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Charismatic Christians Are Normies

Amy Coney Barrett's religious beliefs might seem fringey to media elites, but globally, they are totally mainstream
Screen Shot 2020-09-24 at 3.27.29 PM

The Week‘s Bonnie Kristian has a good piece about how badly progressives are going to screw themselves over if they attack Amy Coney Barrett’s charismatic Christianity. Excerpts:

Going after Barrett’s charismatic faith will do nothing to block her progress through the Senate. It will not add to anti-Trump enthusiasm among the Democratic base, which has long since reached max capacity. But it could well alienate key voting blocs who don’t find charismatic Christianity as weird and scary as many white progressives evidently do. I’m particularly thinking of Hispanic voters who are recent immigrants, children of immigrants, or otherwise maintain close ties to extended family in the Global South, because there is a strong chance those family members or these voters themselves are charismatic Christians, too.

“We are currently living in one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide,” explains religion scholar Philip Jenkins in The Next Christendom. “Over the last century,” his landmark work demonstrates with exhaustive qualitative analysis, “the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably [to the Global South] … If we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria, or in a Brazilian favela.”

Read it all. 

Kristian says she is not a charismatic, but charismatic Christianity, in both Protestant and Catholic forms, is completely mainstream in much of the world (and in the US). Pope Francis knows this well, and has long expressed fraternity and sympathy with charismatics. 

Charismatic Christianity is not my jam either, but I remember when I lived in Dallas, seeing storefront Hispanic Pentecostal churches everywhere, and thinking how out of date my own view of Hispanic Christianity was before I moved to Texas. I assumed that most Hispanic immigrants to the US were Catholics. Not at all! According to 2014 Pew research, 22 percent of US Hispanics are Protestant (versus 55 percent who are Catholic), and of that 22 percent, about one in three are Pentecostal. About 27 percent of the world’s population of Christians are either Pentecostal or charismatic. (Scholars of religion typically define Pentecostals differently from charismatics; all Pentecostals are charismatic, but not all charismatics are Pentecostal.) Besides, citing 2007 data from Pew, Molly Worthen writes that half the Latino Catholics in the US identify as part of the charismatic renewal.

The point is, you aren’t likely (yet!) to find Pentecostals or charismatics in positions of elite secular-world leadership — Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison is a big exception — but there are tens of millions of them in the US, and hundreds of millions worldwide — especially in the Global South. It would be an extremely parochial move by the media and liberal elites to attack Amy Coney Barrett for belonging to a weird, fringey religious sect.

I would like to hear from readers of this blog who are charismatics or Pentecostals. How do you think you are regarded by other Christians, and by non-Christians? Does it please you that one of your own may be nominated for SCOTUS? If she gets the nod, do you think it will bring good attention to the charismatic renewal, or unwelcome scrutiny? What do you think the rest of us need to know about charismatic and/or Pentecostal spirituality?

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