Jim Hinch

Tag: Christianity

March 1, 2021

Common Ground

Guideposts’ new series is Our Common Ground, about people working to bridge racial, economic, cultural and political divides. Such stories get less media attention but they are everywhere and they matter. Stories published so far: A multiracial church in the Deep South has hard conversations about Black Lives Matter (February issue). Two sorority sisters in New Jersey, one Christian, one Muslim, find an unexpected bond in faith. Stories under consideration include: a former gang leader now pursuing alternatives to policing in Stockton, Calif.; how a rural doctor persuaded a small Indiana town to open a needle exchange during an HIV outbreak; gay owners of a popular flower shop in Huntington, West Virginia who were embraced by their conservative community after their son was injured in a skateboarding accident. Racial, economic, cultural and political wounds run deep in America. Some people seek to heal them.

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November 17, 2016

Evangelicals Are Losing the Battle for the Bible. And They’re Just Fine With That

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My latest in The Los Angeles Review of Books, an in-depth look at evangelicals’ evolving views about their foundational text, the Bible. Yet another signal that American evangelicalism is fracturing along generational and ethnic lines.

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December 23, 2015

The African Future of American Christianity

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My latest in Boom: A Journal of California, a story about an Orange County mega-church revived by missionaries…from Africa. As America secularizes and grows more ethnically diverse, forward-thinking evangelicals are looking to rapidly growing churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America to help them survive.

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April 7, 2014

The Nones Have It?

A few recent stories about changing faith in America. Decline of the Revival, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, examines evangelicals’ efforts to understand their sudden loss of cultural and moral influence. What Happened to Religion in America? The I’s Have It, in OnFaith, posits American Christianity’s embrace of individualism as one explanation for that loss. Further evidence of religious conservatives’ current struggles can be found in activists’ recent turn to the courts in their fight against same-sex marriage. Faced with setbacks at the ballot box, religious conservatives have begun focusing on legal efforts to shield believers from the effects of what is increasingly considered a lost cause. It’s not all struggle and decline. Here’s a fun story about a day in the life of one of the rising generation of young, American-born imams quietly but inexorably altering the public contours of their faith. All in a day’s work: basketball, frank talk about sex, and instructions for brushing teeth in Ramadan.

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December 6, 2013

Crystal Ball

My cover story for the latest issue of The American Scholar shows how the death and rebirth of Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral (which went bankrupt and now is being transformed by the county’s surging Catholic diocese into a regional worship and cultural center) signals a wider transformation in the fast-changing landscape of American spirituality.

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January 27, 2013

The Future of (Asian-American) Christianity

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I report in today’s Orange County Register on next-generation Asian-American churches in Southern California influencing the world. Goodbye, mono-lingual, hierarchical, tradition-minded immigrant churches. Hello, multi-ethnic, multi-media, service-oriented worship. Coming soon to your city, too.

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December 18, 2012

Christians’ Demographic Cliff

 

In today’s Orange County Register:

As sanctuaries fill up for the holidays, forward-thinking church leaders are finding little to celebrate in a growing body of research that shows American Christianity at risk of losing an entire generation of young people, perhaps for good.

A record one-third of Americans under age 30 are now religiously unaffiliated, according to a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. That’s up from one-quarter just four years ago. There are now more religiously unaffiliated Americans than white evangelical Protestants.

Sixteen percent of non-Christians under 30 say they have a “good impression” of Christianity, and a mere 3 percent feel that way about evangelical Christianity, according to the Barna Group, a Christian market research organization. As recently as the 1990s, a majority of non-Christians viewed Christianity favorably.

More potentially troubling to church leaders is that half of young Christians have negative views of their own faith, according to Barna.

“It’s the melting of the icebergs, but many people aren’t paying attention to it,” said David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group.

more….

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January 27, 2012

King’s Way

Wow. Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, home to super-pastor Rick Warren (Obama inauguration, Purpose Driven Life, etc.) has joined forces with Southern California mosques to adopt a three-step plan for ending enmity between evangelical Christians and Muslims. The plan’s first step calls for Muslims and Christians to recognize they worship the same God. Interfaith reconciliation has been proceeding for years between Muslims and more liberal-leaning mainline Protestant denominations. This is the first such effort I’ve heard of by an evangelical mega-church. Many evangelicals regard Islam as Christianity’s number one enemy, and they do not at all agree that the two faiths worship the same God. This is likely to make waves. See news release and pictures at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles.

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