We are slowly being conditioned to believe that with decolonization in the political sphere, the “third world” is getting rid of the Christian religion which had come to Asia and Africa—so the story goes—as an auxiliary force of white imperialism. This is a biased and false picture, born perhaps not so much of wishful thinking as of an erroneous logic of history.“ This logic concludes: if Asians and Africans come once again into their own, they ought to reassert their religious personality too.

My own observations as a traveler in Asia and Africa are inevitably personal and partial. Because I had more ready access to Catholic sources of information, for example, my comparisons and references most frequently involve Catholicism, although many of the generalizations would apply to Protestantism as well. In any case I found that, as always, the reality proved to be far more complex than the general assumptions.