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What are the decisive signs of the times for us as North American Christians? Is it possible that we are at a kairos moment, a time when God is moving, and we must choose how to respond? There are signs that we are. Like the signs that accompany a birth, they can prompt anxiety or nurture anticipation. But what cannot be doubted is that a time of radical change is approaching.

The population of our nation is changing. Ethnic minorities have doubled their share of the U.S. population since 1950, and according to the U.S. Census Bureau's latest projections, almost all the growth in U.S. population over the next 50 years—from 282 million in 2000 to 420 million in 2050—will come from ethnic minorities, primarily Asians and Hispanics. On those projections, sometime shortly after 2050 non-Hispanic whites will become a minority in the United States.

This unprecedented shift in the demographics of the United States will be a serious challenge—and not just for whites, who will have to reassess their assumption of what counts as an ethnic "minority." African Americans, who had been the largest minority group since the nation's founding, saw that role pass to Hispanics in 2003. We already have evidence that this shift is producing birth pangs, from the streets of South Central Los Angeles to the poultry farms of the southeastern United States. Not long ago, British television presenter David Frost asked Billy Graham what he saw as the most important issue facing the church in the 21st century. Graham answered, "Racial and ethnic hostility is the foremost social problem facing our world today."

Our economy is changing. For many decades middle-class, majority-culture Americans assumed that graduating from college would secure them a good job, a decent house, and a safe place to live. Yet not long ago I was in an Enterprise Rent-A-Car office on my way to a speaking engagement with college students. The young man waiting on me asked what I was planning to speak about. "Make sure you tell them that when they graduate they're not going to a get a job," he said. The cynicism in his voice was plain. "What was your major?" I asked. He had majored in computer science—a field he had thought would surely secure his future. Instead, he was renting cars.

Our economy has continued to be, by many measures, astonishingly productive. But as the benefits of that productivity flow to fewer and fewer people at the top, the rest of the country struggles to keep even, let alone get ahead. "In our multiethnic society," writer Anthony Walton observes, "this conflict over resources and profits has tended to be 'racialized.' … Issues that are not racial in and of themselves come to be seen in racial terms because of our tendency to be tribal in allocating opportunity and blame."

Economic uncertainty causes people to become self-protective, fearful, and ethnocentric. We have seen how deep tribal divisions go when resources are stretched to their limit in Iraq, the Balkans, and the horn of Africa. In America, too, there is the real risk that we will increasingly see people from different races as a threat to our opportunity and economic security.

Our worldview is changing. The previous American century was one of supreme confidence in the power of science and technology to improve the world. Now we are entering a postmodern era marked, among other things, by a loss of confidence in the Western, scientific worldview. This trend is clearest in medicine. In the third decade of the AIDS epidemic, we are no longer so sure that diseases will readily yield to our technical prowess. Alternative medicine, holistic therapies, and traditional medicine from other cultures are all rising in popularity.

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11