Christianity is the world's largest religion.
It claims one in three of the global population
and is growing all the time.
How did it rise to such power?
How did its message reach the four corners of the globe?
And why was it accepted?
This is the story of what happened when Europeans colonised the world,
and carved out whole new empires...
It was terrible, it was devastating. 90% of the population died.
..Of how they enslaved whole populations,
while trying to force them to convert to Christianity.
Inasmuch as the gospel was preached,
it could not penetrate into the real consciousness of the African.
In this film, I'm going on a journey
to uncover the true story of Christianity's global spread,
to reveal the ancient history of African Christianity
and the sometimes gory truth of the missionary experience.
Forever and ever...
And of how, in the greatest revolution in religious history,
the new converts have seized the religion
of their former colonial masters, transformed it
and are now set to overturn the European world.
The West has lost its original Christianity and the Africans
will need to re-propagate the gospel back to the West.
Right now! Right now! Right now...
As a Christian, I am often asked how someone like me, a man of colour,
can worship the God of his former slave and colonial master.
I was taught at school that the explorer, David Livingstone,
was one of Victorian Britain's greatest heroes. His grave is here
at Westminster Abbey alongside all of the great and the good.
David Livingstone was one in a long line of European missionaries
who dedicated their lives to bringing Western Christianity
to the so-called Dark Continents of the world.
But this great missionary enterprise was part of a huge colonial venture,
one which often brutally exploited peoples across the world.
That history is part of my family history and as a result,
they were introduced to Christianity.
Christianity began as a small Jewish cult in the Middle East.
But it soon spread through Turkey,
Greece, Egypt, North Africa and into Italy
where in the 4th century, it was adopted by
the Roman Emperor and spread throughout the Empire.
And then for the next 1,000 years,
Christianity was dominated by white Europeans.
In 1492, the Spaniard Christopher Columbus reached the New World.
So began 500 years of colonialism.
And the lives of millions of people,
including my ancestors, were changed forever.
The first Spanish colonists to arrive here
believed this was a dark continent peopled by heathens,
who had to be saved from witchcraft,
ignorance and evil.
But wherever they went,
the Spanish found advanced civilisations like the Maya,
capable of building incredible monuments to their faith.
Mayan society was highly sophisticated.
They had exquisite architecture, they were great artists,
mathematicians, astronomers.
It has a very sophisticated religion as well.
This is part of the Dresden Codex and you can see there several gods.
And this is Itzana in the form of an alligator,
an animal that comes from the underworld.
What really disgusted the Spanish invaders was
that these beautiful temples were dedicated to bloody human sacrifice.
Human sacrifices were very important because they had a lot of gods and
the gods needed blood to feed and if the gods didn't have blood,
especially human blood, they just stop producing the energy
for the universe so the universe will just stop.
That was the belief?
That was the belief, yes.
Growing up, I, too, believed they were a heathen,
ungodly and uncivilised people.
Our Christian God didn't continually demand the blood of humans.
But these people had a religious system that had existed for
thousands of years.
For me, this is the tragedy of European colonialism,
that it could see no virtue in the civilisations it encountered.
That all it sought to do was destroy whatever it found
and replace it with its own western Christian civilisation,
with terrible consequences for people all over the world.
Oh, my God!
Isn't that the most spectacular thing you've seen in your life?
But for the European colonists, this meant nothing.
The Spanish and Portuguese divided up the New World between them.
By the late 16th century, their empires extended
from the coasts of Africa to Central and South America
and even to India and the Philippines...
..bringing millions of indigenous people under Catholic rule
for the first time.
And all of this was backed by the authority of the Pope in Rome.
In Mexico, the Spanish were determined to destroy
the local religions and so they built their new churches
right on top of the old Mayan temples.
One of the biggest is the Franciscan convent at Izamal,
the headquarters of a brutal campaign
of forced Christian conversion.
We have to remember that in the 15th century,
the Papacy gave the monarchs of Castile and Aragon the title of
Catholic kings. This only confirmed a very, very old tradition that made
peninsular Iberian monarchs vicars of God and responsible for the salvation
and for the faith of their subjects.
