“Religions die”
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Philip Jenkins about his most recent book, The Lost History of Christianity. I find this all very fascinating.
Your book’s first sentence is “Religions die,” which is rather shocking to the way we see religions existing today: I think we expect cults to fade away, but not established religions. Why are you concerned, at this moment, to write about the vanishing of faith traditions?
Religions really do die. We think of ancient religions like those of the Aztecs or Mayas, which had millions of followers, not to mention copious scriptures. Also, something like the Manichaean faith once stretched from France to China, but that is now extinct. The Zoroastrian religion is not exactly extinct, but it has gone from being a vast world religion to the creed of a few hundred thousand believers.
But also, religions die in particular times and places, in the sense that they once dominated whole countries, but then cease to exist there. The religion is not dead in the sense that it still continues somewhere else, but that is a local kind of death. My book is mainly about Christianity in the Middle East, but I might also look at Islam in Spain, or Buddhism in most of India. Just within our lifetimes, we probably will see the extinction of Christianity in Iraq and probably Palestine.
What interests me about the topic is that so little has ever been done on it. We really don’t know why religions die, and if they do, in what sense they might leave ghosts. One thing that strikes me is how much a dead religion influences its successor - how for instance the old Christianity left its mark on the successor faith of Islam.
Finally, there is a major theological issue that nobody addresses, the theology of extinction. How do Christians explain the death of their religion in a particular time and place? Is that really part of God’s plan? Or maybe our time scale is just too short, and one day we will realize why this had to happen. But as I say, nobody is really discussing these questions.
I find the last paragraph particularly interesting - how do we make theological sense of the death of Christianity in certain regions of the world?
