Hindu temples and retreat centers now appear throughout the American religious landscape. Immigration from Asian countries in recent decades also has dramatically increased the number of Hindus in the United States, including more than 1 million from India, for a total U.S. Hindu population of about 2.29 million, which is still less than 1 percent of U.S. residents.
Yet, popular assumptions about the impact of immigration on non-Christian religious practice in the United States disregard more fundamental realities. In fact, immigration to the United States is having its most dramatic religious effects on the Christian population of the country. That’s because, first of all, an estimated 60 percent of all immigrants are Christian. Moreover, many come with practices, traditions and expressions of their faith that have been shaped in a non-Western context. They bring understandings and styles of Christian practice that often seem foreign to long established traditions. As the introduction to a major study on religion and these new immigrants states, “Even though significant numbers of new immigrants are Christian, they are expressing their Christianity in languages, customs and independent churches that are barely recognizable, and often controversial, for European-ancestry Catholics and Protestants.”
But these new Christian immigrants will have a dramatic effect on America’s future religious life; in fact, their effect is already beginning to be experienced. Consider this. According to the 1990 census, 19.7 million people in the United States were born in another country. By 2010, there were 43 million foreign-born residents in the United States, or one of out every five international migrants alive in the world. Of these, 74 percent were Christian, 5 percent were Muslim, 4 percent Buddhist and 3 percent Hindu. While those proportions will shift somewhat in the future, the overwhelming reality is that immigration to the United States is having a major effect on the Christian population in the country. A strong argument can be made, for instance, that the growing percentage of those who classify themselves as having no religious affiliation in the United States—now at 20 percent—would be higher were it not for immigration.
Not surprisingly, the greatest number of immigrants living in the United States come from Mexico, totaling 12.9 million, 95 percent of whom are Christian. The Philippines provides the second largest number, totaling 1.8 million, nearly all of whom are Christian. India follows with 1.6 million people resident in the United States but born in India; 45 percent of them are Hindu, 27 percent are Muslim and 19 percent are Christian. Out of 1.1 million immigrants from El Salvador, 1 million are Christian. Christians from the Dominican Republic that live in the United States number 740,000, along with 700,000 Christians from Guatemala and 860,000 Christians from Cuba.
An estimated 214 million people in the world today are migrants, living in a country different from where they were born. Nearly half of these migrants are Christians—about 105 million, far more than the proportion of Christians in the world, which is about 33 percent. And for these Christians who are on the move, the United States is their chief destination; they presently account for about 32 million, or 13 percent of the Christian community in the United States. That percentage will continue to rise. These new immigrant Christians are changing America’s religious landscape. Despite the growing religious pluralism in the United States, the dramatic, ongoing story of religious migration to this country will be revealed keenly in the contours of American Christianity.
Not only do the numbers of these Christian migrants to the United States tell this story. It’s also the intensity of their belief and religious practice. Jehu Hanciles, a native of Sierra Leone who now is chair of World Christianity at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, and previously taught at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., has done pioneering studies of non-Western Christianity. His book Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration and the Transformation of the West is a masterful, deeply researched presentation focusing particularly on the effects of South-North migration, and the missiological significance of African migration to the United States. The life and witness of 70 African immigrant congregations in six U.S. cities are also examined. At one point Hanciles observes: “Certainly, the vigorous growth of immigrant churches and congregations in metropolitan centers throughout the country over the last three to four decades suggests that they represent the most dynamic and thriving centers of Christian faith in America.”
