Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era
By David N. Hempton
Cambridge University Press, 270 pages, $32
For two thousand years, Christianity has faced countless obstacles. Empires rose and fell. Wars tore the faithful apart. Science, secularism, and scandal tested its strength. Yet the church endured. Today, the faith finds itself in a new struggle, not against Rome or revolution, but against the all-consuming tide of the digital age. David N. Hempton’s Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era is his attempt to map how Christianity has adapted to each communication revolution, from the first printed tracts to TikTok preachers.
Christianity at the Crossroads is ambitious but accessible, sweeping yet specific. It tells a story of a faith constantly in motion.
Hempton, long celebrated as one of the sharpest historians of religion, approaches the story with both breadth and balance. His central framework rests on three simple words: nuclei, nodes, and networks. Nuclei are the core ideas or memes of faith. Nodes are the points where people and traditions collide. Networks are the channels that carry those beliefs across borders. With this model, he traces how Christianity has grown, fractured, and re-shaped itself over the last five centuries.
He begins on familiar soil, but tills it into something new. The Reformation is not merely Luther against Rome. It becomes a case study in how printing presses turned a “religious virus that came to be known as Protestantism” into a force that shattered Europe. Jesuit missionaries, remembered by many as agents of authority, are shown instead as architects of global Christian exchange. By following not only popes and princes but also printers, pilgrims, and preachers, Hempton recasts old stories as dramas of transmission.
The narrative then moves into the colonial world. Here Hempton shines, examining how Catholicism in New Spain and Protestantism in Sierra Leone spread less by decree and more by movement, with people carrying faith along trade routes, slave ships, and schools. He doesn’t downplay the violence of conquest. Rather, he insists that Christianity’s growth cannot be explained only through coercion. Shrines, small societies, and roaming preachers built bonds that lasted long after empires fell.
Perhaps the book’s richest section is the treatment of the “Protestant International.” Hempton follows Pietists in Germany, evangelicals in Britain, premillennialists in America, and Pentecostals across Africa and Latin America. What at first looks scattered takes shape when traced through the ties that bind it. The shared nucleus, he argues, was “an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety.” The nodes were mission conferences, Bible colleges, and revival meetings. The networks carried the message across oceans, creating an international Protestant identity that persists today.
Hempton also turns to women, who often filled the pews but rarely held the pulpits. In one of the book’s most important chapters, he examines how women built their own networks, Catholic orders, Protestant missionary societies, and informal circles of support. These webs gave women both opportunity and limitation, power and constraint.
The final chapter on digital Christianity feels especially timely. Hempton does not sneer at online worship or dismiss YouTube evangelists. Instead, he asks what new forms of faith are emerging when believers connect in ways that ignore borders altogether. Digital “creatives,” as he calls them, can spread doctrine at lightning speed, but they can also sow division and distortion just as fast. As he puts it, “wildflower gardens seem more exotic and colorful than those tended by gardeners determined to create order,” but “the wilder the garden, the more likely it is to be overtaken by invasive species.” It is a memorable warning, one that captures both the promise and peril of digital religion.
What Hempton gestures toward, but leaves largely implicit, is the significant difference between the new medium and the old. Print created permanence — pamphlets and Bibles that could be owned, re-read, and passed down. Digital, by contrast, is fluid and fleeting, its sermons and clips dissolving into a constant stream.
The difference matters. A tract in Luther’s time might persuade over months and years; a TikTok sermon persuades, divides, or vanishes within minutes. Print also demanded literacy and patience, while digital platforms reward speed, reaction, and brevity. These contrasts shape not just how Christianity spreads, but what form it takes once it does.
The book’s strengths are many. The prose is clear and calm. Hempton casts wide but keeps the center steady. His gift for metaphor is everywhere: roots reaching deep, fungi feeding growth, fireworks scattering sparks of belief. Such images carry weight without heaviness. Most of all, he writes with a global eye. The old Eurocentric story fades, replaced by faith pulsing from the Global South, where African Pentecostalism and Latin American Catholicism drive energy outward, not inward.
Still, there are weaknesses. The framework of nuclei, nodes, and networks, while elegant, sometimes feels stretched. By highlighting stories of growth and triumph, he sometimes overlooks the shadows of decline and defeat. He concedes the point himself, admitting his method “helps us understand change better than continuity, success better than failure.” That honesty is admirable, but the imbalance remains.
Another limitation is the light treatment of theology. Hempton is more interested in structures of transmission than in the deeper content of belief. Those looking for probing takes on prayer or practice may be left wanting. What he provides is context — the social and cultural world that shaped these ideas. Historians will be pleased. Theologians, perhaps less so.
However, despite the flaws, the whole remains rewarding. Christianity at the Crossroads is ambitious but accessible, sweeping yet specific. It tells a story of a faith constantly in motion, reshaped by the tools of communication available in each age. Just as Luther’s pamphlets once traveled through the arteries of Europe, today’s sermons spread through cables and screens. The medium changes, the message adapts.
Two thousand years on, Christianity has outlived empires and ideologies. Hempton’s book reminds us why. The church has always been a network, bound together by ideas and encounters, fragile yet resilient. From Gutenberg to Google, Hempton maps a faith in motion. The work isn’t perfect, but it has power. And it should be read by anyone hoping to understand Christianity in a rapidly changing world.
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