Dear Ron,

Fine article in The Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2002-09-12.htm

... The most successful Southern churches preach a deep personal faith, communal orthodoxy, mysticism, and puritanism, all founded on obedience to spiritual authority.... Whereas Americans imagine a Church freed from hierarchy, superstition, and dogma, Southerners look back to one filled with spiritual power and able to exorcise the demonic forces that cause sickness and poverty.
The places where Christianity is spreading and mutating are also places where the population levels are rising quickly�and, if Jenkins's predictions hold true�will continue to rise throughout the next century. The center of gravity of the Christian world has shifted from Europe and the United States to the Southern Hemisphere and, Jenkins believes, it will never shift back.

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Interesting on-line interview with P. Jenkins, who claims the future of Christianity will be guided more by the "South", especially in Africa but also Latin America. With significant potential for conflicts of Islam vs Christian; and also Protestant vs Catholic, as in:

... most people would say that in Latin America one person out of every nine is a Pentecostal. In some of the areas of fastest growth, notably Peru and Mexico, there have been conflicts between Protestants and Catholics which look exactly like what would have happened in France and Germany around 1580. They even start the same way�the Catholics have a procession of the Virgin, the Protestants gather round and make fun of it, the Catholics go off and burn down the local church. At the moment that's largely at the level of rioting, except in some areas of southern Mexico where it really does look like civil war.

This is only some of what's in the interview; makes me want to read the article and even the book. It's pretty persuasive, demographically, that "reform" of the Catholic Church, as white liberal Americans might want, seems highly unlikely as the growth in the "South" is more coservatively oriented.

Tom