Writing from London, Damian Thompson of the Telegraph observes that African church plants in the UK are “the most vibrant expression of Christianity in Britain” today. But these churches are often marked by “prosperity gospel” teaching and related exploitation by money-obsessed, high-living pastors, as well as full of destructive charismatic practices that are less Biblical than a lightly Christianized form of spirit worship. Thompson, who is a conservative Catholic, writes:

Why don’t we hear more about this? Imagine the hysteria if this were white American Christian fundamentalism. But, because these are black-led churches, the media report the situation nervously and inadequately. Not that the Right is any more interested: it’s preoccupied with the excesses of Islam.

In the long run, however, we’ll pay dearly for our polite indifference. I don’t want to caricature the faith of West African Christians, but it’s a simple fact that it focuses intensely on “God-given prosperity” (ie making money) and spirit possession. And, if trends continue, it will soon overtake the mainstream churches as the dominant expression of Christianity in this country. That raises the real prospect of Christians and Muslims joining forces in a culture war on degenerate British society. What will happen then?

There’s a lot to think about in that. For better of for worse, as Philip Jenkins has documented, Third World Christianity will become normative global Christianity in this century. Like it or not, it’s coming, and this presents some direct challenges to us in the West. Here are some.

For religious liberals, the idea that overthrowing the old religious order in favor of a more emotive, nondogmatic Christianity that accepts homosexuality and other priorities of the white middle classes will have to contend with the fact that they have scant theological grounds on which to oppose the fiercely anti-gay, anti-rationalist Christianity of African churches. If Christians have the right to interpret Scripture on their own, who are we to tell the Africans and their Western followers that they’re wrong? You run the risk of turning into a patronizing jackass like the Episcopal bishop who, frustrated by African Anglicans’ obstinate refusal to turn themselves into liberal Episcopalians, denounced them as able to be bought with “chicken dinners.”

For religious conservatives, we are accustomed to seeing the Africans as our allies. Unlike the dessicated liberalism of established Western churches, the African churches affirm the power of the Holy Spirit, and traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality — precisely the issue on which Western churches split. We take satisfaction in the fact that there are more Anglicans in Nigeria than in the UK, and that they are doctrinally traditionalist. Christianity may be dying in Europe, but it’s growing by leaps and bounds in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. We traditionalist Western Christians take comfort in this, but Damian Thompson challenges that complacency. The Nigerian Anglicans are not the problem … but they are not the only Christians in Africa. This freelance, non-normative Christianity, detached from any stable, authoritative tradition, is, or ought to be, tremendously worrying. Our experience in the contemporary West is that Christianity detached from stable, authoritative tradition inevitably becomes liberalized and secularized, especially on sexual morality. But that is not the case in Africa or elsewhere in the Global South, and the potential negative consequences from that is not something we ever really talk about, or think about.