Jenkins Philip – Kingdoms of this World – How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions

Philip Jenkins – Kingdoms of this World – How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions

When Thomas Hobbes analyzed the roots of the Roman Catholic Church in 1651, he was making a polemical point designed to expose the non- and indeed anti- Christian nature of that institution, but in fact, he made an excellent case for historical continuity. The Papacy had indeed inherited many of the symbols and titles of the old pagan empire. Moreover, Hobbes continued, “the language also which they use, both in the churches and in their public acts, being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?” His comment points to an enduring truth in the rise and spread of great religions, and by no means only of the branches of Christianity. Repeatedly through history, we find a close linkage between world faiths and successive empires. The world’s religious history can scarcely be understood except in reference to those imperial realities and their stubborn survivals.

A map of Christian populations today indicates the persistence of multiple imperial ghosts. The great centers owe their origins to various Christian empires over the past half millennium: the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Belgian, British, and others. Within those empires, many people moved voluntarily, as settlers and colonists. Others were conquered or enslaved, and (at least initially) had new religious systems imposed upon them, although over time, those conquered peoples made the religion their own. Crudely, this is the story of how a religion that in 1500 was overwhelmingly Europe-centered became by the end of the millennium a vast transcontinental enterprise. The world’s largest Roman Catholic communities today are found in Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines, recalling the influence of the long- defunct empires of Spain and Portugal. Soon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the old Belgian Congo, will be counted among that elite of Catholic nations. The Anglican Communion likewise, with some ninety million believers worldwide, retains the unmistakable imprint of the old British Empire. In each case, such survivals go beyond the mere fact of geographical presence and are evident in the political traditions and structures of the respective religions, in their languages and forms of communication.

Although the papal analogies are not exact, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople is still first among equals in the hierarchy of the Orthodox Christian world. He is based in a city that has not had a significant Christian population since the 1950s but still retains the aura of the New Rome founded by the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century. The present incumbent is the 270th to hold the see. Other later realms have left their mark on Orthodox Christianity. Even today, after so much turmoil and persecution, the lands of the former Russian Empire still account for some 75 percent of the world’s Orthodox believers.

But such continuities are in no sense new and can in various ways be traced through the centuries. The Persian Empire left its spectral inheritance, as did various Islamic caliphates and the Ottoman realm, and so did several once-powerful empires in South and Southeast Asia. A map of the lands swiftly conquered by the Arab caliphate during its first century or so of existence— say, by 750 AD— gives an excellent (if not perfect) idea of the heartlands of Islam in the modern world, from Morocco to Pakistan, from the Caucasus to Yemen. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism alike all reflect successive imperial encounters.