Chapter 2
The Minority Majority : This Land Is Their
Land
Walk east along First Street in downtown Los Angeles on a Sunday morning and you will find Japanese Buddhists worshiping in the ornate Nishi Honwanji Temple, while over in the heart of Olvera Street Latin rhythms waft from La Placita, a well-known sanctuary for people from Central and South America. To the northeast, in Lincoln Heights, Primera Iglesia del Nazareno stands next to the Chinese Assembly of God; to the west, in Angelino Heights, the Bethel Temple boasts two English pastors, one Spanish, one Chinese, and one Gypsy! A block from City Hall, stately St. Vibiana Roman Catholic Cathedral rises next to rescue missions where an endless line of homeless wait for food and a place to spend the night in a "cardboard condo." These are but a few of the more than fifty places of worship I discovered within a short radius of The Los Angeles Times building.1
Since my wife, Marjorie, and I moved to a high-rise apartment on the edge of Chinatown in the spring of 1990, an unexpected benefit has been savoring the cultural richness and ethnic diversity of the City of the Angels. Here, thanks to immigration, the minority is the majority.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinos, Afro-Americans, and Asian Americans make up about 59 percent of the population
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of Los Angeles. Nearly half of the new residents are recent immigrants, which means 110,000 new immigrants are absorbed into the city each year.
And what Los Angeles is today, much of America will be by the 21st century.
"America has always been immigrant-driven," notes a ministry strategy paper published in the United Methodist Reporter. "Traditionally, in times past, the immigrants have been European and African, but the current trend reshaping American life is the transformation of our country from a European offshoot to a multiracial 'world-nation' . . . with ethnic ties to virtually every race and region on the planet . . . The Holy Spirit is calling us to respond to these new groups in our midst."2
To be sure, the 1990 census figures showed that 77 percent of America's 250 million people were Anglo. Only 12 percent were African-American, 8 percent Latino, and other nationalities represented a scant 3 percent. But in California, where population growth has been the swiftest, census figures showed that ethnic minorities already accounted for more than 40 percent of the state's 30 million residents. By 2001, the Hispanic, Asian, and Afro-American population will swell to 17.1 million — nearly half of the state's population.3
This multicultural tide is rising across the nation — or will, soon after 2001.
"You'll know it's the 21st Century when everyone belongs to a minority group," proclaimed American Demographics.4
Futurist author Tom Sine predicts that young people able to converse in only one language and raised in suburbs that are still nearly all white, "will become the culturally disadvantaged of the '90s. They will be ill-equipped to participate in the increasingly cross-cultural and transnational environment of tomorrow's world."5
This Land is Their Land, Too
During the 1980s, America's native-born population advanced by only about 4 percent, while the Asian population increased at twelve times that rate and the Hispanic population at five times.6
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"This land is their land," says noted church historian Martin Marty, himself a white, Anglo Saxon Lutheran. "I can't talk demography often enough to my church and others. We may love our heritage — I do — but cannot bet on a future if the cohort on which it draws wanes and nothing replaces it."7
Denominational classification by ancestry will be a thing of the past in the next century. Those of Scandinavian origin will no longer be ipso facto Lutherans or Free Churchers; those of Dutch extraction won't necessarily be affiliated with the Reformed Church of America or the Christian Reformed Church.
Noting recent immigration statistics, Marty speculates: "Add some 'undocumenteds' to this, multiply by 10 and 20 and 30 years, mix in the offspring, and you can see great change."8
In the early 1990s, however, only a relatively few white churches seemed to grasp the coming impact of ethnic pluralization upon our common future as they find themselves comprising less and less of the total U.S. church.
Consider our country's Asian population, sometimes labeled the "model minority."
Since 1980, this group has skyrocketed by 7 million, a growth rate of 80 percent. Some census experts predict that by 2080 Asians will make up 10 percent of the nation's total population (the percentage Latinos will have reached by 2001).9
By 2010, Asians will outnumber Jews by a margin of two to one.
