Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom and contributor to the new Patheos blog “Anxious Bench,” recently posted on the emerging “majority minority.” Increasingly, Americans are nonwhite, and those nonwhite Americans by about 2050 will comprise the majority of the U.S. population. This has huge implications for American religion and politics. Depending on how things go down, it could be a promising development for evangelical non-rightists. Here’s a brief excerpt from the epilogue of Moral Minority:
In contemporary Brazil, for example, evangelicós have participated in all the major political parties. They and others, according to sociologist Paul Freston, have dismantled “facile equations of evangelicalism with conservative stances” and demonstrated “the distance of these actors—indeed, total independence of these actors—from the American evangelical right.” Many, like Ruth Padilla DeBorst, the influential daughter of Ecuadorian theologian René Padilla, have combined conservative theological and moral stances with progressive economic and foreign policy views in ways that defy the Western imagination. In a world where 60 percent of the world’s Christians now live outside the North Atlantic region and in a nation increasingly opened to nonwhite immigrants since the Immigration Act of 1965, these views—especially if joined with black evangelical and white progressive voices—will only continue to carry more weight.
David R. Swartz 