Michael Adegoke

For a century, social theorists treated Europe as the preview of a religiousless world. Factories, universities, welfare states, and Sunday football would finish what Voltaire began. Then global Christianity surged elsewhere, American religiosity refused to die on schedule, and even European maps looked patchier than the theory allowed: empty pews in the Netherlands beside crowded … Read More

Modern human rights language—equal dignity, freedom of conscience, limits on torture, claims against arbitrary power—feels secular in the United Nations General Assembly and in courtrooms that cite treaties rather than Gospels. Yet the genealogy of those ideas runs repeatedly through Christian moral vocabulary, church law, and Christian political conflict. The relationship is not a simple … Read More

“Prosperity gospel” is a contested label for teachings that link Christian faith—often via positive confession, seed offerings, and destiny rhetoric—to material wealth, health, and success. Admirers call it faith for abundant life; critics call it exploitation baptized. Historians should do something harder than cheering or jeering: trace where the teachings came from, how they traveled, … Read More

In July 1974, thousands of evangelical leaders gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the International Congress on World Evangelization. The meeting—closely associated with Billy Graham’s networks and with John Stott’s theological drafting influence—produced the Lausanne Covenant, a defining charter for late-twentieth-century evangelical mission. The “Lausanne Movement” that followed became less a denomination than a platform: congresses, … Read More

Nigeria is one of the most important Christian countries in the world by sheer numbers, institutional variety, and cultural export—from Anglican and Catholic hierarchies to Aladura prophets to global Pentecostal brands. That importance is recent in demographic scale, not in spiritual seriousness. The story runs from nineteenth-century missions and Sierra Leone returnees, through colonial schooling … Read More

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of Africa’s oldest Christian bodies—and one of its most distinctive modern survivors. While many African churches trace their public form to nineteenth-century missions, Ethiopia’s church entered modernity already imperial, liturgical, and Geʿez-rooted. The modern era tested that inheritance: centralizing emperors, Italian fascist occupation, Haile Selassie’s reforms, autocephaly from … Read More

Christianity is not a late import to the Middle East. It is native to the region’s cities, deserts, and languages—Aramaic, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, Greek. What is modern is the pressure cooker: Ottoman reform and collapse, European protection and intervention, Arab and Turkish nationalisms, colonial borders, oil economies, authoritarian states, Islamist movements, and wars that emptied … Read More

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he did not invent the idea that Christianity and science might collide—but he forced the collision into popular culture with unusual force. By 1925, when John T. Scopes stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution, newspapers worldwide framed a morality play: modern science … Read More

Between roughly 1800 and 2000, Christian women expanded the range of recognized ministry far beyond the parish housekeeper stereotype—while formal ordination remained closed, contested, or only slowly opened depending on church, continent, and decade. The story is not a straight march from exclusion to equality. It is a braid of missionary societies, nursing and teaching, … Read More

In the 1960s and 1970s, experiences long associated with Pentecostal storefronts—glossolalia, prophecy, healing prayer, and a vivid sense of “baptism in the Holy Spirit”—erupted inside Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and other historic churches. Participants called it charismatic renewal. They usually refused to leave their mother denominations. That refusal is the movement’s historical signature: Spirit gifts … Read More