[lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Wed Mar 24 11:11:26 PDT 2010


At 08:03 AM 3/24/2010, Chris Doss wrote:


>except in the fantasies of fundamentalists, who are an abberation in
>Christianity

Aberrations grow. Christianity itself was once an aberration,


>and exist in numbers only in the United States.

Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are growing fast and furious worldwide, and not only in developing countries.

One of the biggest Pentecostal churches in the world is in South Korea. Take a drive through the part of Los Angeles populated overwhelmingly by Central American and Mexican immigrants and you need nine hands or more to count the storefront fundamentalist churches.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/254/pentecostal-power

By all accounts, pentecostalism and related charismatic movements represent one of the fastest-growing segments of global Christianity. At least a quarter of the world's 2 billion Christians are thought to be members of these lively, highly personal faiths, which emphasize such spiritually renewing "gifts of the Holy Spirit" as speaking in tongues, divine healing and prophesying. Even more than other Christians, pentecostals and other renewalists believe that God, acting through the Holy Spirit, continues to play a direct, active role in everyday life.

Despite the rapid growth of the renewalist movement in the last few decades, relatively little is known about the religious, political and civic views of individuals involved in these groups. To address this shortcoming, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, with generous support from the Templeton Foundation, recently conducted surveys in 10 countries with sizeable renewalist populations: the United States; Brazil, Chile and Guatemala in Latin America; Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa in Africa; and India, the Philippines and South Korea in Asia. In each country, surveys were conducted among a random sample of the public at large, as well as among oversamples of pentecostals and charismatics.

T`he largest charismatic populations are in Brazil (34% of the population), Guatemala (40%) and the Philippines (40%). In several other countries, including the U.S., Chile, Kenya and South Africa, approximately one-in-five people are charis-matic. Taken together, these findings confirm that members of renewalist movements can be found in sizeable numbers throughout the world.

In six of the 10 countries (all except the U.S., South Africa, the regions of India surveyed and South Korea), the surveys find that renewalists account for a majority of the overall Protestant population. Indeed, in five nations (Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Kenya and the Philippines) more than two-thirds of Protestants are either pentecostal or charismatic. In Nigeria, renewalists account for six-in-ten Protestants.



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