faith healing, from inter-active fun forms of worship to 'speaking in tongues'.

The US president, for instance, is an evangelical 'born-again' Christian, and he is typical of the evangelicals in breaking down the dichotomy between the sacred and the secular, and therefore bringing religion into political life.

The result is promotion of the socially conservative issues dear to these church groups: opposition to abortion, for one. Whereas the traditional churches try to steer clear of political issues, the evangelicals will ardently advocate a pro-Israel foreign policy and an aggressive stance vis-a-vis the Islamic countries""one reason why the invasion of Iraq was so popular in the US (and the last pope, it will be recalled, had opposed the invasion).

There used to be a time when mainstream Christians saw the evalengicals as a lower order of being, but no longer""for the trend is increasingly mainstream. About a fifth of the US is now said to consist of evangelical Christians, as are growing numbers in South America (and also in Africa and parts of Asia, like South Korea), where the evangelical churches are a major challenge to the Roman Catholic church.

Globally, out of an estimated 2 billion Christians, about between 500 million and 650 million people are now said to be evangelicals, up from about 100 million 40 years ago""and they are growing faster than the global population, while the liberal Protestants and Catholics decline in relation to the total population (there is little data available on the eastern orthodox churches).

There has been some attempt at dialogue between these different churches, but in approach and tradition they are as different as chalk and cheese, and there hasn't therefore been much achieved by way of a meeting ground.

The mushrooming evangelical churches (and there is no shortage of 'charismatic' preachers who start their own church) reach out through hundreds of TV channels and radio stations, as well as magazines and periodicals, indulging in successful fund-raising and marketing themselves in a focused way to win over ever more converts from traditional Christianity (less so from other faiths).

Here in India, we get the backwash effects of this trend through the "God" channels that have greater currency in southern India, and the occasional visitations of American televangelists""with some of the visits causing controversy, as happened recently in Bangalore.

Even in India, the young are beginning to move away from the traditional, non-invasive churches to the more inclusive, demanding and even all-encompassing evangelical churches.

As attention shifts from the last pope's funeral to the election of the next one, what do these global trends say to the cardinals who comprise the electoral college? The media has speculated on the fact that the growing part of the Catholic church is in South America and Africa, not in Europe and North America, and suggestions have been made that the next pope should appropriately be from the 'Third World'.

That question may be less important than the larger one, of how the traditional churches are going to cope with the twin challenges of a secular world where you have to accept and live peaceably with other faiths, while keeping at bay the aggressive evangelical churches that are moving to centre stage.