In the "Silicon Valley," the home of the semiconductor industry in Santa Clara County south of San Francisco Bay, 40 percent of manufacturing jobs are held by Asians. In New York City, most the 500 clothes-making shops are operated by Chinese. Indians operate ten percent of the nation's motels, and even in places like Tulsa and Reno, Koreans run hundreds of small stores.
Asians are the best educated group in the United States. About 40 percent are college graduates, and nearly 20 percent of the Harvard Class of 1994 is Asian. (Less than 25 percent of whites are college graduates.)
In the past Asian immigrants have come primarily from China and Japan, but increasingly they are from Southeast Asia. Like Vietnam's boat people, these newest immigrants are often peasants.
So, while median household incomes of Asians are higher than any other group — including whites — Asians also have higher poverty rates than whites.10
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American Income, More or Less
Income distribution among Americans is becoming more unequal, the Census Bureau found, surprising almost no one. But it is shocking to note that 1 percent of U.S. households hold one-third of all our country's personal wealth! While in 1988 almost one in three white households reported wealth of $100,000 or more, only 5 percent of black households and 12 percent of Hispanic households were in that category.11 Thus, a more racially diverse nation may also turn out to be a more divisive one as the struggle for a piece of the American pie grows more intense.
The gap between the rich and the poor may wedge even wider, particularly if the recession of 1990-91 marked the beginning of a prolonged decline that exacerbates inter-ethnic competition for jobs and resources. Repercussions will be especially acute in the big cities: the Anglo group will be the elderly retired, while the work force will be predominantly Afro-American, Latino, and Asian.
Until the early years of the next century, at least, Latinos are apt to be on the lowest rung of the American economic ladder; many are employed at minimum wages because they have less education than the society at large. Less than two-thirds finish high school compared with nearly 90 percent of non-Hispanics. In 1988 household net worth for Hispanic married couples was only $15,690, while that of black households was $17,640. The household net worth of white couples, meanwhile was $62,390.12
Nor is the big picture optimistic for most Afro-Americans. According to a report published in 1989 by the National Urban league, Afro-American enrollment in U.S. colleges declined from 33 percent in 1976 to 28 percent in 1986. During that period, tuition costs nearly doubled while financial aid packages didn't even meet the costs of inflation.13
Increasing numbers, although a small percentage, of blacks will
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be living in affluence, while a larger chunk will be at or below the poverty level in the final years of this century. Fortunately, there are some hopeful models for black church groups wanting to help lift their people higher economically, socially, and spiritually (see chapter 16).
Unfortunately, the country's Native Americans — only a small blip on most demographic charts — not only are not growing, but are the poorest of the continent's poor, a blot the 21st century must surely reckon with.
Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?
Many observers of the racial scene believe we are losing ground gained in the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s.
Tom Sine sees a rampant and growing racism in America fueled by a new extremism of the right.
"Unless leadership in the church and the society takes a decisive initiative," he writes in his book Wild Hope, "we are likely to see intensified racial polarization and violence.
"It is unusual," he continues, "to hear white Christians of any stripe speak out on the growing issue of racism that threatens the very fabric of our society. And 11 A.M. Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in American life."14
Alvin Poussaint, a black associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Why Blacks Kill Blacks, agrees that the polarization level is rising: "Despite the success of black athletes that white kids worship, too, despite a black Miss America, despite TV shows such as Bill Cosby's, feelings of racism don't seem to be eradicated. People are segregated, so they're still basically prejudiced. That may change with the next generation, but not with these kids."15
Bob Fryling, director of campus student ministries for the evangelical organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, believes racial incidents at colleges may increase in the next several years "as Asian students become increasingly successful and black and Hispanic students feel cut out of the pie a bit."16
And Alvin Toffler points out in Powershift, the third volume of his prescient trilogy, that we must now "cope with open warfare between
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rival minority groups" — like what has happened between Cuban and Haitian immigrants in Miami and between African-Americans and Hispanics elsewhere.17
Resistance to the image of America as the "melting pot" is rising everywhere, a shift that will take on even larger proportions by 2001 and after. Blending, once the ideal, is passé. As society grows more ethnically and culturally diverse, say the critics, we should embrace multiculturalism.
