Francis, Strickland & Burke

The 1960s have long been seen as a decisive decade in terms of Christianity’s encounter with secular and pluralistic modernity. In terms of secular modernity’s impact on relations among different Christian traditions, the 1990s—with the explosion of the culture wars—were crucial. Now, just over a decade into Francis’s papacy, we have transitioned into a global Christianity that is more reflective of the Southern hemisphere, and in the United States, a Catholicism and Protestantism that is, to be blunt, less “white” and less “male.” It’s hard not to see Strickland and what he represents as a reaction to this new demographic reality.