Positing translatability as “inherently translatable” would entail that any religion possesses this pillar unless in translation its meaning is altered beyond some arbitrary judgement of relationship between translated and original meaning. But accepting pillars two and five would suggest that mutability of a religion’s meaning is not problematic within the typology you’ve defined. Empirically, it might be true to say that Christianity has been translated into more languages than other religions but asserting that it is inherently more translatable is a very difficult argument to make.

With regard to the specific mention you make of Buddhism, I would assert that Buddhism can be seen as possessing all five pillars. In terms of biography, one could certainly posit that there is an analogous pattern of self-community-religious figure in following Buddha’s life and teachings. Polycentricity, whether intended as geographic or doctrinal is certainly applicable and is in the case of Buddhism a corollary of pillar five. There are multiple schools of Buddhism (Zen, Theravada, Vipassna) which would each have their own geographic centre and which reflect adaptation of Buddhism to different contexts. Being less familiar with Islam, I’ll refrain from applying your model to it, but I think it unlikely that it would have none of the pillars.

I think that while these pillars may allow for interesting empirical observations about how Christianity has fared globally, I don’t think that they are intrinsically unique to Christianity,and in fact, could be identified in almost any cultural movement, sacred or profane which is geographically diffuse and temporally persistent. In other words, mutability, local adaptation of culture, and integration of culture into individual and community “biographies”, translatability (which could be said to always be inherently an act of approximation) are very much the norm. Consequently, this typology could possibly be used to render a claim that Christianity to many aspects of culture, right down to a 4chan meme.

Overall, I’d hazard a guess that technology is not itself in competition with Christianity. Rather, technology is merely instrumental in the diffusion of ideas and culture which compete with Christianity.

Apropos of the comment by Nidya, the word of God may be a wonderful thing for those in third world countries, but timely achievement of the Millenium Development Goals might also be wonderful, perhaps even miraculous. If being better nourished, better educated and healthier means they will be less willing to embrace God’s word, I suspect that’s a tradeoff many would make.

Most radical movements carry some similar attributes. This really drew some great comparisons though!

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God Bless,
Jordan

THANKS,
DeAnte Nails