The Spanish colonists believed they had
a mission from God to convert the Indians.
And in charge of the work in Yucatan
was a Franciscan monk, Diego de Landa.
But this conversion was in no way voluntary.
The local people were reduced almost to slaves.
And Europeans brought terrible diseases with them too.
According to the Archbishop of Mexico,
in the duration of two or three months, he saw 100,000 people die.
This catastrophe, it was terrible, it was devastating.
90% of the population died.
I can see how the Mayans thought their gods had abandoned them,
while the Spanish believed it was their Christian duty
to save these people by converting them to Christianity.
What happened here in Yucatan
was mass conversion at the barrel of a gun.
The new colonial Christian masters wanted to control
not only the bodies but also the souls of their Mayan subjects.
To Diego de Landa and his Franciscans,
it looked like they had succeeded.
But they were wrong.
30 years after their arrival in Mexico,
the Spanish monks began to get disturbing reports...
..of idols hidden in caves,
of human sacrifices...
..of Mayan priests who were encouraging the people
to return to the old pagan ways.
When questioned by the Franciscans, the locals freely admitted
that they still worshipped their Mayan idols.
For Diego de Landa and his Franciscans,
this was a betrayal of all that they had worked for.
And his reaction was one of pure vengeful savagery.
In an attempt to root out the pagan idols and the heretical ringleaders,
De Landa unleashed a new weapon in Yucatan...
..the Inquisition.
Thousands of Mayans were systematically rounded up and tortured.
The Mayans still remember those terrible days.
TRANSLATED: 'They got them and took them away, and they mistreated them.
'And they took them from the temples so they didn't listen
'to the gods' words. They took them away and hung them
'so they didn't perform ceremonies, or take part in religion.
'That's what it was like when the Spanish invaded Mexico.'
De Landa was determined to destroy the Mayan gods
once and for all.
So he ordered the local population to assemble in the town square.
First, a huge pile of idols and sacred skulls were put to the torch.
And then hundreds of Mayan religious books,
the beautiful manuscripts which held their whole civilisation
in their pages.
Today, only three volumes survive, anywhere in the world.
For us, it would be like destroying
the last surviving copies of the Bible.
So began Western Christianity's encounter with the outside world.
While sincerely believing they were bringing
Christian salvation to these people,
the Europeans instead brought death and destruction
on a monumental scale.
And the worst part of it was forcing people to convert just didn't work.
SPEAKS SPANISH
But incredibly, in secret, the Mayans were able to save
some of their religious traditions,
later importing them into their own version of Christianity.
And so prove that for many, like me,
the white way is not the only way to salvation.
MEXICAN BAND MUSIC PLAYS
500 years ago, white Europeans began a colonial land grab
that eventually covered most of the world.
They brought their version of Christianity with them
and tried to force the native peoples to convert.
Given the fierce resistance we saw to Christianity in Mexico,
it seems surprising that it grew to the global force that it is today.
500 years ago, there were hardly any Christians
outside of the middle eastern Europe.
Today, they outnumber those in the heartland several times over.
The question is, how did they do it?
What was it that led to such enormous growth?
I was told that one of the secrets of Christianity's global success
had first taken place in the jungles of Mexico.
The Spanish colonists tried to destroy the old Mayan religion,
but they failed.
Instead, elements of it survived with incredible consequences.
Here in Ek Balam, I've come to find out how.
The villagers are celebrating the beginning of the maize harvest.
But instead of a Catholic harvest festival, it's a Mayan ceremony,
and the man in charge may be a Catholic priest,
but he's also a Mayan shaman.
(PRAYS IN SPANISH)
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
(TRANSLATION) Every year, when the first harvest is collected
we have to thank God for what we have received.
That's why we have the altar here,
and then we take the tender cooked corn,
and place it on the altar to consecrate it to God.
(PRAYS IN SPANISH)
These people are Christians,
but they also like to invoke a local power
to bring rain and bless their harvest.
Its name is Chaac, the same as the Mayan god
who once demanded human sacrifices at Chichen Itza.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
(TRANSLATION) Chaac is the power of God. We can't actually see it,
but we know its name, Chaac, which is a Mayan name.
