Why is Christianity’s geopolitical center of gravity shifting to Africa?

in

This is the script for my video posted on September 23, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

In the year 1900, Africa had about 9.6 million Christians, but today it has around 750m. In many ways, Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted south of the Sahara, where African church leaders are now decisively winning internal fights within the Anglican, Catholic, and Methodist worlds. But why is this happening, and what impact does it have on geopolitics?

You might not know that Christianity actually came to Africa long before most of Europe. The Egyptian city of Alexandria was one of the great theological centers of early Christianity. Some of the most influential Latin theologians came out of Carthage in modern Tunisia.

The kingdom of Aksum converted under King Ezana in 330 CE, making Ethiopia one of the first states to adopt Christianity, after Armenia and around the same time that Rome did. The Orthodox Church there survives today.

But after the Arab conquests of the 7th century, Latin Christianity faded across the north over several centuries while Coptic and Ethiopian Christianity survived. The difference was likely that the Coptic and Ethiopian churches lived in local languages and rural communities, while the Latin church stayed tied to a Romanized urban elite and never translated itself into Punic or Berber.

In 1491 though, some 800 years later, King Nzinga a Nkuwu of Kongo was baptized as a Catholic after the Portuguese made contact, taking the name Joao I. His son Afonso became a genuinely devout ruler who built churches and schools in the name of Catholicism. And Afonso’s son Henrique was the very first sub-Saharan Catholic bishop in history.

Unfortunately, Afonso funded his Christianization effort partly through the Atlantic slave trade with Portugal, and by the 1520s the trade had spiraled out of his control, with Portuguese merchants and Kongolese nobles enslaving even free-born people. Afonso famously wrote letters to the Portuguese king to protest the kidnapping of nobility. But the bottom line here is that Christianity and the slave trade arrived in Africa together.

In the early 18th century, the Kongolese prophet Kimpa Vita, or Dona Beatriz, preached a new form of Africanized Christianity, and though she was burned as a heretic for it, her movement was an omen of what came later.

Then in the 19th century, a wave of missionaries swept across the continent alongside colonization. The two often collaborated, but colonial authorities were suspicious of missionary literacy efforts and openly hostile to independent churches they could not control.

The Liberian prophet William Wadé Harris baptized tens of thousands across the Gold Coast before the French expelled him from Côte d'Ivoire in 1914. Simon Kimbangu was arrested by the Belgians in 1921 and died in prison three decades later. Dona Beatriz's omen had arrived, and the churches these men founded outlasted the empires that jailed them.

This created lasting legacies though in the form of mission schools, which remain very common in sub-Saharan Africa, and vernacular Bible translations. Rendering scripture into hundreds of African languages affirmed those languages as adequate vessels for the faith, which undercut the colonial project it was meant to serve.

In fact, counterintuitively, the end of colonialism in Africa actually allowed Christianity to explode in Africa because it decoupled the faith from foreign political power, giving locals control over their own beliefs.

From 1970 to 2025, the population of African Christians grew from 138m to roughly three quarters of a billion. Catholics remain the largest single tradition on the continent, but the fastest growth has come from neo-Pentecostal groups and indigenous megachurches in places like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and the DRC.

In reality though, most of that recent growth came from birth rates rather than conversion. Mass conversions happened earlier, as African traditional religions collapsed from roughly 58% of the continent in 1900 to a few percent today. Africa now has about 1.6b people, and this is still rapidly rising. Some projections show that about 42% of the world's Christians will live in sub-Saharan Africa by 2060.

So how is this affecting Christian denominations? Well, in some cases it’s quite dramatic. The Church of Nigeria, for example, claims to have about 25m members as of 2025. The Church of England counts just under 22m, but its actual worshipping community is around a million, with average Sunday attendance of only about 582000. Anglican membership numbers are self-reported and unreliable across the communion, but by most counts the majority of the world's roughly 100m Anglicans now live in Africa.

In 2023 the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches said it no longer recognized the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals because of a blessing made for same-sex couples. The archbishop resigned over an unrelated scandal, and he was replaced by a woman. The Church of Nigeria announced in 2025 that it would sever ties with the Church of England over her appointment, and by early 2026 the Global Anglican Future Conference was openly building a rival structure.

Catholicism is changing too, with Africa’s share rising and Europe’s falling, though the Americas remain the largest single bloc. But Africa is the only region where the number of seminarians is growing. And these priests are gaining influence. When Pope Francis allowed non-liturgical blessings of same-sex couples in late 2023, the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar issued a collective statement saying this could not be carried out in Africa. Francis and his doctrinal office signed off on it, which made it a negotiated opt-out for an entire continent rather than an uncontrolled revolt.

The United Methodist Church, meanwhile, repealed its longstanding bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage in 2024. Two years earlier, the Global Methodist Church had launched as a conservative breakaway, based mainly in the US but expanding into Africa. Most African United Methodists actually stayed, and they remained the denomination's conservative center of mass. Churches also matter enormously where the state is weak. The Catholic Church alone runs more than 45000 primary schools, 18000 secondary schools, and 1,600 hospitals in Africa, making it among the largest non-state providers of education and healthcare on the continent

African Christianity has some fascinating impacts on geopolitics. After the Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, which canonically covers all of Africa, recognized the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as autocephalous in 2019, the Russian Orthodox Church severed communion and began planting dioceses of its own across the continent. Alexandria condemned it as neocolonialism. The Russian church took in over 100 Alexandrian priests and, by its own count, opened over 200 parishes in about a year and a half, tracking closely with Russia's broader African strategy.

Meanwhile, US right-wing Christian groups have reportedly spent at least 54m dollars in Africa advancing anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion agendas. The Fellowship Foundation accounted for the largest single share, including more than 20m in Uganda alone, and the Ugandan legislator who wrote that country's original anti-homosexuality bill was one of its associates. African governments are accountable for their own laws, and most of the continent's anti-LGBTQ statutes began as British colonial ones, but foreign-funded Christian conservative networks are a tangible and growing input.

In late 2025, the current US administration designated Nigeria a country of particular concern, claiming that Christianity is facing an existential threat there even as Christians there comprise 43-46% of the population, or over 100m people. The US used this to justify strikes on terrorist targets in the northern regions. But in reality, attacks affect people there regardless of their faith, and in many cases Muslim civilian deaths exceed Christian ones. Nigeria’s own government rejects the US’s framing outright. It’s clear that the US is taking a very one-dimensional view of a conflict that also has ethnic, economic, and criminal aspects.

But outside of this, the African diaspora is shaping what religion looks like in other parts of the world. Some of the largest congregations in Europe are now African-led ethnic-minority churches in places like London, Paris, and Amsterdam. In many ways, migration is acting as missionary work.

At the same time, Islam is growing in parallel, and some projections show that Muslims will reach parity with Christians globally around 2070 and outnumber them by 2100. Religion will be a key factor deciding Africa's dynamics going forward. But it’s worth noting that the money, the endowments, and the institutional machinery still sit in the global north, and African provinces often rely on northern funding to operate. The center of gravity has moved, but the center of power has not, at least not yet.

Keep reading

I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.