Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America

by Michael O. Emerson

They know that most of their friends and relatives—who are predominately white—are not hatemongering racists bent on keeping blacks down. And they know this much better than they can know the experiences of black Americans. So, when they must assess the “race problem,” given their cultural tools, they conclude that it must be blacks exaggerating, or to the advantage of some to claim there is a race problem, or that the race problem is but individual problems between some individuals of different races. In short, they speak in ways that support their own racial group and the American system.

Church growth specialists capitalize on this; by appealing to and using segregated networks (the “homogenous units” principle), churches grow, and religious strength is increased. This approach, though effective for congregational and denominational growth, also helps to strengthen and affirm homogenous networks, thereby consolidating racial division.

The basic workings of American religion promote more ingroup friends, marriages, and acquaintances. Thus, religion—especially “strong” religion—both helps to create racially distinctive networks and, in using them as the basis for congregational and denominational growth, helps maintain and justify them.26

The organization of American religion gives religious groups the freedom to compete for adherents, which appears to create a dynamic vitality. It also leads to competition, pluralism, and ultimately a very segmented market. For our purposes, there is an important consequence of this segmented market. A key function in most religions is to proclaim what ought to be, what is universally true, what is right and just. We may call this the prophetic voice. But the organization of American religion fragments this prophetic voice, even within the same religion, into thousands of different voices.

What the clergy believed was right—in other words, what they believed the prophetic voice should be—was ultimately constrained and shaped by the wishes of their congregations.

For these reasons, we claim that the dominant religious voices, or at least those that receive the most support, on issues of race relations are those most supportive of the status quo. Surveying the research, we discover important confirmation. Scholars find that the more clergy have to lose by speaking and acting prophetically on race issues, the less likely they are to do so.42 What is more, researchers find that the most popular religious groups in a local area—as measured by membership numbers—are the least likely to take social activism stands on racial issues, as they have more to lose in the community by challenging the status quo.43 This effect appears to hold regardless of whether the numerically dominant group is Protestant or Catholic.44 Thus, the numerically strongest voices, because structural forces push them to favor the racial status quo, serve to ghettoize the weaker voices calling for change.

So, within groups, religious leaders possess power and authority, to be sure, but only to the extent that they embody a group’s concerns and hopes. They can to some extent shape the direction of the group, yet if they stray too far from the felt needs of the group, from comforting and uplifting the group members, their authority and power are weakened and may be rejected. Evangelical leaders can call for an end to racialization, and are able to influence ordinary white evangelicals on race-relations issues, but only within a small range of possibilities, limited by the social positions and theological understandings of the mass of ordinary evangelicals. The radical message of the early racial reconciliation leaders, by the time it got to white, grassroots evangelicals, was minimized to little more than having respect for people of other races, or having a cross-race friendship. When a more radical message is pushed, as the leader of Promise Keepers, Bill McCartney, observed, the walls go up, and those in his conservative Christian subculture tune him out.

The first new step evangelicals might consider, therefore, is engaging in more serious reflection on race-relations issues, in dialogue with educated others: What are the problems? In what directions are the United States and its people heading? What influences will class, growing racial-ethnic diversity, changing occupational and political structures, and complex systems of stratification play in altering the landscape of American race relations? How is the problem understood from different racial and ethnic group perspectives? How do individual-level versus group-level phenomena operate differently and simultaneously in the problems of race relations? What solutions have already been tried? What else helpful is currently known about these questions and solutions?