When President Obama meets with Pope Francis tomorrow, the world will catch a glimpse of what history looks like. The first pope from the global South in 1200 years will be welcomed in the White House by the first African-American president of the United States. This picture will be worth far, far more than a thousand words.
Pundits will analyze each public word spoken, and search for hints about the private words exchanged between these two. The politics of Pope Francis’ interaction with the President, and later with Congress, will fuel incessant speculation from Washington’s insiders. But around the world, and particularly in the global South, it’s the symbol of this meeting which will matter.
Pope Francis represents the changing face of world Christianity. Today, one billion Christians are found in Latin America and Africa. In 1980, more Christians were found in the global South than in the North for the first time in a thousand years. Every day, that movement accelerates. Francis’ words about the world’s injustices, and his actions of humble human solidarity, project the voice and longings of world Christianity’s new majority and resonant far beyond the boundaries of this faith.
President Obama symbolizes the changing demographics of America. Hope and demographics elected him in 2008, and by 2012 the changing face of the electorate in the U.S. proved determinative of America’s political future. Today, a majority of babies born in the U.S. are non-white, and some major urban areas already reflect the coming reality of a society without a racial majority.
For centuries in both the world church and global politics, power has been centered and controlled largely by white men from the West and global North. All that now is shifting. And while some politicians and even churchmen try to play to people’s fears, they cannot change the tide of history.
Both President Obama and Pope Francis face enormous institutional powers and entrenched habits of the mind that seek to thwart or deter transformational changes propelled by birth-rates, migration, and rising human aspirations that can imagine a different future. They each navigate those challenges in ways that history, ultimately, will come to judge. But by simply meeting together on the White House lawn, they will make visible the hopes of hundreds of millions.
This is a picture that will propel the future.
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson is a Sojourners board member and former general secretary of the Reformed Church in America. His most recent book is Without Oars: Casting Off into a Life of Pilgrimage.
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