Whose Religion Is Christianity?
Lamin Sanneh wrote this short book in the form of answers to questions — the questions he had spent years fielding from Western audiences, students, journalists, and colleagues who could not quite believe what was happening to Christianity. Gambian-born, raised Muslim, converted as a young man, and by 2003 the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School, Sanneh occupied an unusual vantage point: he was both a product of the movement he studied and one of its most rigorous historians. The situation that called the book forth was a persistent Western assumption, held by secular critics and guilty churchmen alike, that the explosive growth of Christianity in Africa and Asia was colonialism's afterlife — a borrowed religion worn by peoples who had been talked out of their own. Sanneh's book is a sustained refusal of that assumption, delivered in the compressed, conversational register of a man answering objections one by one.
His central argument turns on translation. Christianity, unlike Islam with its revealed Arabic, has no sacred language; it has been from Pentecost onward a religion that arrives already translated and goes on translating. When missionaries reduced African languages to writing and rendered Scripture into vernacular idiom, they handed local peoples an instrument they could not control — the terms of indigenous religious life were now the terms of the gospel, and the vernacular Bible became a standing critique of the colonial order that had carried it. What happened, Sanneh insists, was not the Christian discovery of indigenous societies but the indigenous discovery of Christianity. From this he draws his most consequential distinction: between global Christianity, the Western faith replicated abroad, and world Christianity, the plural and largely unsupervised movement of peoples appropriating the gospel in their own tongues and categories. He notes the awkward fact that African Christianity grew fastest not while missionaries were present but after they withdrew, in the decades of independence, and he presses the point that the faith's demographic center has moved south while Western theology has kept talking as though it had not.
The book has continued to matter because it supplied the conceptual grammar for the study of world Christianity, and because it reframed the missionary record without whitewashing it — Sanneh grants the complicity and still insists on the unintended gift. It remains the shortest route into an argument that reshaped missiology.
Who should read this: Western Christians who suspect their faith is an ethnic possession, and anyone teaching or studying mission history, world Christianity, or Christian-Muslim relations. It is not a statistical survey of global Christianity, not a systematic theology of religions, and not devotional reading; those wanting demographic detail should go to Jenkins, and those wanting Sanneh's full historical case should go to his earlier Translating the Message.