The Changing Face of Christianity

Philip Jenkins has a fresh release out called The New Faces of Christianity. I've mentioned Jenkins' book The Next Christendom in this blog before, so I'd thought I'd take a look at what he's been up to lately. I came across an interesting interview with Jenkins conducted by The Wittenburg Door in October of 2005. Here is an excerpt:

DOOR: What's the big picture? What will the mass of Christians look like 50 years from now?
JENKINS: My argument is that one of the big factors will be ethnic. In the United States, looking at the whole population, something like a third of Americans will have either Latino or Asian roots, and the vast majority of those come from backgrounds, which are presently Christian. I think it's quite likely that those people will still continue to be Christian and they will certainly be very dominant voices in the Catholic Church and probably most of the mainstream churches.
Globally, Christianity will be much more of a black and brown religion. The figures I suggest, with all awareness of the queries about numbers, somewhere between four fifths, and five sixths will be in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or from migrant communities in the West. Non-Latino white Christians will represent only about a fifth or sixth of the whole, so Christianity will be much more a black and brown religion.
DOOR: Have any demographers mounted a serious challenge to your projections?
JENKINS: No, which either means one of two things. It either means my figures were impeccably right, or that demographers haven't bothered to look at my book. Don't forget, my book [The Next Christendom] certainly does not pretend to be an original work of demography. I'm relying on standard sets of statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.N. and so on. So I'm not doing anything really radical or surprising.
DOOR: How does the faith of what you call the global south differ from the faith of the U.S. and, say, Europe?
JENKINS: It differs much more from Europe than it does from the U.S. First of all, faith in the global south, like the global north, is very diverse. Obviously, it has very liberal people, it has very conservative people. But, insofar as you can generalize, the religion of the global south tends to be more charismatic, evangelical or Pentecostal, and yes I know those two things are different.

As I've said before, the race is on for the hearts and minds of millions in the Global South. Come join the fun!