Brian Stanley's artfully conceived history of twentieth-century Christianity is as panoramic, as depressing, and as complex as the era it chronicles. The approach is thematic: fifteen chapters, each taking up a major theme in historical scholarship and human events. This methodology gives even a hefty hundred-year survey a surprisingly intense moral urgency. Stanley's goal, in fact, is to write directly and unapologetically to the present, to provide an explanation for “how the churches got to be the way they are.” Alongside the usual set of topics for a twentieth-century retrospective—ecumenism, religious pluralism, totalitarianism—there are many more still unfolding painfully today: Christian participation in war and genocide, the impact of migration and forced exodus, the rights of indigenous peoples, and the “politics of Christian survival” within the post-9/11 Islamic world.
Stanley illuminates each theme with two geographic case studies. Instead of a straight chronological march through the century or a region-by-region survey, he takes readers on a succession of deep dives into local stories of Christian communities in different parts of the world. These stories are chosen less for comprehensiveness than for unconventional and illuminating juxtapositions, bringing home the complex reality of what we so often glibly refer to as “global Christianity.” Thus, the chapter on human rights, race, and indigenous peoples pairs apartheid in South Africa with the legacy of residential schools for First Nations in Canada, two overtly similar tales with opposite outcomes. In South Africa, the missionary legacy provided an educational system that ultimately proved a “strategic resource for radicalization and eventual liberation.” In Canada, however, missionary schools exposed the churches to “the full force of the postcolonial reaction” (265). Another striking example: The Eastern Orthodox encounter with modernity is told through the lens of Greek and Turkish claims to Mount Athos and “new strands” of Orthodoxy in Kenya. Side by side these stories exemplify the dynamism and global spread of a faith tradition often stereotyped as monolithic and impervious to change.
This approach makes for absorbing reading and looks to be a wonderful teaching tool, but, as Stanley willingly acknowledges, it imposes certain sacrifices. Every reader will wonder about an omission or the choice of one regional study instead of another. The attention given to Protestants, for example, does not do justice to the greater numbers and geographic span of Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox churches. Indeed, as Stanley admits, the “stretch marks are sometimes disconcertingly obvious” (7). The same disproportionality applies to gender: though women are the clear majority of Christians, they still do not carry the story line. Stanley's approach does allow him to focus on the laity rather than the usual run of popes, and patriarchs, and denominational executives, but the main characters are still mostly male.
The limitations of Stanley's approach will be most evident to readers interested in theology. They will look in vain for chapters on liberalism or neoorthodoxy, German seminaries or fundamentalists. Karl Barth is, on the whole, a bit player. But what is sacrificed in comprehensiveness is recovered in analytical heft, an aspect best illustrated by the full chapter devoted to liberation theology. Stanley juxtaposes the more familiar story of Latin American base communities with the Palestinian one, showing how the Exodus paradigm, a central motif for writers like Gustavo Gutierrez is deeply discordant to Arab Protestants like Naim Ateek. “There is liberation theology,” Stanley writes, “and theologians of liberation” (237).
Stanley's broad, comparative, thematic approach is a pointed rejoinder to the narrative of “world Christianity,” which has focused on the rapid growth of churches in the global South and their dramatic decline in Europe and, perhaps ultimately, the United States. Too often, he writes, that story of change comes with an implicit value judgment, the assumption that the intensely evangelical, often theologically conservative Christianity south of the equator is “destined for unending church growth until the eschaton” (8), while the temporizing, feckless liberals to the north are busy sowing the seeds of their own demise. But, as Stanley writes, “world Christianity means world Christianity” (8). History is still happening, even in countries deemed to be irredeemably secular. A fascinating case study of Sweden, for example, suggests that the stereotypical view of Scandinavia as an atheistic wasteland obscures other meaningful modes of religious presence; in this case, a deeply rooted need to belong that has outlived the decline of supernatural belief.
Stanley's book does not compel readers into any one narrative about religion in the modern world. To some it will be an unsparing testimony to the ways in which Christians have been both complicit and deeply scarred by the century's orchestrated assaults on human dignity. Others will see the persistence of human hope, not just the possibility but the necessity of belief in horrific times. At the very least, it should inspire historians of religion to think broadly and boldly about their subject, to recognize the moral urgency with which the past speaks to present.
