How Latinos are Changing American Christianity

Writing for the Washington Post's "On Faith" section, Dr. Richard Land, president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, discusses some of the big changes the Latinos are making to Christianity. Here are some statistics from his article that demonstrate that change.

• "There are 40,800 churches in the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, 3,200 Latino Southern Baptist churches and 2,500 Latino Assemblies of God."
• "The Southern Baptist Convention alone expects to double the number of Hispanic Southern Baptist churches by 2030."
• "They are also more socially conservative, with 70 percent of Latino evangelicals “opposed to abortion in all or most cases” as opposed to 41 percent of the general U.S. population."

Dr. Land references a Time Magazine cover story about this change called:  "The Latino Reformation,” (Time ,April 15, 2013). 

What is fascinating about this change is that it is happening much as the writer, Philip Jenkins, suggested it might in his book,  The Next Christianity, in which he argues that the center of Christianity will move to the global south and that only 1/5 of the the three billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites by 2050.