From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
The New Evangelicals
They don't think like Billy Graham.
Time Magazine built a recent cover story around its list of the 25 most influential evangelicals. The list features a fair number of success-driven entrepreneurs whose achievements can be measured by standards that Time writers understand--book sales, converts, market share.
Time's evangelicals of influence are Anglo (23 of 25) with a nod apiece to Hispanics and African-Americans. But this traditional face of American evangelicalism is changing. An ever higher number of U.S. evangelicals--perhaps nearing a third of the total--are Asian, African, Latin American or Pacific Islander. While Billy Graham would probably make their list of influential people, some of Time's others would not.
The ethnic evangelicals, having arrived since 1965, have brought a surge of fervor into American denominations. Between 1998 and 2004, ethnic congregations in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod increased to 204 from 48. Every Sunday, U.S. Christian and Missionary Alliance congregations worship in 28 languages. A 2004 article in Presbyterians Today noted how immigrants from Brazil to the Sudan were changing the ethnic mix of that denomination.
The faith of these newer Americans is--like that of U.S. evangelicals generally--rooted in the Bible and personalized by experience. It may even be more expressive and literalist than what the older forms of evangelicalism have become. But the ethnic evangelicals have little time for the much-publicized conservative interest groups that mobilize white middle-class church members.
Ethnic evangelicals and their offspring are more urban than suburban; they vote Democrat as well as Republican. New arrivals are as likely to care about immigration, human rights, poverty and religious freedom abroad as about same-sex marriage or Israel--though they do not speak with a unified voice. They often pour their money and energy into programs focused on their countries of origin.
These newcomers already wield influence in evangelical institutions. Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania is a hub for Korean networking. It now offers a satellite program in Seoul. New York's Alliance Theological Seminary offers a Chinese Studies Program, a ministry track aimed at Chinese-American congregations. Asian students predominate in some large campus chapters of InterVarsity or Campus Crusade for Christ. The dean of Illinois's Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is an immigrant from the Ivory Coast. An evangelical Nigerian immigrant holds an endowed chair at McCormick Theological Seminary, also in Illinois. An immigrant Gambian evangelical holds another at Yale Divinity School.
The change on the ground is obvious in urban neighborhoods. More than a century has passed since New York City made anyone's short list of American evangelical hubs. Yet today Korean, Chinese, African, Jamaican, Latin American and eastern European evangelical congregations cram thousands of storefronts and living rooms, as well as once-Anglo stately churches.
Around the country, Hispanics move by the thousands from traditional Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism--or have already made the move before coming here. (One in six Hispanics arrives as a Protestant, but fully one in three of second- and third-generation Hispanics identify themselves as evangelical.)
Meanwhile, African immigrants have brought the creative variety of African Initiated Churches to American cities. Brazilian immigrants can watch their favorite Brazilian preachers on cable TV. The Web brings Korean-Americans live sermons by David Yonggi Cho, the pastor of a Seoul congregation that dwarfs all American megachurches combined. Mr. Cho's representatives organize Korean-Americans into affiliated units.
As for the number, reports of growth in American evangelical and Pentecostal denominations are more likely to refer to the surging growth within an ethnic constituency than to new Anglo membership. Since 1993, the Assemblies of God has closed, on average, more than 40 majority-white congregations each year while opening an annual average of 87 ethnic churches.
The 20th-century global explosion of evangelicalism has come full circle: Evangelicals from everywhere rub shoulders in the U.S. Not that the media have really noticed.
Ms. Blumhofer directs the Institute for the Study of Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.
