I was honored to make my Comment Magazine debut late last week.
Comment, which is edited by polymath Alissa Wilkinson, plays in the substantive, culturally astute neo-Reformed space inhabited by thinkers like my own man Oliver O'Donovan. They're doing great work, and are worth adding to your list of organizations to follow.
Also, it's Canadian. Which means it does it within nothing less than the utmost generosity and kindness. My only regret in publishing for them is that I tried to slip in an "eh?" but they wouldn't let it through. (Okay, that's not true. But I wish i had!)
That aside, I offer something of a critique and mea culpa for...well, just read it:
That minority seems even smaller when we reflect about the fact that "the next Christians" will probably not be from North America at all—or if they are, they will be first and second generation immigrants, as they often are in England and Europe. As Phillip Jenkins has argued in The Next Christendom, "the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America." While the extraordinary rise of global Christianity cannot be solely attributed to evangelical efforts—Catholicism is still dominant—neither can such efforts be ignored. And locating the question of evangelicalism's future in America in this global context would help give younger evangelicals a better perspective on our own strengths and weaknesses.
In the past 30 years, evangelicals have often teetered between healthy self-criticism and narcissistic navel-gazing, a challenge that the "next Christians" need to learn to apply not only to their own individual lives, but the movement as a whole. There are blind spots built into the discussion about who the next Christians are and what shape Christianity should take—blind spots which can only be really seen properly when the movement is put into dialogue with both history and other communities around us. For the many merits of both The Next Christians and Hipster Christianity, they also make manifestly clear the compelling need for a broader examination and analysis.
Matthew Lee Anderson
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.
