Studying Race and Religion

Abstract

The authors provide an analytical review of the past 115 years of scholarship on race, ethnicity, and religion. Too often work in the study of race and ethnicity has not taken the influence of religion seriously enough, with the consequence being an incomplete understanding of racialization, racial and ethnic identity, and racial inequality. The authors examine key works in the field; conduct an assessment of articles published on race, ethnicity, and religion in six journals over a five-year period; and outline where scholarship should head in future years. Most notably, until the mutual influences of race, ethnicity and religion are better understood, the power of each is underestimated.

Keywords

race religion ethnicity race relations racial inequality

Religion is racialized, and race is spiritualized. If we are serious about understanding race and ethnicity in the United States, we must wrestle with this statement and ultimately use it as our guide. As such, we provide a critical overview of the area of race and religion, reviewing the field’s focus (or lack thereof) at the nexus of these two dominant areas of American life. We give an overview by era and then focus most carefully on work published in the twenty-first century.

The Early Sixty: 1900 to 1959

The work on race and religion in the early 1900s was sparse and lacked rigor. Save an exception discussed later, there were between 20 and 30 pieces on the topic published by sociologists during these 60 years.

Some studies, to the contemporary eye, are painful. For example, in a 1926 Social Forces article, Newbell Puckett summarized in the abstract,

The Negro, with his ability to stand heat, his resistance to malaria and other tropical diseases, and his passive nature . . . [is] a useful machine for providing the Southern planter with the muscular energy necessary for the cultivation of his crops. (p. 581)

Young (1929) wrote that although Christian doctrine teaches that all men are brothers, “this is a very hard doctrine to exemplify when Christians are living in close contact with backward races.” Graham (1954) concluded, without talking to a single person, that racial separation in congregations is the choice of Negroes, not just whites, as both races recognize that such an arrangement is “desirable under existing conditions” (p. 83).

Some studies were informative, especially for the time (though clearly written from a privileged white viewpoint). Erdmann Doane Beynon’s 1938 American Journal of Sociology article “The Voodoo Cult among Negro Migrants to Detroit” is unique in that it studied the then nascent Nation of Islam movement. This movement, he wrote, “belongs to a chain of movements arising out of the growing disillusionment and race consciousness of recent Negro migrants to northern industrial cities” (p. 894). On the basis of his study, Doane Beynon surmised, “As a result of the teaching of this cult, they have gained a new conception of themselves and regard themselves as superior, rather than inferior, to other people” (p. 894).

Other work focused on the patterns of religious thought and practice of “Negroes” (Ackiss 1944; Krueger 1932), best practices within southern religion for positive race relations (Johnson et al. 1947), small-scale studies of black church structure (Daniel 1942; Fauset 1944), the connection between religious beliefs and race prejudice (Edwards 1935; Loescher 1948; Young 1929), the transformation of immigrant groups becoming an ethnic/racial group (Francis 1948), and interracial churches (Jack 1947; Pittman 1945).

A highly influential work—Protestant, Catholic, Jew—was published in 1955 by Will Herberg. Ethnicity, he argued, was no longer of central importance; rather, the United States was now a triple melting pot divided by religion. He wrote little about racial divisions, save to say that they were an anomaly to his general framework. Regrettably, though his work is an important contribution, his lack of serious engagement with the meaning of race was typical of white scholars of this era.

The Work of W.E.B. Du Bois

The social scientific study of American race relations and religion begins with, and is dominated by, W.E.B. Du Bois. He was the first to communicate the idea that race in America is spiritualized; that is, that race resides so deeply in the American psyche that it exists, in Durkheimian terms, no longer in the mundane world but on another plane: the plane of the sacred, evoking deeply felt emotions, part of the national religion, blessed in many ways by institutionalized religion.

Consider his now deeply influential work The Souls of Black Folk (DuBois 1903b). The very title of this book is a major clue to how Du Bois conceptualized race, particularly blackness. Further, the first chapter of this book, outlining the persistent subjugation of Negroes and a struggle to achieve freedom, is titled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The “double consciousness” of which he so eloquently wrote is rooted in what Du Bois saw as a spiritual tension of being in a liminal space with double (black and white), figurative sight. Du Bois also devoted an entire chapter (“Of the Faith of Our Fathers”) to the topic of Negro religion.

