Christianity in China is not a nineteenth-century novelty with a medieval rumor attached. In 635, according to the Xi’an stele of 781, a Church of the East mission reached the Tang court. Later centuries saw Yuan-era Christians, Jesuit scientific accommodation under the Ming and Qing, the bitter Chinese Rites Controversy, suppressed communities, Protestant and Catholic … Read More
The Great Awakening is often remembered as a colonial American lightning strike: Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, George Whitefield on a field, sinners trembling, a nation of evangelicals born. That memory is not empty. It is too small. Britannica describes a revival concentrated in British America mainly between about 1720 and the 1740s, linked to Pietism, … Read More
India’s Christian history refuses the neat plot in which Europeans invent the Indian church in the sixteenth century. Communities on the Malabar Coast have long claimed Saint Thomas the Apostle as founder; they lived for centuries in East Syriac liturgical orbit, negotiated caste and kingdom politics, and then faced Portuguese Catholic pressure to Latinize. Meanwhile … Read More
Between 1700 and 1900, Christianity’s geographic center of gravity began a shift that the twentieth century would complete: from a religion whose most powerful institutions were European to a religion with large, self-directing churches on every inhabited continent. The usual picture is a Victorian missionary in a pith helmet. That picture is late, Protestant, and … Read More
In little more than a century, Christianity in Korea moved from a persecuted minority faith to a major public religion of the South—complete with megachurches, global missionaries, universities, and political visibility—while the North’s church life was crushed into a remnant under communist rule. Outsiders reach for simple keys: American missionaries, Korean zeal, capitalist takeoff, shamanic … Read More
A stubborn textbook sentence still walks the earth: Christianity came to Africa with nineteenth-century missionaries. The sentence is false as history even when it is true as a local memory in a particular village evangelized in 1870. Africa hosted Christian kingdoms while much of northern Europe was still being converted. Aksum adopted Christianity in the … Read More
When Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantine imperial church lost its emperor. Orthodoxy did not disappear. The sultan installed a patriarch within an Ottoman system that governed Christians as a protected yet subordinate community—later discussed under the millet framework—while Orthodoxy’s liturgical life, monasteries, and village piety continued under Islamic imperial sovereignty. For nearly … Read More
Western church history often treats Egypt as a prologue: Alexandria’s catechetical school, Athanasius versus Arius, desert monasticism, then the camera pans to Rome and Constantinople and never pans back. Egypt’s Christians, however, remained. They remained after Chalcedon split the imperial church. They remained after the Arab conquest ended Byzantine rule. They remained as a large … Read More
The twentieth century subjected Eastern Orthodoxy to an ideological empire that denied God as a matter of doctrine: Marxist-Leninist states closed churches, shot and imprisoned clergy, infiltrated hierarchies, and taught atheism in schools—while also, at times, drafting surviving church structures into patriotic propaganda. From the Bolshevik assault on the Russian Church through Stalin’s wartime recalibration, … Read More
Russian Orthodoxy did not begin in the Kremlin. It began on the Dnieper, in the conversion politics of Kievan Rus, when Prince Vladimir I accepted baptism (traditionally 988) and pulled his realm into the Byzantine Christian world. The metropolitan see that served the East Slavs was long titled of Kiev—even when politics and Mongol power … Read More