Christianity is shifting East – Washington Examiner

As the increasingly irreligious West decays and declines, God is showing himself to the East in unprecedented numbers.
The West has effectively rejected God. After the past few hundred years of secular efforts to divorce Christianity from its foundations there, secularism has succeeded in Europe and is soon to do so in America as well. The average church attendance among the youth in European nations is 8.4%. In America, it is 20%. Now large majorities of both cohorts radically oppose all the gifts Christian thinking has given them since their foundations.
However, not all hope is lost for Christians. For as God may seem to be leaving, he is simply shifting focus. The center of gravity for God’s more active efforts is quickly moving toward the East. Across the Eastern Hemisphere, unprecedented Christian growth is taking place, especially under the harshest conditions.
Asia’s Christian population is now at roughly 8.2% of its overall figure, and it has grown twice as fast in the past century. All regions outside of Western Asia have seen rapid growth. The most notable development is in China. Many speculate that its Christian population now exceeds 100 million and is still growing, despite increasing harassment from its authoritarian government.
The laws of Islamic countries are very harsh toward Christians, so faith has been slow to spread there for hundreds of years. However, that is beginning to change, as Christians there are appearing in large numbers. The most notable is Iran. The brutal suppression by its overzealous theocracy has led more residents to reject the Islamic faith. Amid this rift, Iran’s Christian population has spiked from 10,000 to 1 million in 20 years, making it the fastest-growing one in the world.
There have been countless growing accounts of Muslims converting due to having dreams of Jesus. This experience is becoming so frequent that some missionaries now call it “the normal experience” and claim that “Muslims are responding to Jesus in levels we have never seen, not in 1,400 years.” Even in war-torn Gaza, 200 residents reportedly awoke one morning having had the same dream of Jesus and simultaneously converted.
China’s dystopian crackdowns during COVID-19 fueled the short-lived but nationwide “white paper revolution” to call for ousting the ruling regime. Iran’s murder of a woman not wearing her hijab at the hands of its morality police sparked a four-month-long series of “woman, life, freedom” protests.
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Could these be signs of dramatically changing times or at least a prologue to them? As the West removes God from all aspects of life, happily welcomes foreign invasion, and suffers a birth dearth, the East is showing signs of unprecedented religious and political change.
The Christian faith is rapidly sprouting East at the same time as the East’s authoritarian power structures form larger and larger cracks in them. The entire geopolitical world is about to be completely shaken up.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner Winter Fellow.

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