Isn’t Christianity a Western Religion?

The short answer: No. Christianity began in the Middle East, spread into Africa and Asia before it was strong in most of Europe, and today most Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It isn’t any one culture’s religion. It’s been translated into thousands of languages because God speaks to every people in their own words.

On TV, Christianity can look like a white, Western thing: European cathedrals, American preachers, old paintings of a blond Jesus. Some people see it as part of the history of empire and say, “Why would anyone outside the West follow that?”

It’s a fair challenge, and the history behind it isn’t all comfortable. But the picture is badly out of focus.

It started in the Middle East

Jesus was a Jewish man, born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, who died and rose again in Jerusalem. He never visited Europe. The first churches met in Jerusalem, and the disciples “were first called Christians at Antioch” (Acts 11:26), in what is now Turkey, near the Syrian border.

On the day the church was born, the crowd included “Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia” (Acts 2:9), people from what are now Iran and Iraq, along with visitors from “Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene” (Acts 2:10). Each of them heard the good news in his own language. One of the first non-Jewish believers was “an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official” (Acts 8:27). And the church at Antioch was led by a team that included “Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene” (Acts 13:1), very probably Africans.

Africa and Asia came early

Some of the greatest thinkers of the early church were African. Augustine lived in what is now Algeria; Athanasius was a bishop in Egypt; Tertullian and Cyprian lived in Carthage, in modern Tunisia. Ethiopia had a Christian king in the 300s. Armenia became officially Christian around the same time, earlier than any other nation. Christians in India trace their church back to the apostle Thomas, and Christian missionaries from the Middle East had reached China by the 600s. Much of Northern Europe, by contrast, heard the gospel centuries later.

So when someone in Africa or Asia follows Jesus, they aren’t borrowing a European religion. In many places they’re returning to one of the oldest faiths their region has known.

The church today

The centre of the Christian world has moved. Most of the world’s Christians now live in the Global South, and researchers count more Christians in Africa than on any other continent. The Bible is now available in full in more than seven hundred languages, and at least part of it in thousands more.

That isn’t an accident. From the start, Jesus sent His followers “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). In heaven the song is to the Lamb who “purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). Other faiths sometimes treat one sacred language as the only proper one for worship. Christianity has always translated. God doesn’t ask you to become someone else’s culture to belong to Him. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

The honest part

It’s also true that some Western Christians mixed the gospel up with their own culture and their own empires. Some missionaries treated local customs as worthless, and some stood by while colonial powers did great harm. That was wrong, and Christians should say so plainly. But others, often local believers, did the opposite: they put the Bible into people’s own languages, built schools, and fought the slave trade. And the gospel itself judges every empire, Western ones included.

So if you are African, Asian, Latin American or anything else, Jesus isn’t a foreigner to you. And if you are Western, the faith doesn’t belong to you either. It belongs to Him.

Think about it: If God speaks every language, how might it change the way you pray to know He hears you in the words you actually think in?

Go deeper: Samuel Ajayi Crowther (For Teens) — the story of a Yoruba boy rescued from slavery who became a bishop and did the largest share of the work on the first Yoruba Bible, showing that the gospel never belonged to England and could speak Yoruba. Start with chapter 8, “In Our Own Language”.