Timothy Samuel Shah

The Pioneering Protestants

Abstract:According to cross-national research, Protestantism has significantly contributed to global democratization. While Protestantism does not inevitably cause democratization, it often generates social dynamics that favor it. Some of the most important of these are: 1) the rise of religious pluralism; 2) the development of democratic theory and practice; 3) the development of civil society; 4) the spread of mass education; 5) printing and the origins of a public sphere; 6) the reduction of corruption; and 7) economic development. The article explores how Protestant groups, including Protestant missionaries, have promoted these dynamics in the past. It also argues that contemporary Protestant movements—particularly Pentecostalism—are continuing to do so in the present, though with less dramatic results.

EVANGELICAL POLITICS IN THE THIRD WORLD: WHAT'S NEXT FOR THE “NEXT CHRISTENDOM”?

Abstract As the center of Christianity is shifting southward towards the developing world, misconceptions abound. Southern Christianity is mainly characterized by theologically conservative evangelicalism, even in the so-called mainline denominations. Christians in the Global South do not present a unified political ideology and are spread across the political spectrum depending on place and local politics. Their tendency toward ecclesiastic independence and schism works against any risk of theocratic momentum in politics. Furthermore, evangelicals are not militant fundamentalists. Pentecostals are the fastest growing group and often typify Southern Christianity in its kinship with the poor. As the nexus of Christianity shifts South, we must be careful not to think that it is Americas brand of it.

Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity

Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Our Judeo-Christian tradition refers to this inherent dignity of man in the Biblical term “the image of God.” Martin Luther King Jr. RIGHTS AND ENLIGHTENMENT Imagine, if you would, an Enlightenment that takes place in a Europe where there had never been a Constantine: no fiery sign in the sky, no Battle at the Milvian Bridge, no Nicaea. Imagine a thoroughgoing intellectual revolution, in which men “dared to know,” casting off half-believed myths of Zeus, demystifying all sacral kingships, seeking to understand the place of humanity in a mechanistic nature without superstition. Would such an Enlightenment have issued in the thunderous proclamations of the American and French Revolutions? The liberal revolutions of the late eighteenth century were the political offspring of the Enlightenment. The pronouncements of the inalienable rights of man were the avant-garde of modern ideology, and they now have triumphed as fundamental international norms. But would an Enlightenment without Constantine also have given birth to Enlightenment liberalism? Could we have had a Kant without a Constantine? If you have indulged this lavish thought experiment so far, consider the answer of the Enlightenments most acute critic, Friedrich Nietzsche: no. Proclamations of rights and human dignity were not a necessary political derivative of Enlightenment rationalism; rather, they were a relic, a secular myth born of weakness. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the needy products of slavedom hiding from itself…. Now the slave must vainly scrape through from one day to another with transparent lies recognizable to every one of deeper insight, such as the alleged ‘equal rights of all’ or the so-called ‘fundamental rights of man,’ of man as such, or the ‘dignity of labour.’” For Nietzsche, humanity bore no inherent dignity: “‘Man in himself,’ the absolute man possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties.” Only through culture, through art, could humans create beauty and meaning and thus come to possess dignity. Certainly this view set the illiberal Nietzsche apart from his age.