‘The Most Segregated Hour’: Rethinking Race And Religion In America
(ANALYSIS) If I asked you to think of one quote about race and religion in the United States, I am going to bet that if you could conjure one up quickly it would be, “11:00 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.”
It’s often attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. but in reality that statement predates King by maybe a decade or more. Regardless of who first said it, the sentiment remains the same: American religion is still one of the last spaces where one can find any sort of racial diversity.
Empirically, it’s surprisingly difficult to test because so few surveys ask about the demographic makeup of one’s congregation. I’ve rarely seen questions such as: What is the age breakdown of your congregation? Or: Do you attend with people in a similar socioeconomic situation?
But, because of the newest release of the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, we can dig more deeply into racial diversity on Sunday mornings in churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship. Lucky for us, the Association of Religion Data Archives now hosts the RLS on their website, which allows for easy exploration of variables and frequencies.
Folks were asked, “Typically when you attend religious services in person, what is the race or ethnicity of most of the other people attending?” This question was asked only of those who reported attending a house of worship at least once a year—roughly half the sample.
The best way to understand the responses to this question is to compare a respondent’s race to the racial makeup of their congregation. That way we can see, for example, whether a white respondent attends a majority-white church.
So, here’s what we find: Most people who attend church semi-regularly worship alongside others of the same racial background. Among white churchgoers, 78% attend a majority-white congregation.
For African Americans, the figure is 68%. About three in five Asians and Hispanics report worshiping in congregations where their own group forms the majority.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.