Wednesday, December 04, 2002

John Quiggin makes the exceptionally good point that Paul Sheehan's argument about Christianity being potentially overwhelmed by relatively fundamentalist poor-world Christians relies numerically on the presence of 480 million Catholics in Latin America, and that although conservative, these don't strike him as likely to have great crusading zeal. Latin American Catholics strike me as not being too different in character from Spanish or Italian Catholics a few decades ago: they didn't strike the Enlightenment as directly as did norther Europeans, but as their countries became richer, they absorbed most of its values anyway. This is my expectation for Latin America too. (This is consistent with what I was arguing the other day).

There are troubling things about Christianity in Africa, however. In the years since, a number of sources have reported that nominally Christian leaders aided and egged on the genocide (whereas Islamic leaders generally tried to stop it). I don't understand how or why this happened, but I need to make an effort to.

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