In the same year that The Souls of Black Folk was published, Du Bois (1903a) edited The Negro Church. He argued that so intertwined in the United States are “blackness” and “religion” that one cannot understand one without studying of the other. As Zuckerman (2000) noted, Du Bois’s contributions to the understanding of religion in the racialized world included that, in addition to spiritual rewards, there are extensive social rewards from religious participation where the black church is central to African American organized life.

Second, Du Bois wrote in depth about the dual capacity of religion to do good and to do ill (Blum 2007; Zuckerman 2000). We see the depths of Du Bois’s view of race as spiritualized in the United States (and later globally) in his creative writing, written and published throughout his long career, such as in “The Song of America” (Du Bois 1908):

On founding stones in Hell:

My Temples rise

. . .

I writhe, I rave,

I chain the Slave

I do the deed, I kill!

Now what care I

For God or Lie?

I am the great

I WILL

A common theme in Du Bois’s writings is the racialization of religion, its serving to reproduce race and racial divisions rather than challenge them. We see this in writing such as “Jesus Christ in Georgia” (Du Bois 1911) and “The Son of God” (Du Bois 1933).

And perhaps his fullest summary statement, written a year before his death, was “Ghana Calls” (Du Bois [1962] 1965). Penned when he had moved to Ghana and had given up on the United States and the West (and the U.S. government had given up on him—he was denied renewal of his U.S. passport) (Lewis 2009:712), he described America as “a wretched land, all scorched and seemed, covered with ashes, chained with pain, streaming with blood, in horror lain,” a place that rendered him “old, worn, and gray; along my hard and weary way, rolled pestilence, war again; I looked on Poverty and foul Disease, I walked with Death.” He went on to describe the “reeking West whose day is done, who stink and stagger in their dung.” And he gave one final description of America: “Enslaved the Black and killed the Red, and armed the Rich to loot the Dead; worshipped the whores of Hollywood, where once the Virgin Mary stood, and lynched the Christ.” His dream, he wrote, had instead become realized in Ghana and Africa more broadly, “the sum of Heaven’s glory,” “where black is bright, and all unselfish work is right, and Greed is Sin.” Finally, life as it should be, what he had searched for: “I lifted my voice and cried, I cried to heaven as I died.”

Civil Rights and its Aftershocks: 1960 to 1997

As Du Bois’s career and life ended, American race relations intensified. This led to more interest among sociologists in understanding race and religion. Publication rates increased, from 20 to 30 publications over the entire period between 1900 to 1959 to 20 to 30 publications per decade.

Many publications examined how religion—most especially what is collectively referred to as “the black church”—shaped the civil rights movement, politics, views, and collective actions of people. E. Franklin Frazier (1964) published The Negro Church in America. He argued that, although civil rights leaders expounded the nonviolent stance of Gandhi, the real basis for the movement rested squarely in the black religious tradition, an argument later made with even more rigor and evidence by Aldon Morris (1984). In this view, religion and race are thus inseparable.

Many studies on race and religion over this period examined the relationship between religious involvement and racial prejudice (e.g., Bagley 1970; Ellison 1991; Whitam 1962). The most sophisticated of studies found a U-shaped relationship whereby the most prejudiced are the “somewhat religiously involved,” while nonparticipants and those deeply committed were the least prejudiced.

Other areas of study included black Muslims (Karpas 1964; Laue 1964), religion and politics (e.g., Brooks and Manza 1997; Cohen and Kapsis 1977), religious affiliation patterns by ethnicity and race (Taylor et al. 1996; Welch 1977), congregational segregation and integration (Mol 1965; Parker 1968; Wood and Zald 1966), religion and intermarriage patterns (Lavender 1976), and religion’s either slowing ethnic assimilation or enhancing ethnic identity (e.g., Driedger 1980; Wood 1970).

