explosions in Africa and Asia (J. Taylor 1990: 633–4; Park 1994:
129–30). Meanwhile Christianity, while it has been marginalized
in many industrialized nations, continues to be the world’s largest
religion thanks to missionary successes and increasing popula-
tions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Indeed, since 1900, the
distribution of Christians throughout the world has changed from
a situation where Europe accounted for about half of the world’s
Christians to one where it now contains less than a quarter (J.
Taylor 1990: 635–7). It is projected, moreover, that by the middle
of the twenty-first century, Christianity will be overwhelmingly a
religion of what is now termed the Third World; furthermore, the
brands of Christianity that will be espoused there will be predom-
inantly of a conservative hue, however much that might surprise
or even dismay ‘liberals’ in the west (P. Jenkins 2002).
Even in Europe the picture defies glib generalizations. In
the struggle for nationhood that has characterized European
history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, religion has
often been a central element in the definition of national iden-
tity (Hobsbawm 1992: 67–73, 123–4). Ireland and Poland, for
example, have made great play of their Roman Catholicism. More
recently, religion – and not just Christianity of course – has been
one of the categories by which the ethnic groups of the former
Yugoslavia have sought to assert their identity. Thus Serbs and
Croats have stressed their adherence to the Eastern Orthodox and
Roman Catholic traditions respectively. Neither statement of reli-
gious identity should be seen in isolation. For the Serbs, Eastern
Orthodoxy, like their use of the Cyrillic script, emphasizes their
kinship with the Slavic peoples of much of eastern Europe, espe-
cially Russia, while for the Croats, Roman Catholicism, like their
use of the Roman alphabet, is emblematic of their aspirations to
be admitted to the western European community of nations.^5
It might still be objected that the resurgence of religious
fervour in south-eastern Europe is anomalous, out of step with
what is happening elsewhere in the modern industrialized world.
Yet there is evidence to suggest that the widely heralded collapse
of religion in the modern west has been overstated. While it seems
WHAT IS EARLY CHRISTIANITY?1
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