Some have dubbed this new concept "the salad bowl," "a mosaic," or a "a patchwork quilt." Toffler describes it as "a dish in which diverse ingredients keep their identity."18
Ethnics and Ethics
This balance is especially critical — and precarious — for the nation's schools, city governments, and churches. Coalition-building between minority groups is crucial. Religious groups must wrestle with the gospel dictum that in Christ there is "neither Jew nor Greek," while celebrating racial diversity and ethnic pride and lauding the unique contributions of a multi-hued constituency. All without being separatist.
A racially integrated, hetergeneous church model might look like this: You turn to your left in the pew and greet an young black man, a lawyer who drives to your suburban church from his downtown, luxury high-rise. His wife is Indonesian. On your right is a middle-aged Hispanic woman who, with her three sons and her husband, an auto mechanic, came to this country from Mexico ten years ago. A variety of other national origins and backgrounds are represented in this congregation where the Christian Education pastor is a converted Jew of Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian descent and is married to a Salvadoran.
Another likely model within a racially and culturally diverse neighborhood is a church with multiple congregations: The Spanish service for the Latino crowd (the largest of the weekly gatherings) is held on Saturday evenings. Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese congregations meet on Sunday mornings, and a Cantonese service is held on Sunday nights. Your English service — the smallest — is held at 2:30 on Sunday afternoons, where your pewmates, with the
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exception of several blacks and an Oriental nightshift worker who couldn't come to the earlier services, are Anglos. St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church in Baldwin Park, a Los Angeles suburb, already operates something like this. (We'll take a closer look in chapter 27.)
"Immigration is going to turn the churches upside down," Father Gene Hemrick, who advises the nation's Catholic bishops on trends, prophesied in 1989.19
He ought to know. Catholicism is the nation's most cosmopolitan religion and the only major faith whose members include Americans with roots in at least thirteen different nationalities. No ethnic group is numerically dominant,20 although Catholic trend-watchers estimated in 1990 that one-third of their church was Hispanic — and growing.
Complicating this tug-of-war over how to define ourselves in the coming millennium will be the growing phenomenon of interracial marriage. With such marriages tripling between 1970 and 1988, babies born to interracial couples represented about 3 percent of all U.S. births in 1990.21
Salad bowl? Melting pot? What's a good Jewish synagogue or a Pentecostal assembly to do?
Another paradigm of a successful downtown church ministering to a difficult and turbulent population is the First Baptist Church in Los Angeles, where the pastoral staff includes a Latino woman, a Filipino, and a Korean. Senior pastor John H. Townsend tells how the congregation mirrors "God's world of magnificent differences":
We are quite at ease with our mixture of peoples from the four points of the compass . . . . Our congregation offers a model of racial integration and harmony. Adult church school classes for Korean, Spanish, Anglo and Filipino members preserve the special interests and style of each of these groups. But we worship as one body in Christ, every Sunday, surmounting the language barrier with simultaneous translation, heard over headsets . . . We do not sponsor separate ethnic churches within the Anglo church. Our abiding interest is fashioning ourselves into one people, one community. Personal distinctives are not forfeited in this process but shared: individual gifts are honored . . . . It is not an assimilation process.
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We are working as hard as we can to preserve the ethnic and cultural mix even though we're very different in language and custom . . . We believe this is what the church at its best should be. And it is certainly a representation of what our larger society needs to be.22
Racial diversity is not the only monumental challenge that will test the people of God in 2001, however. Another precipitate of demographic change is the seismic activity ahead as our culture's center of gravity shifts from youth to age.