What's going on now is not a pagan survival,
but Christianity Mexican-style.
It's much like when Pope Gregory wrote to Saint Augustine
in the sixth century during the English conversion to Christianity.
He wrote, "Don't destroy their religious traditions,
"simply adapt them to Christianity." And it worked.
What happened then founded western Christendom.
What's happening now is part of a new Christendom.
The fact is, Christianity has never been just a white man's religion.
If it had, it would never have been ableto spread so far and so wide.
Its strength is its ability to adapt to local circumstances.
For me, the best example is the global popularity of Jesus' mother.
Although she lived and died in Palestine,
visions of the Virgin Mary have appeared all over the world -
in Asia, in Africa and Latin America.
This, really, is why Christianity began to make inroads,
here in Mexico.
It's a portrait of the Virgin Mary.
But if you look closely, it's not the pale version
we're used to seeing in European paintings of the day.
No, she's brown.
In fact she's called here the "virgen morena" -
the Brown Virgin of Guadalupe.
And her cult is a classic example of what happened
once Catholicism began to take root here.
(TRANSLATION) In Mexican religious history,
the Virgin of Guadalupe is half Indian, half white,
or rather indigenous,
and therefore her face, and the way the friars wanted to represent her,
they wanted to show a Virgin close to the Mexican people,
a dark version, just like them, not a blonde European one, but a dark one.
That's the main idea.
The Virgin appeared here and she loves her people, her dark people.
The Brown Virgin of Guadalupe is now the national saint of Mexico,
and there are hundreds of other local cults
dedicated to the Virgin Mary
all over Latin America and the developed world.
This intense emotional attachment to the Virgin Mary
has been one of Christianity's secret weapons
in its extraordinary growth all over the world.
If you look at churches in the provinces of Mexico,
they're packed...
They're packed with people and masses and different rituals,
whereas in Europe you see less and less participants.
The Spanish Conquest had destroyed the local gods
and caused a devastating loss of population,
but in this very apocalyptic atmosphere,
Mexicans began to turn to Christianity in large numbers.
The Indians saw their whole world shaken completely,
and a new process had to begin.
The second or third generations, disciples of the first missionaries,
were able to speak Spanish,
write the Latin alphabet and help in the process of Christianisation.
But crucially, the Mexicans refused to give up all
of their old religious traditions
and many were simply imported into the new Christianity.
I would say that...
from the 1650s on,
we can speak of a hybrid...religion,
which was Christian, but that had some rituals
of Indian origin, purely pre-Hispanic.
By the middle of the 17th century,
through the military might of the Spanish and Portuguese empires,
Christianity had spread throughout Central and South America
and even to India.
Now it was the turn of another continent to face the full force
of European colonialism, the land of my ancestors - Africa.
When Europeans came face to face with my ancestors' religion,
again, they saw only witchcraft, superstition,
and the powers of darkness.
DRUMMING, SINGING
When they tried to convert them,
they did so in the context
of one of Christian Europe's most shameful episodes -
the slave trade.
Although I was born in Britain, I have traced my family story
back through the Caribbean to Ghana in Africa.
When the Europeans first came face-to-face with the home
of my ancestors they weren't confronted by Mayan temples
or bloody human sacrifices, but by the spirit world of the fetish.
Many of the indigenous religions of Africa centred on a belief
that the world was full of spirits, which could affect every aspect
of people's lives.
Many African villages
had their fetish priests, whose role was to enter the spirit world.
Once there, they could take on the powers of healing, prophecy
and spiritual warfare.
But when the Europeans first encountered them,
they saw only witchcraft and superstition.
They thought the local peoples were nothing but primitive savages,
so began one of Christian Europe's most shameful episodes,
the slave trade.
My ancestors were held in slave forts like this
before being shipped off to the Caribbean to be enslaved.
Once there, they were given the religion of their slave master,
and much like me many years later, taught that it was part of a huge
benevolent missionary effort.
And that, in fact, Christianity was a Western religion.
In fact, there could be nothing further from the truth.
Cape Coast Castle was the headquarters
of the British slave trade in Africa from the end of the 17th century.
