Philip Jenkins in the Wittenburg Door

I've long enjoyed the Wittenburg Door, the satirical rag sometimes called the "Mad Magazine [or National Lampoon] of the evangelical Christianity."  They've been skewering televangelists -- admittedly an easy target -- and other creatures in the bestiary of American religion for nearly 30 years now.  (Often hilariously, though sometimes missing the target, as most all satires do.)  Check out, for example, the account of a Sotheby's auction of memorabilia associated with C.S. Lewis, the "evangelical saint."

More seriously, the Door also runs good interviews with a variety of figures, and this month's online is with Philip Jenkins (The New Anti-Catholicism, The Next Christendom, etc.).  It touches on the priest sex-abuse scandals, the Jesus Seminar, Christianity in the developing World, religion in America vs. Europe, etc.  A couple of excerpts on the last two subjects:

DOOR: What's the big picture? What will the mass of Christians look like 50 years from now?
JENKINS: My argument is that one of the big factors will be ethnic. In the United States, looking at the whole population, something like a third of Americans will have either Latino or Asian roots, and the vast majority of those come from backgrounds, which are presently Christian. I think it's quite likely that those people will still continue to be Christian and they will certainly be very dominant voices in the Catholic Church and probably most of the mainstream churches.
    Globally, Christianity will be much more of a black and brown religion. The figures I suggest, with all awareness of the queries about numbers, somewhere between four fifths, and five sixths will be in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or from migrant communities in the West. Non-Latino white Christians will represent only about a fifth or sixth of the whole, so Christianity will be much more a black and brown religion.

. . .

DOOR: What do you think of the argument [explains America's greater religiosity on the ground] that America's separation of church and state has caused religion here to be an organic extension of the people, while in Europe it's seen as part of the state, or something that came from the state?
JENKINS: The argument doesn't work very well if you compare [the U.S. to] Britain, because although the Anglican Church was an established church there, it's been a couple of hundred since there was any real enforcement. So there's no real reason why people shouldn't go off and become Methodists or Baptists, and many did. And they lived in those church set-ups and then the secularization thesis kicked in and those churches faded away to insignificance—as they should have done in America but didn't.
    So, I genuinely don't know. It's not a religious freedom argument or a separation of church and state argument, because separation of church and state, in most European countries, was always pretty much a formal thing. You were always pretty free to be a Methodist or a Baptist in Britain, so I think you've got a real problem there for sociologists of religion.

Tom