Importantly, following the changes in immigration policy in the 1960s, studies of immigration, ethnicity, and religion emerged (e.g., Abramson 1979; Bankston and Zhou 1996; Min 1992). Some studies researched ethnic congregations and the religious patterns of the immigrants as they made the transition from homeland to new land.

During this period, little overarching theoretical work was written; few scholars devoted directed, long-term focus to the topic; and, as a result, the literature, though making important contributions, reads more as scattered insights rather than an integrated research program.

Shift to Overdrive: 1998 through Today

An analysis of scholarly output on the topic of race/ethnicity and religion finds a change—from 20 to 30 articles on the topic per decade to 20 to 30 articles per year. We also see the rise of racial/ethnic and religion scholars, those scholars who either work primarily at the juncture of these fields as the focus of their scholarship or have published multiple influential works on the topic and often are members of both the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities (or related sections) and the Section on Religion.

Why this shift occurred seems due to the confluence of three main factors: (1) new immigrants or the children of new immigrants came of age, earned PhDs, and studied topics that were part of their or their communities’ experiences; (2) exactly 30 years after Martin Luther King’s death, major divisions remained, progress seemed to have stalled on many measures, and there was a growing restlessness within religious organizations surrounding race and ethnicity; and (3) perhaps related to the first two reasons, several major projects were funded on these topics by nongovernmental foundations, enabling large-scale data collection and concentrated theory building and allowing scholars to focus on such topics for a sustained time. As in the field of race and ethnicity more generally, there tends to be a division in thought and networks between those studying immigration, ethnic identity, and religion and those studying race and religion. We examine the two related areas in turn.

Rebecca Kim (2011) traced the development of the dominant theories in the study of ethnicity (assimilation) and religion (secularization), noting the parallel tracks. In both cases the dominant historical theory (for ethnicity, assimilation; for religion, secularization) proposes that the very subject of interest is disappearing in the face of modernity. But both fields have had to adjust their theories in the wake of decades of empirical realities—namely, ethnicity and religion remain. Several theories in both fields have been put forth to account for the seeming failures of their dominant theories.

The problem, according to Kim (2011), is that the fields rarely talk to each other (see Gans 1994 and Marti 2005 for exceptions) and thus miss the opportunity to better understand and theorize exactly the shape, function, and fate of ethnicity and religion going forward. For example, she summarized the work of several scholars who found that the process of immigration into the U.S. context invites greater religious practice and, within the American congregational model, simultaneously heightens religious participation, social connections, and ethnic preservation. At the same time, involvement in ethnic congregations allows “Americanization,” which we learn is spiritualized, is ethnicized/racialized, has assimilation aspects (taking “American” names, for example), and has cultural preservation aspects (language school, for example) all rolled together (e.g., Cadge and Ecklund 2007; Chen 2008; Chong 1998; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Ecklund 2006; Jeung 2004; Kurien 2007; Kwon, Kim, and Warner 2001; Min and Kim 2005; Warner and Wittner 1998; Yang 1999).

We cannot understand the persistent ethnic and racial segregation, Kim (2011) argued, unless we understand the multiple roles that religious congregations play in American life, allowing ethnic preservation but working most effectively and efficiently at such a role in ethnically homogenous contexts. As Emerson and Smith (2000) argued, the voluntary, competitive marketplace context of U.S. congregations means that they can provide what people seek with the least cost by being ethnically and racially segregated. And this in turn daily reproduces ethnicity and race. There are thus strong feedback loops between religion and ethnicity, which buttress and reproduce each other. Failure to take this as a starting point is to invite undertheorization and misunderstanding of race, ethnicity, and religion.

In the study of race and religion, we likewise see a vast expansion of research and debate. One line of work asks how congregations “do” race—how they frame it, how they talk about it, how they enact it—and how religious tools, metaphors, and materials shape this doing of race (Becker 1998; Jenkins 2003; Marti 2005, 2008, 2012; Pattillo-McCoy 1998; Stanczak 2006; Yancey and Kim 2008). Another line of work interrogates the relationships between congregational and religious organizational resources and political or community activism (Billingsley 1999; Brown 2009; Brown and Brown 2003; McRoberts 2005; Wood 2002).

