Decoloniality and Interculturality in World Christianity: A Latin American Perspective

Abstract

‘World Christianity’ has become a buzz word in the past few decades, contrasting Eurocentric perspectives that portray Christianity as a ‘Western’ religion.1 As a world religion, Christianity presents itself as border-crossing, finding a home equally within multiple cultures, and between them. World Christianity refers, then, to both a field of study and a movement.2 As a field of study, it explores the ‘worldwide’ nature of Christianity, paying attention to both the distinctiveness of Christian experiences in different cultural contexts and the relationships among them. Since the beginning of the twentieth century scholars noticed that the presence of Christianity in all six continents granted it the de facto status of a world religion.3 That global presence, however, should not be understood as a static phenomenon. In the past century, and more emphatically in the past fifty years, World Christianity experienced a drastic demographic shift, undergoing an astounding numeric growth in the global south, especially in Africa, in contrast with dwindling numbers and decreasing public influence in the North Atlantic, the cradle of modern Christianity (Sanneh 2005: 3–18). Scholars such as Andrew Walls (2002) and Lamin Sanneh (2003), among others, noticed that this most recent drastic demographic shift was reshaping the manifestation of Christian faith in the contemporary world, noting that the “world-Christian turn” (Kollman 2014) had sweeping cultural implications.