Passions of Pope Victor.

• Author: Jenkins, Philip
• Position: 'The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church' by John L. Allen, Jr. - Book review

John L. Allen, Jr., The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday Religion, 2009), 480 pp., $28.00.

Forecasting the future of religion has a long and tainted history. Too often, futurology merely consists of watching the current trajectory of lines on a graph, and extending them until they reach some sensational conclusion. This was the process that led Mark Twain, a century ago, to predict that the world's largest religions by 2000 AD would be Roman Catholicism-and Christian Science. But no less troublesome is the enduring belief that religion is simply going to fade away and thus we need give it no account. That comforting construct generally endures until some vast explosion, literal or figurative, reminds us not just that many millions of people around the world take religion very seriously, but that they also do not draw sharp lines between the spiritual and political dimensions of life. As Western governments discovered in September 2001, we do indeed have a choice. We either pay serious attention to the patterns shaping religious belief and practice worldwide, or else we find ourselves very suddenly scrambling to play catch-up on that which we have failed to notice.

And thus we come to John Allen's dazzling study of Roman Catholicism in The Future Church. Of course, this is not to suggest that the West will face an armed onslaught from fanatical Roman Catholics anytime soon. Or that this is an ideology we need to comprehend and then confront. But Allen's book does an excellent job of identifying the broad trends--cultural, social, demographic, technological--that are going to have a major impact on all strands of Christianity. And to differing degrees, they will also reshape all the world's religious systems. We can argue about particular phenomena that Allen notes; I would leave out some and add others--but he has provided a singular service in beginning what should be a continuing debate. The Future Church is a deeply valuable book, and it demands to be very widely read.

If prediction guru John Naisbitt had not coined and cornered the term in the 1980s, Allen would probably be talking about "megatrends," those deep underlying movements that are transforming the Catholic world and the Church. Quoting Arnold Toynbee, Allen is careful to distinguish those profound currents from the passing trivia:

The things that make good headlines are on the surface of the stream of life, and they distract us from the slower, impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the surface and penetrate to the depths. But it is really these deeper, slower movements that make history, and it is they that stand out huge in retrospect, when the sensational passing events have dwindled, in perspective, to their true proportions. And this leads Allen to omit various phenomena that, in his view, fall short of the categorical mark. Most startling for Americans, perhaps, is the clergy-abuse affair that has so occupied the headlines over the past fifteen years or so. Yet, as Allen says, this "crisis" has little resonance outside North America and Western Europe, and chiefly needs to be understood in light of specifically American circumstances. It is not, therefore, a trend in anything like the same sense as, say, the massive expansion of Christianity in the global South. Among other "trends that aren't," Allen lists the "return to orthodoxy," "homosexuals" and--daringly--"feminism." He is laudably anxious to avoid falling into the Mark Twain trap of extrapolating current trends ad infinitum. Let it be said, though, that of these supposed nontrends, feminism may be the one most likely to confound even as restrained a prophet as Allen.

What Allen does identify are ten key phenomena: "A World Church," "Evangelical Catholicism," "Islam," "The New Demography," "Expanding Lay Roles," "The Biotech Revolution," "Globalization," "Ecology," "Multipolarism" and "Pentecostalism."

Though they overlap considerably, each of these developments poses problems for the Catholic Church, which formed its institutional structure and its belief system in an older and radically different world. For example:

* A Church dominated in the twentieth century by the global North, meaning Europe and North America, today finds two thirds of its members living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Catholic leadership will come from all over the world in this century to a degree never before experienced....

* A Church whose social teaching took shape in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution now faces a twenty-first-century globalized world, populated by strange entities such as multinational corporations (MNCS) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOS) that didn't exist when it crafted its vision of the just society....

* A Church whose diplomacy has always relied on the Great Catholic Power of the day is now moving in a multipolar world, in which most of the poles that matter aren't Catholic, and some aren't even Christian.

Obviously, what many Westerners see as the reactionary, benighted Catholic Church is anything but unique in being slow to come to terms with this emerging world, or in failing to resolve its relationship to postmodernity. But that certainly does not mean that Church authorities fail to understand the gravity of the issues they face. In fact, we could argue that the Catholic Church was the very first global institution in history. After so many "world empires" that were strictly confined to Eurasia, the Church was the first to span the globe, if you are looking for a convenient date for the birth of globalization, what about 1579, when the diocese of Manila was created as a suffragan see of Mexico City, in a stunning transoceanic leap? Today, debates about the role of a traditionally Western-oriented church in the New World are probably more intense among Catholic leaders than those of any other faith tradition.

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The Future Church is so hard to summarize because its content is so astonishingly rich. Through his journalistic career, Allen himself has met every significant player in the realm he describes, and visited every theater of transformation in the Catholic world. Frequently, he will throw out an anecdote or a case study in a paragraph or a page that any other author would have developed into a full-length book. (To take one example, somewhere in these pages there lurks an excellent future tome on Christianity in India).

But to approach The Future Church through the one trend that spills over into multiple sections, we find ourselves confronted with "The New Demography." Put simply, people around the world are...