An influential set of work focuses on the impact of religion on race—from attitudes to actions to relationships to organizational dynamics to urban change (e.g., Brown 2011; Edgell and Tranby 2007; Marti and Emerson 2013; Merino 2011; Mulder 2015; Perry 2014; Porter and Emerson 2013; Yancey 1999). Emerson and Smith’s (2000) work Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America is an oft-cited work in this area. They argued that evangelical religion—because of its religiocultural tools and the arrangement in segregated congregations—leads to greater division in racial attitudes, more resistance to political solutions for racial inequality, and greater division in how to solve America’s racial problems between whites and blacks than is found among other Americans.

This work has generated many other works, some finding strong support for its arguments, others nuancing the points in the book, and still others taking issue with the interpretations in the book. One such example of the latter view is the work of Tranby and Hartmann (2008). Drawing from whiteness studies and critical race theory, they argued two key points: (1) that antiblack stereotypes may be more pervasive and functionally necessary than Divided by Faith claims and (2) that the religiocultural tool of freewill individualism (and related tools) are not race neutral, as assumed in the book, but are part in parcel of a vigorously defended majority white culture and identity.

Another vigorous debate that has ensued is over the relationship between religion and understandings of racial inequality (e.g., Brown 2009; Cobb 2014; Cobb, Perry, and Dougherty forthcoming; Emerson, Smith, and Sikkink 1999; Hinojosa and Park 2004; Park 2014; Taylor and Merino 2011; Tranby and Hartmann 2008). Despite a flurry of research, no agreement has been reached. Findings differ on the basis of the data set used, the assumptions, measurement issues, and more. Clearly, a major advance in the field of race and religion will be to reach consensus on the relationship(s) between religion and understandings of racial inequality, a necessary component of moving toward racial progress.

But perhaps even a greater degree of activity and debate has ensued over what are variously called multiracial, interracial, multiethnic, or multicultural congregations. This work has asked, to name a few questions, how such congregations form, what prevents them from lasting, what conditions encourage their survival, how they operate, who attends them and whether these individuals change from attending, who leads them, what types of music and worship styles are used, what impacts this organizational arrangement has on racial (and other) views, whether they result in altered friendship patterns, and their social benefits and costs (e.g., Christerson, Edwards, and Emerson 2005; Christerson and Emerson 2003; Dougherty 2003; Dougherty and Huyser 2008; Edwards 2008; Edwards, Christerson, and Emerson 2013; Emerson 2006; Emerson and Kim 2003; Ganiel 2008; Garces-Foley 2007; Marti 2005, 2008, 2012; Martinez and Dougherty 2013; Pitt 2010; Priest and Priest 2007; Scheitle and Dougherty 2010; Stanczak 2006; Wong 2014; Yancey and Emerson 2003). Books by Gerardo Marti (2005, 201) and Korie Edwards (2008) have been particularly important, in many ways capturing the divergence of views within this line of study.

Disagreement surrounds the political implications of such congregations. Do they ultimately represent racial progress and evidence toward greater equality, or do they represent assimilation, threaten black and ethnic congregations, and threaten ethnic identity itself? Moreover, some critique the continued focus on organizational religion to the near exclusion of other forms of religion and spirituality. Future research must grapple with how such outcomes vary by the relative mix of groups in the organization, rather than relying simply on a single measure of diversity. In short, it is difficult to assume that the social causes of and results from, for example, Asian-white congregations are the same as black-Hispanic congregations.

Even more recently, scholars are examining how race shapes religion (Dougherty and Mulder 2009; Korver-Glenn, Chan, and Ecklund 2015; Perry 2012; Shelton and Emerson 2012; Wilde forthcoming). Shelton and Emerson (2012) explored how racial discrimination across America’s history deeply influences contemporary African American religious beliefs and behaviors. Dougherty and Mulder’s (2009) work examines the ways that growing racial and ethnic diversity in southeast Grand Rapids, Michigan affected local, traditionally white ethnic Dutch Christian Reformed congregations. From 1970 to 2000, increasing ethnic and racial diversity and white residential decline in this area lessened the sustainability of these traditionally neighborhood-based congregations. They found that older congregations in neighborhoods where greater ethnic and racial transition occurred experienced the most substantial membership loss, while newer, suburban Christian Reformed churches were more stable. Congregational attempts to achieve sustainability included appealing to people living in areas beyond their local neighborhoods, which resulted in greater competition among churches and ultimately threatened sustainability. In contrast, mission churches, those founded to tap a non-Dutch constituency across a wider area, were the fastest growing.

