Jenkins' Ear

Our recent discussion of Christianity was sparked by my post of a few months ago, on Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom. Jenkins is an extremely charitable and perceptive observer of religion, and in God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis, he turns those talents to producing an extremely helpful reconsideration of the conventional headline wisdom about European religion, which is that secularism is the rule, Christianity is at the end of a long decline, and Islam is at the beginning of its ascendancy. Issues of immigration, terrorism, and multiculturalism are all in play, and their complexity is often underrated. Jenkins does a thorough job of bringing it to the fore. I feel like I have now a much clearer picture, not only of European issues, but also of American and global questions of religion and politics. There is a marked difference between this work and something like Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Huntington is evocative, but leaves you feeling like very obvious parts of the picture are missing. Jenkins resists at every turn the temptation to melodrama. The contrast between the clarity of his own insights and the obfuscation of the headlines is dramatic enough. He never blinks at the grave dangers posed by Islamist terrorism. Nor does he fail to recognize that new security measures and different kinds of public policy might be genuinely necessary in the face of this threat. And he understands that European Christianity does indeed face great challenges in the face of both secularism and Islamic immigration. But he is never at a loss for historical context, for the perspective of the longer view, or for a steady stream of the necessary and often missing facts and figures. For anyone who wants to better understand the future of Christianity, of Islam, of Western secularism, and of the relationships and conflicts being forged between them, this an indispensable resource.