The End of Power (36 page)

WE NATURALLY LOOK FOR EVIDENCE OF SHIFTS IN POWER IN THOSE
areas where its impact is most dramatic and brutal: on life and death, war and peace, the control of governments and the rise and decline of enterprises. And in each of these areas, we have seen that the decay of the power of the megaplayers is opening new paths for small and hitherto marginal actors, some of whom may gain access to capabilities that can limit the options of the once powerful.

But power dwells also in the church or religious group that collects the tithes and regiments the life choices of its adherents; in the union that gathers workers' dues and negotiates on their behalf for better wages and labor conditions; in the charity that brings private funds to bear on social works at home and fighting poverty abroad. Power also rests in the university whose research labs produce the most important scientific findings and innovations or whose graduates land the most prestigious jobs; in museums and galleries and music record labels; in symphony orchestras, book publishers, and movie production houses. And, of course, there is power in the media, the channels and filters we turn to for information, and whom we trust to be honest and useful, or to pull others toward our own point of view.

The stakes vary. Most, fortunately, fall short of life and death. Harvard versus Yale resembles Manchester United versus Chelsea more than it does, say, the US military versus the Chinese People's Liberation Army or Al Qaeda. As purely economic enterprises, the fates of the BBC, the
New York Times, El País
, or other prestige outlets affect far fewer workers and livelihoods than does, say, the profit and loss of Monsanto or WalMart, even if
their influence on debate and policy matters acutely to media circles and helps to keep our democracies healthy. On the other hand, the distribution of power in the philanthropic world among foundations and donors has intense and immediate effects on billions of people near and far, determining which projects are funded (and how) and which emergencies are deemed most urgent. The importance of workers' ability to organize themselves to improve their economic fortunes needs no explanation. And the power of organized religion on other spheres of life and the intensity of rivalries between faiths is likewise obvious: the evidence—all too often bloody—scars history.

That is why our panorama of the great change taking place in the workings of power today needs to extend beyond business, politics, and war. The aim is not to be exhaustive. We will, however, examine what has happened to the power of long-dominant organizations in four areas that directly affect a large proportion of humanity: religion, labor, philanthropy, and media.

“They are stealing our sheep.” So one Jesuit described the tide of change sweeping Christianity in Latin America, long a Catholic bastion.
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Who are “they”? The new evangelical, Pentecostalist, and charismatic Protestant churches that have sprouted across the region in the last thirty years—much as they have in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere—are giving the Catholic Church fits, and swiftly emptying its pews. A 2005 survey found that the proportion of Latin Americans who consider themselves Catholic dropped from 80 percent to 71 percent in the decade between 1995 and 2005. Worse still for the Church, only 40 percent said they actually practice their faith, a dramatic drop in a continent where the Catholic Church was dominant for centuries. In Brazil, for example, half a million Catholics leave the church each year. Whereas in 2000 the Catholic population represented 73.6 percent of Brazil's population, by 2010 that percentage had decreased to under two-thirds, or 64.6 percent. Only two-thirds of Colombians now call themselves Catholic, one-third of Guatemalans have left the Catholic Church since the 1980s—and the statistics go on.
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In La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, some former Catholics told reporters they felt “abandoned” by the Church. “It didn't really exist for me,” one said. Now, they belong to the New Pact Power of God Church, a charismatic ministry where ten thousand people pray in multiple shifts every Sunday.
Scenes like this are common across Latin America. But the sheep have not been stolen. The sheep aren't sheep anymore: they are consumers, and they have found a more attractive product in the market for salvation.
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The roots of the modern evangelical movement trace back to an early-twentieth-century African-American ministry called Azusa, which was based on concepts drawn from the Bible story of the Pentecost. The movement that arose, Pentecostalism, gathers a broad range of larger denominations and independent local churches that share a few core concepts about individual deliverance (through being born again) and elements of worship such as speaking in tongues. But the autonomous churches that have garnered millions of adherents to become a social and political force in the United States, Brazil, Nigeria, and many other countries are not all Pentecostal; they include other kinds of evangelical and “charismatic” groups, each with a typically self-proclaimed prophet or apostle, but quickly forming their own chapters and hierarchies. Many preach the so-called prosperity gospel, which holds that God smiles on the accumulation of wealth in this life and will reward material donations to the church with prosperity and miracles. Indeed, in a recent Pew survey of religious attitudes in the United States, where 50 of the largest 260 churches are now prosperity based, 73 percent of all religious Latinos agreed with the statement “God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith.”
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The rise of Pentecostal and charismatic Christian churches, and not just in Catholic or mainline Protestant–dominated countries, has been staggering. Estimates vary, partly because of the fluidity of terms and boundaries, but the impact is still clear. A Pew survey in 2006 estimated the proportion of “renewalists”—both Pentecostals and charismatics—to be 11 percent in South Korea, 23 percent in the United States, 26 percent in Nigeria, 30 percent in Chile, 34 percent in South Africa, 44 percent in the Philippines, 49 percent in Brazil, 56 percent in Kenya, and 60 percent in Guatemala.
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Even in “non-Christian” India, renewalists make up 5 percent of the population; put another way, there are well over 50 million Pentecostals and charismatics in India, and some estimates claim that China has at least twice as many. Many renewalist churches are completely local, often not more than a storefront congregation of the kind familiar in black and immigrant neighborhoods of North American cities. Others have sprouted major organizations with hundreds of chapters and an international presence.