Other work by Samuel Perry (2012, 2013), along with other race and religion scholars (e.g. Cobb et al. forthcoming), examines the ways race affects religious (multiracial) congregations, evangelical outreach ministries, and interracial evangelical organizations, as well as the ways religion in the United States both perpetuates and contests racial inequality. For example, in evangelical outreach ministries, the institutionalization of white cultural and behavioral patterns concordant with white moral dispositions contradicted and offended minority workers’ moral dispositions. This, Perry (2012:105) argued, resulted in interracial tensions, leading to minor adjustments by whites, “eventual capitulation or resignation” of minority workers, and the overall reproduction of white dominance in these evangelical organizations. All told, post-1998 research on ethnicity, race, and religion is promising in terms of theory building and methodological innovation, while highlighting some of the many gaps that still remain.

A Systematic Assessment of Race/Ethnicity and Religion: What is Published?

To more systematically assess how often religion is used in the study of race and ethnicity and more clearly identify existing gaps, we classified every article published in the five-year period between 2010 and 2014 in six journals. We examined the European journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, the main publisher of articles on race and ethnicity during this period, three U.S. generalist sociology journals (American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces), and the two most highly ranked U.S. social science journals of religion (Sociology of Religion and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion).

Across these six journals during the five-year period, 373 articles on race and ethnicity were published, most (70 percent) of which appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies. This British-based journal is more likely to have racial and ethnic articles that consider religion (25 percent) than are the U.S. sociological journals (15 percent).

This is due in part to one main concern in Europe that commands more attention than in the United States—studying Muslim immigration, where religion and ethnicity are often conflated, such as in the manner that Judaism in the United States is sometimes viewed. Most commonly, these studies focus on attempting to understand either the relationship between religious and ethnic identities or the context of ethnoreligious groups—their adaptation into a new society, the reactions by the host members of the society, or intergroup relations. Approximately two-thirds of all articles incorporating religion in Ethnic and Racial Studies over this period fall into these general categories.

The next most common category of race and religion articles published in Ethnic and Racial Studies involves using a measure of religion as a control variable in a multivariate analysis (about 14 percent of the racial/ethnic and religion articles). Obviously, such an approach entails the inclusion of religion at the most minimal of levels, similar to “throwing in” a control variable for “nonwhites,” work scholars of race and ethnicity rightly find far too simplistic.

Despite some shallowness in the treatment of race/ethnicity and religion analysis, several pieces in this overall sample are noteworthy. A study analyzing the change in the “quality of life” gap between whites and blacks from 1972 to 2008 (Coverdill, López, and Petrie 2011:799) found “a declining but discernable significance of race” for its four measures: overall happiness, marital happiness, health status, and trust. The authors found that the overall narrow gap in quality of life between whites and blacks in the simple bivariate case was due to higher religious attendance of African Americans compared with white Americans. Because religious attendance leads to greater life satisfaction, once racial differences in attendance are controlled, the black-white gap grows. Overlook religion, overlook the reality of racial disparities.

In an article on religion and lynching from 1890 to 1929, Bailey and Snedker (2011) found that that the greater the religious diversity of a county, the more lynching that county experienced. Greater religious diversity, they argued, weakens the bonds of a cohesive moral community, and, in replacement, likely leads to enhanced white solidarity (substituting racial cohesiveness for religious cohesiveness). Two other lynching and religion findings stand out: counties where larger shares of the black population worshipped in churches controlled by African Americans experienced higher levels of racial violence and counties where a larger share of church members belonged to racially mixed denominations had a lower incidence of lynching. This article then begins to surface the depth of the interplay between religion and race, pointing to the need for further creative thinking on these issues.

