Isn't Christianity a Western religion?

The objection is usually about colonialism: Christianity is what Europeans carried around the world along with the flag, so a person outside Europe adopting it is adopting somebody else’s culture.

The history is worth knowing, because it runs almost exactly the other way.

Where it started

Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew. He was born in Bethlehem, grew up in Nazareth, and spoke Aramaic. Nobody in the New Testament is European except a few Roman officials, and they are the antagonists.

The first Christians were Jewish, in Judea, in a province under occupation. If you had asked anyone in the first century where this movement belonged, nobody would have said Europe.

Africa and Asia were early, not late

This is the part that undoes the objection.

Africa. Christianity was in Egypt within living memory of the events, and Alexandria became one of the great centres of Christian learning. Some of the most important early theologians — Origen, Athanasius, Augustine, Tertullian, Cyprian — were North African. Ethiopia has had an unbroken Christian tradition since the fourth century, which is earlier than most of Europe.

Asia. Syriac-speaking Christians carried the faith east into Mesopotamia and Persia. The Church of the East reached India, and there is a Christian community on the Malabar coast that traces itself to the first century. There were Christians in China by the seventh.

Meanwhile large parts of northern Europe were not Christian until the ninth or tenth century. Scandinavia is later than Ethiopia by six hundred years.

So the sequence people assume — starts in Europe, exported outward — is backwards. Europe was one of the later regions to receive it.

Where the Christians are now

The demographic shift in the last century is dramatic.

In 1910, around 80% of Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 2010, about 61% lived in the global South — Africa, Asia and Latin America.

One in four Christians in the world today is African, and that share is rising. The fastest growth is in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, while church attendance in Europe falls.

The average Christian alive today is more likely to be a Nigerian grandmother or a Brazilian teenager than anyone in London or Ohio.

What this does not settle

Colonial missions did real harm, and Christians should not use these facts to change the subject. Christianity was genuinely used as an instrument of empire. Cultures were suppressed and churches were complicit.

Two things sit alongside that without cancelling it. Christianity existed in most of those regions before the colonisers arrived, sometimes by a thousand years. And it has kept growing where the empires left — which is not how an imposed foreign religion usually behaves.

Objections answered

Doesn't it still carry Western culture with it?

Often it has, and that has been a live argument within the church for a century. But the growth is now largely led by non-Western churches with their own music, theology and leadership, and increasingly they are sending missionaries to Europe.

Isn't the Bible a Western book?

It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, in the Middle East, by people none of whom were European. Its earliest translations were into Syriac, Coptic and Latin — two of those three being African and Asian languages of the time.

Then why is Jesus always painted as a European?

Because cultures depict him as one of their own, and European art dominated the export market. He is painted as Ethiopian in Ethiopia and Korean in Korea. The blond Jesus is a European habit, not a Christian doctrine, and it should be said plainly that historically he looked nothing like that.

How to say it

Give the two dates

“Ethiopia was Christian in the fourth century. Norway in the eleventh.” One comparison does more than a paragraph of argument.

Say where the Christians are

“One in four Christians today is African.” It is checkable, current, and it undoes the picture the objection depends on.

Concede the colonial history

“You’re right that it was used by empires, and Christians should own that.” Refusing to defend the indefensible is what makes the historical points land.

Shared ground, and where traditions differ

All Christians hold

All the traditions hold that the gospel is for every nation, and the oldest churches in continuous existence — Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac, the Thomas Christians of India — are not European.