The slavers kept hundreds of Africans at a time
here in these dungeons.
Then they herded them at gunpoint
down these corridors towards the ships.
That was just the start of a horrific ordeal.
Up to a fifth of those who left Africa died en route,
either through starvation, disease or brutal violence.
The exact number of Africans
shipped overseas during the slave trade is hotly debated.
Estimates range between ten and 50 million.
The survivors not only lost their freedom,
but their African identity as well.
Shockingly, this relic from the slave trade, Cape Coast Castle,
was also the setting for the beginnings
of the British missionary effort in Africa.
I have here a copy of a letter by
one of the first missionaries to work in Ghana,
"I have taken the earliest opportunity to acquaint you
"with the history of my journey.
"I got safe by God's peculiar grace
"to cape Coast Castle in Africa after having undergone in the voyage
"a great deal of difficulties and dangers."
What's interesting is that this
letter wasn't written by a European, but by an African.
In fact, the first Black African to be ordained as an Anglican priest
and a missionary.
His name was Philip Quaque, and he's buried here in the castle.
He was the son of an African who sold slaves to the British.
But when he was just 13, he was sent to London
to be trained as a missionary.
He was ordained priest in 1766 and sent back to Africa to convert
his fellow Africans in a chapel located directly above the slave dungeons.
You know, he was an ordained priest
and how do you think that he and the others as Christians
felt about this enterprise that they were directly on top of?
They weren't even removed from it, they were standing on top
while they were praying to their god.
Yeah, to the best of my mind and knowledge Philip Quaque was helpless,
he was the one black skin amongst the whites
and he was trained by them so...
I imagine maybe he was brainwashed.
Let us pray, almighty and everlasting God...
Today, it's easy to see how
doomed from the start Quaque's mission was.
The Christianity he had been taught was Western European, the religion
of 18th century England, shorn by the Reformation
and the Enlightenment of its popular spirituality,
its vitality, its raw energy.
This kind of religion bore no relation to the world
of black Africa.
One God, now and forever. Amen.
By the time he died,
Quaque had converted just a handful of his fellow Africans.
So, how do you think the people who lived out side of Cape Coast castle
viewed Philip Quaque?
Having mingled yourself with the white man who was selling
our own brothers and sisters and not even
visiting us in the community and a white wife on top of it.
Naturally, they saw him as a traitor.
When Quaque died in 1816 he was a broken man,
shunned by both communities.
The white slavers could not accept this black priest
and the local community couldn't understand
why he had given up on the ways of old.
It was a miserable failure.
If Christianity was to take root in places like Africa,
it would need to compete with the local religions on equal terms.
There was no point in Europeans imposing something
alien from the outside.
Anyway, all this talk about bringing Christianity
to the dark continent was false.
It had already been here 1,000 years before the first missionary arrived.
The true Christianity arrived in Africa
2,500 miles away on the other coast.
When the European missionaries first came to Africa,
they were faced with an uncomfortable truth.
It wasn't the dark continent they had imagined.
They weren't the first Christians to come here.
On the other side of Africa, is a land that successfully
resisted European colonialism until the 20th century.
A country, Ethiopia,
that came into being long before Spain or Portugal or Britain.
It is even mentioned in the Bible itself.
I'm with a group of Christian pilgrims
and we're on our way to see an ancient religious festival,
part of one of the oldest churches in the Christian world.
Founded over 1,600 years ago,
when Britain and most of Europe languished in a pagan dark age.
We're about to investigate the Ethiopian Orthodox church.
CHANTING
Here at Lalibela, in the Ethiopian Highlands,
is one of the most extraordinary religious sites in the world.
Carved out of the rock itself, they call it the Jerusalem of Africa.
Oh, wow that's incredible!
If not slightly dangerous!
Oh, my days!
Look at that.
It's a whole underground city.
It's like...wow.
How old did you say this is?
Over 800 years ago it was excavated at the end of the 12th century.
My word.
This should be one of the wonders of the world, shouldn't it?
This isn't an uncivilized people that have to have their religion
or someone else's religion thrust upon them.