In an important article exploring the debate over contraception use, Wilde and Danielsen (2014) explored a two-year period, between 1929 and 1931, and analyzed how religious groups for the first time became divided over issues of sex, gender, and family, issues that remain powerful dividers in current times. The authors showed with ample evidence how these divides were based on racial and class differences and argued that our current divides are “deeply rooted in century-old inequalities of race and class” (p. 1710). To overlook the deep connections across time between race and religion (and class) is to misunderstand and misdiagnose today’s divides.

And in the one article published on religion and race in American Sociological Review during the study period, Braunstein, Fulton, and Wood (2014) asked how it is possible for racially and socioeconomically diverse civic organizations to “hold together.” They demonstrated that this appears to be achieved through what they called “bridging cultural practices”; specifically in their case study, prayer practices served as both the bridge and the unifier. Again, ignore religion, and miss out on a vitally important process enabling multiracial organizations to operate.

Discussion

Our survey of sociological work on race/ethnicity and religion through the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first century demonstrates that American religious life is deeply stratified along racial lines and that religion as a powerful institution of U.S. civic organization holds incredible sway in reproducing the U.S. racial order. Our survey also demonstrates that U.S. racial categories and identities are in part composed of religious, moral, and cultural tastes, norms, and traditions. We argue that scholars of race and ethnicity cannot fully understand their object without considering the ways religion is both the cause and effect of that object.

Where do we go from here? And why does it matter? This essay suggests three fruitful directions. First, because of the demonstrated ways race/ethnicity and religion are intertwined and mutually constitutive in the U.S. context, it behooves race scholars as well as religion scholars to uncover and examine the theoretical and empirical parallels across their respective fields. Kim (2011) provided an excellent example for how this might look, but we need to know much more. One such parallel could be debates about measurement currently characterizing both fields. Religion scholars have regularly debated the best ways to measure religion and religious expression, while race scholars are reconceptualizing how to measure race. A dialogue on measurement could help both fields specify what, exactly, they are studying and how they plan to measure it. Most important, the work on race and religion has overwhelmingly taken “religion” to mean “Christianity” and race to mean “black and white.” Research must move beyond these categories to capture modern realities, and doing so may generate new insights.

Second, future research must tackle the tangle of race, religion, and inequality, particularly in multiracial contexts. The stakes are high: the implications of religion reproducing racial inequality are vastly different from religion challenging racial inequality. If, under particular conditions, multiracial congregations challenge racial inequality, thus providing a way toward racial progress, this would signal a huge step forward in what have been mostly stagnant (or worsening) race relations since the civil rights era. On the other hand, if religion reproduces racial inequality, even in multiracial contexts, we must understand why, in order to more effectively minimize the regress. Another possible branch of inquiry, applicable not just to multiracial contexts, is an examination of the charged relationship between religion and the U.S. state and how this relationship uniquely affects racial inequality and race relations. Consider that religion is perhaps the only institution in which government has not directly intervened in issues of race and ethnicity. Religion thus offers an area of study highly unique to and with tremendous potential for furthering understanding of race and ethnicity.

Third, analyzing the most recent publications on race and religion suggests a need for deeper and more creative theorization on the race-religion interplay. Publications such as Bailey and Snedker’s (2011) work on congregations, counties, and lynching and Braunstein et al.’s (2014) research on cultural bridging practices in diverse civic organizations indicate that religion plays an even more significant role in race relations than commonly recognized. But it remains to tease out the specifics of this role, not only in terms of race relations but also for other dynamic social processes such as racial formation.

An important contribution moving forward, then, will be not only to outline, assess, and critique the current state of the literature but to use such knowledge to generate new synthetic understandings and to generate higher level theory. Such theory can in turn shape our research agenda in the coming decades. It is our suggestion that such a theory take as its root what we view as a core U.S. dialectic: religion is racialized, and race is spiritualized.

Footnotes

Author Biographies

Michael O. Emerson is the Allyn R. and Gladys M. Cline Professor of Sociology and the Academic Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rice University.

Kiara Wyndham is a post-baccalaureate fellow at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.

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