well to remember that many of these religious battles will bernfought both between and within states, perhaps with the fullrnpanoply of weapons now available to even small nations: Therntrue age of crusade and jihad might belong to the 21st century,rnnot the 12th.rnConsidering these changes, we cannot fail to be struck by thernsheer pervasive irrelevance of white Europeans and Americans,rnand their failure to appreciate what is going on around them;rnThe Lambeth statement on homosexuality should have comernas not the slightest surprise to anyone who had taken the troublernover the years to observe the moral rigor of African Christianity.rnNot only do Western Christians not see the struggles in progressrnaround them, they are actually hostile to the missionary endeavorsrnwhich represent a primar)’ battlefront of the emergingrnworld. Seeing only the idealized Hinduism offered by academicsrnand romantic New Agers, they would, for instance, bernappalled at any endeavor to evangelize the Dalit peoples oppressedrnfor millennia by the Hindu caste svstem. And anyway,rnstates the multicultural truism, who are we to export our taintedrnviews to anyone? Far better to apologize repeatedly to the supposedrnvictims of our past religious colonialism: the first nationsrnin North America, the oppressed in Africa and Asia.rnThus confined to the sidelines of history, Westerners are goingrnto find themselves increasingly out of touch with the religiousrndimensions which shape the new world and literally unablernto communicate with the new people of faith. We canrneven imagine a frightening worst-case scenario of a world torncome, in which an incredibly wealthy though numericallyrnshrinking Western population espouses the values of humanism,rnornamented with the vestiges of liberal Christianit}’ and Judaism;rnmeanwhile, it confronts the poorer and vastly more numerousrnglobal masses who wave the flags not of red revolution,rnbut of ascendant Christianity and Islam. Though this soundsrnnot unlike the racial nightmares of the Cold War years, one crucialrndifference is that the have-nots will be inspired by the Scripturesrnand by the language of apocalypse rather than by the textsrnof Marx and Mao: We, the West, will be the final Babylon.rnIn January, Paul Lewis of the New York Times wrote an articlernentitied “As Nations Shed Roles, Is Medieval the Future?”rnwhich examined contemporary trends away from the powerfulrnnation-state and suggested that a new world order might resemblernthe decentralized statelets and fiefs of the Middle Ages.rnLewis interviewed pundits who speculated whether this neomedievalrnworld might be hooped together by a common ideologyrnin the same way that Christianity had united the earlier period:rnSome identified democracy and the free market as thernfuture universal creeds, others favored environmentalism as “arnglobal cause that transcends national boundaries.” Given thernhighly secular venue, it is not surprising that no expert suggestedrnthe obvious candidate for the new Christianity, which is,rnwell, Christianity. It is quite possible to imagine a future Christendomrnnot too different from the old, and we can only hopernthat the new Res Publica Christiana does not confront an equallyrnmilitant Muslim world, Dar al-Islam, or else we really willrnhave gone full circle back to the worst feahires of the 13th centur’.rnThe difference from the old Christendom, with all its universalrnpretensions, is that the new model is unlikely to includernthe liberal and secular West. “Western Christianity” might yetrnbecome an oxymoron.rnCedars and Irnby ]ohn Nixon, Jr.rnCedars, though not of Lebanon, and Irn(Nothing at all like Solomon) inhabitrnMy solitude. A temple, roofed with sky.rnContains our gnarled and shaggy presences-rnOur evergreen if not as green as AprilrnInsistence on survival. Hermit treesrnAnd hermit, we at evening sometimes makernA little lonely hymn beneath the stars forrnWhatever deities may be awake.rnAUGUST 1999/19rnrnrn