Christianity Is Not a “White Man’s Religion”

Today we often hear Christianity dismissed as a white, Western, male religion or “white man’s religion,” but this is uninformed. Look at a map you’ll find—shock and awe—that Christianity is a Middle-Eastern religion. Also, as Paul Marshall has pointed out, Christianity “was in Africa before Europe, India before England, China before America. Three-fourths of world Christians live in the Third World.”¹ Marshall said, “China before America.” That’s an understatement since there are Christian tombstones in China dated no later than 86 CE.² Also, more people attended Christian services last Sunday in China than in every country of Europe combined—England, France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, and so on. In fact, “China is on track to have the world’s largest population of Christians by 2030.”³ And this isn’t true only of China. People who attended Christian services last Sunday in Sub-Saharan Africa dwarf the number of church attenders in Europe, and this is also true for South America. The large majority of people who attend Christian services in the world are not white, and more women are Christians throughout the world than are men (and this is not because women make up a larger percentage of the world’s population than do men). Further, even in the United States, the Pew Research Center reports that African Americans self-identify as Christians more often than do Whites.⁴ Thus, Christianity is not a white man’s religion. Instead, when you put it all together, I’m the thankful adherent of a non-white, Third-World, female religion.

1. Paul Marshall, Their Blood Cries Out (Dallas: Word, 1997), 7-8. [↩]
2. “Christian Designs Found in Tomb Stones of Eastern Han Dynasty,” Travel in China, http://www.china.org.cn/english/TR-e/38507.htm, accessed August 1, 2016. [↩]
3. Eleanor Albert, “Christianity in China,” Council on Foreign Relations, October 11, 2018), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/christianity-china, accessed July 27, 2020. [↩]
4. David Masci, “5 facts about the religious lives of African Americans,” Pew Research Center, February 7, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/02/07/5-facts-about-the-religious-lives-of-african-americans/, accessed July 27, 2020). [↩]