This is a structure to celebrate their own expression.
This is their own expression of Christ.
SINGING
The Ethiopian Orthodox church
was founded when pagan emperors still ruled in Rome.
It is thought that Christianity
was brought here by monks from Egypt in the fourth century.
But some Ethiopians claim that their faith goes right
back to the Old Testament times before Christianity even existed.
The Ethiopians even have their own ancient manuscript tradition,
with perhaps the first ever African alphabet.
Ethiopian Christianity is so old that even its Bible is different.
When European scholars arrived here in the 17th century,
they found books in this bible that they had not even heard of,
perfectly preserved.
How old is this book?
820 years.
820 years. So it was here when this church was built?
It's written in a most wonderful and colourful script
as well as the illustrations.
How long did it take to write this Bible?
It takes about eight years.
Many aspects of the Ethiopian church are particular to this community.
You won't find them in any other orthodox community across the world.
But though it may seem strange to Western eyes,
it's a testament to the extreme age of this African church.
Today, is the feast of St Michael, and the ceremonies here demonstrate
an extraordinary facet of Ethiopian Christianity,
its links with Judaism and the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem.
At the heart of every Ethiopian church is a sanctuary
where the public are never allowed.
Inside, protected by the priests,
are kept the most sacred objects in the Ethiopian orthodox faith.
A few times every year, they are carried in procession
on the heads of these priests, covered with sacred cloths.
They are inscribed blocks of wood, replicas of the tablets of stone
brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai
as told in the Jewish Old Testament.
The Ethiopians practise other Jewish customs too,
such as circumcision, and even many of the Jewish dietary rules.
(TRANSLATION) Our religion stands on three foundations.
The first is the command of the holy spirit.
The second is the law of the Old Testament,
and the third is the new law of the New Testament.
Lalibela is not only famous amongst modern Ethiopians,
but amongst people around the world.
It's the pride of our people and as you have witnessed it,
you will be able to tell the story better than we can.
It is a really holy day here.
People have walked for miles, for months, just to get here
so that they can see the tablets
even though they are covered, just to see the bishops,
just to be blessed on this day, to kiss the walls of the churches.
It really is a very significant and moving spiritual day.
Seeing a church as ancient, and as African,
as this has been a truly liberating experience for me too.
When my ancestors were enslaved by the British they had their freedom,
their identity, their religion, their names ripped from them.
I was born with the surname Roberts,
that of the last slave master to own someone in my family.
When I discovered this,
I decided to trace my ancestry back to Ghana
and reclaimed an ancestral name,
Kwame Kwei-Armah.
I wear this orthodox cross to symbolise, for myself really,
that I can access Jesus the revolutionary,
the protector of the dispossessed,
through the lens of Africa and not through my colonial masters
who often arrived with a bible in one hand and a gun in the other.
The Ethiopian church has been an inspiration for millions of people,
not just in Africa, but round the world.
Seeing Jesus through a non-European, non-Western lens like this
has been the key to a transformation in world Christianity
which is already having seismic effects.
In a reversal of roles, it's now Africa and not Europe
that is the powerhouse of world Christianity.
And it's Britain, formerly the biggest colonial power,
that is feeling it most.
Hallelujah!
Once called the Dark Continent,
Africa is now the global powerhouse of Christianity.
It is the fastest-growing Christian community anywhere in the world.
In 1900 there were just ten million Christians here.
Today, a little over a 100 years later,
there are more than 360 million.
Now those millions are beginning to challenge
the Western Christian establishment.
And Britain's at the heart of the storm.
The sheer numbers and increasing power
of the African Anglican churches
have already begun to shake the unity of the Anglican Communion.
In particular, liberal Western attitudes
over issues like women priests and homosexuality
have angered African Christians.
This practice makes the whole Church seem
as if it's going against the teachings of the Bible.
They brought Christianity to us.
Now it's our turn to take Christianity to them.
But the real challenge is not just about social values,
but about the faith itself.
And that's down to the kind of Christianity Africans created
out of the turmoil of the colonial experience.
Throughout this journey I've been constantly amazed at how people
abandon beliefs that have dominated their lives for centuries
for this new religion, born out of a small place in the Middle East,
2,000 years ago.
