To me Phil Jenkins is doing some of the best writing on Christianity in the world today. Check this out:
In 2000, thirty-five million Americans were counted as Hispanic, almost 60 percent of them of Mexican ancestry. Nearly twelve million more Americans come from East or Southeast Asia. Asians and Hispanics combined make up 15 percent of the population today, but this share is projected to grow to almost a quarter by 2025, and to a third by 2050. By mid-century, 100 million Americans will claim Latino origin. They will then constitute one of the world’s largest Latino societies, more populous than any actual Hispanic nation with the exceptions of Mexico and Brazil. By that point, fifty or sixty million Americans will claim Mexican descent.
The religious consequences will also be far-reaching, and in most cases, it is the Christian churches that will benefit from demographic change. The vast majority of Latin Americans come from Christian cultures, either Catholic or Pentecostal. And although not every one is equally pious—or even notionally a believer—they have all been formed in a cultural matrix that is clearly Christian. I look forward with fascination to the day in December 2031 when millions of Mexicans and other Latinos celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the appearance of Our Lady of Guadeloupe to the peasant Juan Diego. Within the U.S., as much as across the southern border, the event should mark a triumphant expression of Latino pride and self-assertion, a visible symbol of one of the dominant faces of American Christianity.
