For 25 years, I’ve had real problems with the religious demographics being projected by scholars and even the most trusted institutions. I remember being dumbfounded by my scholar-friend Dr Muata Ashby, prolific author and Egyptologist, attempting to resurrect both ancient Egyptian language and religion, following the Zionist model, as a precursor to 21st century Pan African victory; attempting in the early 2000s a book on an assessment of global Christianity; I found his categorization of church groups so out of step with reality; he seemed stuck in the 19th century. For him, Pentecostalism was not yet even a statistically significant category. I was assured this major blunder would certify the scholastic irrelevancy of his publication, regardless of what other insights he may have had.
I was equally convinced that even Gallup and Pew were off. Though the most trusted names in religious polling, they still rank Catholicism as the major force in global Christianity, a quite understandable mistake, I believe, owing to the unreliability of their sources, unable to capture the enormity of the erosion from Catholic conversion to Evangelicalism, and in particular Pentecostalism, especially in Latin America, but in Asia and Africa as well, due to the philosophy of Catholic church membership registration, which holds every baptized infant to the practice of its parents, regardless of what philosophical or lifestyle changes it might embark upon throughout its adult life.
There is also the sheer dynamism of the aggressive expansionism of Pentecostalism both into traditional Catholic and Protestant church memberships, as well as more recently, the previously unchurched, as with the evangelistic explosion amongst Amazon valley and Andean indigenes, quite difficult to capture with the blunt instrument of a biennial poll.
It would take an atheist to finally get it right. For those who won’t read the book watch the video.
YeKengalé 