Though Pentecostalism first arose in the United States, historic American missions like the Assemblies of God are no longer the fastest to spread around the world. The big exporting countries in the redemption business
today are Brazil and Nigeria. In Brazil, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded in Rio de Janeiro by pastor Edir Macedo in 1977, now has five thousand chapters. It spread to the United States in 1986 and has a presence in almost every country. Its latest plan, which received authorization from the Brazilian government, is to build a ten-thousand-person megachurch in São Paulo that will be the equivalent of eighteen stories high, modeled on Solomon's Temple. “We will spend tons of money, without a doubt,” Macedo said.
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Another large Brazilian denomination, the Reborn in Christ Church, was founded in 1986 by a husband-and-wife team known as Apostle Estevam and Bishop Sonia; it owns newspapers, radio stations, and a TV channel. In 2005, it sponsored a new political party, the Brazilian Republican Party, which joined a coalition with President Lula da Silva's Workers Party in the 2006 elections. Yet another Brazilian church grew out of the epiphany of a surfer and former drug addict named Rinaldo Pereira. In the span of ten years, his Bola de Neve church formed more than one hundred chapters with up to several thousand members each. The church name means “snowball”—an apt title these days for a grassroots evangelical ministry.
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In Nigeria, meanwhile, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in Lagos in 1952 but whose spread truly began in the early 1980s, operates in one hundred countries. Its pinnacle annual prayer meeting at a revival camp along the Lagos-Ibadan expressway gathers up to a million devotees. In the United States, it claims about three hundred parishes with fifteen thousand members and growing.

In the wake of these new leaders in the transnational market for souls, many other churches are spreading—divine fruits of the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions.
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In fact, the roughly 2.2 billion Christians around the world are so dispersed that, as a recent Pew report put it, “no single continent or region can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity.”
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The share of the Christians in the population of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has risen from 9 percent in 1910 to 63 percent a century later.
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Talk about the Mobility revolution: in 2010, Christians made up almost half of the world's 214 million migrants, opening new possibilities for the expansion of the faith and spreading it further beyond the reach of any centralized denominational authority.
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As I have argued when discussing the ascent of the micropowers in previous chapters, the point is not that these new challengers will dislodge the megaplayers. The point is that they will deny them options that in the
past the big players could take for granted. The new charismatic churches, for example, will not dislodge the Vatican or the Anglican Church. But they will narrow the range of possibilities and reduce the power of these large institutions.

The success of the new denominations inevitably comes to the detriment of mainline Protestant groups like the Anglicans and Lutherans, and most of all, the Catholic Church. Until a few decades ago, the Vatican's principal problems were the gradual secularization of Europe and the aging population of priests. These were serious issues, and the Church sought to modernize in response, notably through the decisions of the Vatican II council—for instance, by requiring Mass to be given in local languages rather than in Latin. But nothing prepared the Vatican for the competitive challenge of the Pentecostal and charismatic churches, not just at the far limits of its reach but in places like Latin America long considered the faith's backyard. Already in the 1970s and 1980s, the Church faced internal dissent with the emergence of liberation theology in Brazil and elsewhere in the continent. The threat of liberation theology has diminished, particularly with the spread of democracy in the region.
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But the inroads of the new denominations and the greater intensity of renewalist religious practice (more people attending longer services and adapting more aspects of their life to the church's requirements) are chipping away at the influence of the once overwhelmingly dominant Catholicism. “If the church doesn't make changes to its centralized structures and authoritarian messages, it will suffer a genuine collapse in Latin America within roughly fifteen years,” in the estimate of Elio Masferrer, the chairman of the Latin American Religious Studies Association.
¹³

Scholars and analysts were slow to take in the scale of the trend, perhaps because they found it easy to dismiss Pentecostal worship as odd or exotic. Now, however, it is unavoidable, as evangelical groups have grown influential in politics (fielding candidates for office in countries like Brazil) and the media (launching radio and television networks in many countries). Neither the Catholic Church nor the mainline Protestant denominations have found a way either to halt the spread of these small and fast rivals or to stanch the defection of their own adherents, with all its implications for revenue and relevance.

Why? In part, that failure has to do with doctrine, and the ability of the evangelical churches to offer a message based on wealth and spectacular services—with their faith healings and deliverances—that contrast with
Catholicism's austere and repetitive rituals. But the core advantage, the one that makes the rest possible, is organizational. The changes in the composition and practice of Christianity are as drastic a case of the decay of power, away from large hierarchical and centralized structures and in favor of a constellation of small and nimble autonomous players, as the world has known.

The essence of the Pentecostal and evangelical advantage lies in the ability of these churches to spring up without regard to any preexisting hierarchy. There are no lessons to receive, instructions to await, or ordinations to earn from the Vatican or the Archbishop of Canterbury or any other central leadership. In the classic case, unless they have emerged from an already existing evangelical church, a pastor simply appoints himself or herself (while Catholicism still forbids women priests, there are any number of Charismatic women apostles, bishops, and prophetesses) and puts out his or her shingle. In this respect, the church resembles nothing so much as a small business launched in a competitive marketplace without funding from a central source; it must succeed on the basis of the members it draws, the services it provides them, and the tithes and collection revenue they can be persuaded to give.
¹⁴
As John L. Allen, a reporter covering the Vatican and author of
The Future Church
, has observed: “Barriers to market entry in Pentecostalism are notoriously low. Any Pentecostal who feels dissatisfied with the offerings of the local church is free to move on to another, even to start his or her own church in a basement or garage.”
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