In 1900, Christianity looked, to many Western observers, like a European religion with overseas colonies of faith. By the early twenty-first century, the typical Christian was more likely to live in the Global South—Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia—than in Europe. Seminaries in Rome and Canterbury still mattered; growth engines in Lagos, São Paulo, Seoul, … Read More
In the decades around 1870–1920, a current of American Protestantism insisted that the kingdom of God required more than converted individuals. Factories, tenements, child labor, corrupt machines, and racial injustice were not merely “secular” problems; they were spiritual emergencies. Preachers and professors who shared this conviction built what historians call the Social Gospel—a reform movement … Read More
For much of Christian history, official speech about other religions oscillated between mission, polemic, and temporary truce. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) marked a public turning for the Catholic Church: other religions were to be approached with respect, Jews were not to be charged with collective guilt for the crucifixion, and dialogue became a pastoral … Read More
The two world wars of the twentieth century killed tens of millions, redrew empires, and tested every moral vocabulary the churches possessed. Christians fought on every major side. Chaplains blessed troops who shot at other chaplains’ flocks. Pacifists went to prison. National churches prayed for victory as if God wore a uniform. After 1918, disillusionment … Read More
A megachurch is usually defined by weekly attendance in the thousands—often 2,000 or more—gathered under a single congregation’s identity, frequently with multiple services, campuses, and media arms. The word sounds American, and the United States did pioneer and brand the form. Yet huge congregations also thrived in Seoul, Lagos, São Paulo, and Singapore. Critics see … Read More
Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews in a campaign of industrialized genocide now called the Holocaust (Shoah). Christians were among the perpetrators, the bystanders, the rescuers, and the victims of related persecutions. For church history, the necessary question is not only what Hitler did, but how older … Read More
Few topics in Christian history provoke sharper slogans. One side says the cross marched with the sword and that is the whole truth. The other says missionaries opposed empire’s cruelties and that is the whole truth. Archives support neither monopoly. Iberian padroado Catholicism, British Protestant societies, French Catholic orders, Russian Orthodox expansion, and German mission … Read More
When European empires retreated in the mid-twentieth century, the churches those empires had escorted—or at least tolerated—faced a legitimacy crisis and an opportunity. Mission compounds, foreign bishops, Western hymnbooks, and funding pipelines suddenly looked like political liabilities in new nations. Yet Christianity did not leave with the governors. In much of Africa, parts of Asia, … Read More
Evangelicalism entered the twentieth century as a contested word and exited it as a global network of megachurches, mission agencies, parachurch ministries, and political brands. Between those bookends lie the Fundamentalist-Modernist split, the neo-evangelical rebuilding of mid-century America, Billy Graham’s mass crusades, the Lausanne movement’s world congresses, Pentecostal and charismatic overlaps, and a demographic shift … 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 Spiritâ€â€”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