January (Web-only) 2000

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Washington Post holds Christian Y2K freak show
The search was on at every major media outlet for religious fanatics who believed January 1 would bring in Christ's millennial kingdom. The Washington Post found some in Huntsville, Arkansas, and writes a surprisingly unsurprising story.

Will the next era be post-Christian?
So asks David Martin in the January 1 issue of Canada's National Post. The author of Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America argues that Christianity will survive just fine, but it won't be the European version of the last 1,000 years. Those states least involved in Christianity—suppressing it or promoting it, he argues—will be the ones to shape Christian trends in the future. "The Christian religion is on the wrong foot in those old heartlands where it was tied up in established powers and forms. In the U.S., by contrast, it is in alignment with a plural society in motion and well attuned to a messianic nationhood." Didn't de Tocqueville say exactly the same thing in his 1831 Democracy in America? (That's what Books & Culture says in its January 2000 issue, anyway.)

Media continue to beat the candidates' religion to death
The first few articles about how presidential candidates—both Republican and Democrat—are talking about Jesus as never before were pretty interesting. Now, it seems that there's not a current events publication that hasn't covered the topic. Fortunately, the article in the current issue of The Economist is actually insightful, though it maintains the cynicism of most magazines' coverage.

Zambia is a "Christian nation," but does it matter? While most of the world's eyes focused on the big number change Saturday, Zambia also noted its eighth anniversary of President ...