Why has Christianity been so spectacularly successful?
And why is it growing so quickly?
Here in this small Ghanaian village, we can get a glimpse
of how the global Christian explosion took place.
In 1922, a charismatic African preacher called Joseph Appiah
was expelled from the Methodist Church
because he insisted on playing African drums.
But he didn't give up.
He set up his own church.
So what would you say was the main differences
between the mainstream Methodist church and your own?
(PRAYS)
Whereas before they might have turned to a fetish priest,
Joseph Appiah and his congregation nowsaw the power
of the Christian Holy Spirit
as a means to bring healing and help cast out evil spirits.
MAN CHANTS, CONGREGATION RESPONDS
(PRAYS)
Did the establishment see this healing and these drums
as maybe the African Christians going back to a former fetishism?
Churches like this sprang up all over Africa
during the colonial period.
These African independent churches
confronted the spirit world directly,
and it was they who kick-started
the spectacular growth of Christianity in Africa.
The promise that Jesus is your personal saviour is a universal one.
But the real secret of Christianity's global success
is that it still allows people to hold on to their own culture.
It means you can turn Christianity into your own religion.
After independence in the 1950s and '60s,
the peoples of the former European colonies in Africa
had a difficult history, full of plagues, famines and wars.
But when they read their Bibles,
they saw their own lives played out in its pages.
For them the Bible is not describing an alien, ancient world,
it's describing their lives, now.
# Read your Bible, pray every day
# Pray every day, pray every day
# Read your Bible, pray every day
# If you want to go... #
There are hundreds of different churches in Africa
and moreare being added every day.
In fact, it's the fastest-growing Christian community in the world.
Every 30 years, it doubles.
In fact, by 2050, there will be more Christians
in Latin America, Africa and Asia than Europe and America combined.
That means the West's stranglehold on Christianity
will have been broken, and a new Christendom will have arisen.
CLAPPING, SHOUTING
This new Christendom is very different
from what we're used to in Europe.
It's not something that is at the margins of society.
Here, Christianity is a core part of daily life -
something that affects everything people do,
that quite literally takes them over.
In terms of sheer numbers,
the most spectacular growth is found in charismatic Pentecostal churches.
They now account for one quarter of all Christians worldwide.
One of the biggest in Ghana
is the Christian Action Faith Ministry in Accra.
Spiritual warfare dominates the ministry of this church.
Powered by the Holy Spirit, exorcisms deliver believers
from the power of evil spirits.
You are able to empower your spirit man and then
we are able to obtain from God things you can't get physically.
I have had instant healing several times.
Healing is at the heart of it.
Like the older independent churches, Pentecostal churches engage directly
with the spirit world.
This couldn't be more different
from the sedate churches of the Western missionaries.
And this kind of biblical Pentecostalism
is not just confined to Africa.
It is rapidly spreading all over the globe,
in Asia, in America, and in Europe too.
This is the future of global Christianity.
For Pentecostals, the power of the Holy Spirit is fundamental,
and it's something they believe we in the West no longer have.
(SCREAMS)
(SHOUTS)
This has truly been a revolution of global proportions.
For ever and ever.
Amen.
For 2,000 years, Europe has had a stranglehold on Christianity.
When Europeans began to create new empires overseas
they took their Christianity with them,
often brutally forcing their subjected peoples to convert.
But it didn't work.
Christianity only became a global religion
when local peoples took control of it and made it their own.
And today these new Christians have harnessed a powerful spiritual force
which many churches in the West have abandoned.
No longer does Europe control the faith.
The Western dominance of the Christian world is broken.
Today a new Christendom has emerged, based in the developing world,
and these new Christians believe it is Europe that now needs converting
to the true faith.
It's not just an African issue.
Churches in Latin America and Asia seemingly share the same worldview,
that Europe is now the Dark Continent,
a place where Christianity is a shadow of its former self.
The missionary boot is on the other foot.
Have faith in God and continue to read the Bible.
You will see the power of God in your life emerge.
# Read your Bible, pray every day, pray every day... #
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd