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Church in a Post-Racial America
When the Reverend Wright Story broke in 2008, I was taken aback by then-Senator Obama’s offhand reference to church being the “most segregated hour” in American life; I was even more surprised to learn that the comment was a variation on a quote from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In my own experience — admittedly, hardly representative — church had been one of the places I was most likely to interact with people less pasty white than I. Was the quote simply antiquated? A lie? Was I missing something?
To shed some light on the matter, I commend to your attention this study led by University of Connecticut researchers regarding racial inclusivity in American churches. Their findings were remarkable, if not terribly surprising. To wit, Mainline Protestant churches — despite being more politically liberal and likely to hold racial diversity as an explicit value — were more racially monolithic than either Evangelical or Catholic churches and more likely to treat potential congregants differently based on their apparent race. Equally of interest, Evangelicals — the most politically conservative and least likely to be openly interested in racial diversity — were the most racially diverse and showed the lowest disparity in response. Catholics were generally a close second.
The finding regarding response– the actual subject of their rather puckish experiment — was based on how churches responded to emails expressing interest in attending service, with the sole variable being the name of the supposed inquirer. As described in the paper:
A key manipulation in this project is the perceived race and ethnicity of the email authors, whom we labeled “characters.” We designated the race of each character on the signature line by utilizing given names and surnames that signaled likely racial or ethnic identities of the characters as follows: “white” (Scott Taylor, Greg Murphy); “black” (Jamal Washington, Tyrone Jefferson);“Hispanic” (Carlos Garcia, Jose Hernandez); or “Asian” (Wen-Lang Li, Jong-Soo Kim). We created two names for each racial/ethnic identity to offset idiosyncratic responses to specific names.
We created separate name-identified email accounts for each of the characters … [and] used these accounts to send the emails described above to a nationally representative sample of churches between May and July 2010. These email accounts were then used to collect the responses of church officials. We received many responses from the churches on the same day we sent the emails; in other cases, responses came several weeks later, often with an apology for the slow response.
The results:
In testing [our first hypothesis], Christian churches, as a whole, responded more frequently and more fully to inquiries with white-sounding names. In testing [our second hypothesis], we found that it was primarily mainline Protestant churches that showed significant variation by race in both the quantity and quality of their responses. They responded most frequently and most welcomingly to emails with white-sounding names, followed by black and Hispanic names, followed by Asian names. There was variation, however, across the five mainline denominations that we analyzed. Evangelical Protestant and Catholic churches showed little to no variation in their response rates and moderate variation in the quality of their responses.
The paper offers some interesting speculation as to why this might be the case. Mainline Protestant churches are more likely to have historical ties to specific European nations and ethnicities (think of the overlap between being Lutheran and of German descent) compared to either Catholics or Evangelicals, and that the latter’s theological emphasis on the importance of one’s individual relationship with Christ is more congruent with outreach that crosses racial lines than other approaches (“Want to know Jesus? Cool! You should come to our church!” works better in this context than “Want to know about our church? Cool! You’ll get to know Jesus!”).
Next time liberals trot out the “most segregated hour” horse, you might want to mention this research. And if you want to have some fun at their expense, just refer to it as “the latest science.”
Published in General, Religion & Philosophy
“Of course, all are welcome! Please don’t be offended if we wait to get to know you better before putting you in charge of supplying the daycare with apple juice.”
;-)
OTOH, Christian hip-hop is apparently a thing, so much so that there’s even a “Catholic hip-hop scene”. Still trying to imagine that…
Baby got book?
It had been a thing at least since I was a teenager, but which churches do they attend?
I’m curious about how Orthodoxy fares, but I bet that even if they separated us by patriarchates, my predominantly Arab patriarchate (Antioch) would come out as lily white, because I think the racial categories they’re using count them that way (you get some Ethiopians and some converts, but most Orthodox countries are European or Middle Eastern; even Native Alaskans seem not to be a thing for this study).
There’s something mildly funny about the idea that Jews have few ethnic minorities in their synagogues, when traditionally membership as been seen as almost 100% minority.
I am not surprised that Evangelical churches, given their mission statement, are more integrated and better at e-mail. About 3 years ago my church hired a full time communications director to modernize our internet, e-mail, and social media presence. He is hardly the only reform, but we’ve doubled in size, adding 1500 members in that time (give or take -and a third are baptized converts). A normal Sunday is about 2000-2500 people at the church. Easter we had over 5000. Churches need to get on their e-communications.
My church also partners with a black baptist church in the city. We get together every year for a concert and we do various charity events together (Thanksgiving baskets, for example). It’s an enjoyable service, but I see why we don’t worship together all the time. I don’t understand the attachment to hats, and until that service, I thought went Pentecostals said “running” they were being metaphorical.
I’m sure they thought I was way too staid.
I figure Heaven will just have a running section, a dancing section, and a choir loft.
I actually own this CD:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_Minded
KRS-One is an interesting fella.
Women are required to cover their hair, thus hats.
Interesting essay Tom. I can only speak for the Catholic Church. Part of the universality went back to the time regardless of borders the liturgy was Latin. Whether one was in Europe, the Americas, Asia, or Africa any Catholic wherever they were from would hear the Mass as if they were at home. The exception to this rule would be the Byzantine Rite Churches that practiced the Eastern Rite but still recognized the authority of the Pope. An example of this would be the Maronite Catholic Churches that still say the Mass in Aramaic.
No matter what country a Catholic priest, bishop, cardinal, or Pope comes from their authority is recognized by a Catholic no matter where they come from.
When I first moved to my house, I was still a happy apostate. My mother in law wanted to attend a service so looked up the geographically closest baptist church, and went.
It turned out to be a black church. I really liked the service. The first 2 hours of the service anyway. Which is why the black-ish episode resonated. They were totally happy to see us there, and were very welcoming but stylistically, it didn’t gel.
The hilarious bit was the 2 couples trying to not sound racist for not liking each others services.
There is a phenomenon in my own, very liberal denomination that is widespread in the other liberal Christian churches: a pervasive anxiety over the segregated Sunday, and lamentations when there aren’t enough non-white faces in our pews. This has little or nothing to do with the fear that we might not be saving sufficient numbers of souls (in my case, we’re Universalists, so it doesn’t arise). How can we call ourselves “diverse” or “multi-cultural” when our pews were so lamentably monochrome?
The solution was, apparently, a big dose of guilt. If we all could just be made to feel guilty enough, those minorities would flock to our services because everyone knows that a brown person enjoys nothing more than a Sunday morning spent in the company of apologetic white people.
Hence the past two issues of our quarterly denominational magazine devoted, almost entirely, to Black Lives Matter and White Guilt Matters Even More.
Strangely, this hasn’t helped, so we scratch our pointy heads in perplexity.
African-Americans are the most devoutly religious demographic in the country, and that usually means Christian. A devoutly religious Christian of whatever hue is probably going to want to attend a church where, at a minimum, Jesus gets a few, approving mentions. Just sayin’.
Incidentally, did you know that Jeremiah Wright served in the U.S. Marine Corps?