Kingdoms of This World

Review of Philip Jenkins New Book

I once managed to persuade my wife to join me on a drive from Houston to Waco. She was strangely agreeable. There I had the pleasure of Truett President Todd Still taking me on a short tour of the seminary and around Baylor University. It just so happened we bumped into Prof. Philip Jenkins which was a true delight and led to a brief conversation. I had much enjoyed his book The Lost History of Christianity which is about the history of the church east of the Jordan - it remains one of the most insightful books I’ve ever read. Anyway, after that encounter with Jenkins, I found out why my wife was so agreeable to this detour to Waco as she had a sinister motive for our expedition. She dragged me to some “siloes” where I spent three hours (I am not lying, three terrifying hours) in a tourist trap, joining a chain gang of other men press-ganged into following their wives around this hellscape of over-priced homeware and extortionately priced cafe-food. I then paid a king’s ransom for the merchandise which also required buying extra luggage to take it back to Australia. Magnolia Inc. now ranks just below the OPC and Hardee’s in my list of American enemies. Still, it was worth it to meet Philip Jenkins in person!

Jenkin’s new book is Kingdoms of This World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2024). The blurb reads:

Kingdoms of This World is the first full-length study of the imperial contexts of the world's religions. Philip Jenkins offers extensive coverage of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and other faiths, and ranges widely in tracing the imperial histories of many different parts of the world. This study also considers the religious consequences of the dissolution of empires in modern times. Drawing on the very extensive contemporary scholarship about empires, the book is an innovative and thoroughly researched survey of a critical topic in the history of religion.

This is a great book about world religions concerning how religions challenge empires, make empires, and how empires challenge and change religions. In sum:

“A global history of world faiths is of necessity an imperial history.”

This book is good because it shows that religions and empires have a two-way relationship. It is not just the case of empires using religion to provide religious capital to their imperial ventures (true though it can be) since religions too can shape empires, challenge them, and reform them. Whether we are talking about the Assyrians, Aztecs, Babylonians, Belgians, Ottomans, Mughals, Spanish, British, Ethiopian, Mongol, or Khmer empires, religion had a multi-dimensional rather than static relationship within all of them.

There is eye-opening stuff such as the story of Ashoka, emperor of the Maurya dynasty in India in the third century BC who was like the Buddhist Constantine.

Catholics, often Jesuits, were often complicit with the abuses of the Spanish empire, yet they also became the leading critics and resisters of imperial violence, sometimes even issuing weapons to people and training them to fight their imperial overlords. Paraguay was created as a direct result of the Jesuits fermenting rebellion. The Jesuits proved to be so detrimental to the Spanish empire in Latin America that they were expelled from Spanish possessions in 1767 and deliberately suppressed in 1773.

Jenkins observes how “The Bible easily lent itself to radical or revolutionary interpretations, especially for slaves.” Of course, Jenkins notes too that for British abolitionists, their aim was not to harm the empire as much as morally purify it from the scourge of slavery. In 1915, the Baptist minister John Chilembwe led an anti-colonial rebellion in modern-day Malawi, which was a key moment in the rise of the African independence movement. Olive Schreiner was the daughter of a Wesleyan missionary family in South Africa and in 1897 she published a short novel Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland which depicts a wild adventurer who has seen countless evils in Africa and his life is changed by an encounter with a stranger who turns out to be Christ himself. The protagonist of the story learns that he must resist the empire even to the point of martyrdom. It is like a more explicitly religious version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

A summary of the book comes from Jenkins’ own words:

In pursuing what they conceive as their interests, those empires have vastly expanded the world’s religious diversity, bringing once-localized faiths literally to the other side of the world. In the process, they sometimes force those religious systems to detach themselves from a landscape and cultural setting, making them more open and translatable to wider contexts. Religions actually do learn to singe in strange lands, sometimes in new tongues.

There is a great miscellany of facts as well. Jenkins states that 1880s Melbourne, Victoria in Australia was vastly richer than Los Angeles and California at the same time. In 20 BC, an Indian envoy to the court of Caesar Augustus created a sensation when he committed ritual self-immolation in Athens. Perhaps such words lay behind Paul’s claim that even giving your body over to be burned counts for nothing without love. By 2030, Africa is set to have more Catholics than Europe. Russian Muslims make up 18% of the population and some project that they could become the majority by the end of the twenty-first century.

In any case, a truly fascinating and informative book and definitely one to read for 2025!