Word: americanization
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...Martin Luther King Jr. famously declared that "11 o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week ... And the Sunday school is still the most segregated school." That largely remains true today. Despite the growing desegregation of most key American institutions, churches are still a glaring exception. Surveys from 2007 show that fewer than 8% of American congregations have a significant racial...
...some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion's most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from...
...Emerson. Some of the country's largest churches are involved: the very biggest, Joel Osteen's Lakewood Community Church in Houston (43,500 members), is split evenly among blacks, Hispanics and a category containing whites and Asians. Hybels' Willow Creek is at 20% minority. Megachurches serve only 7% of American churchgoers, but they are extraordinarily influential: Willow Creek, for instance, networks another 12,000 smaller congregations through its Willow Creek Association. David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame studying the trend, says that "if tens of millions of Americans start sharing faith across racial boundaries, it could...
...however, that changed. Hybels was leaving on vacation when Willow's only African-American pastor, Alvin Bibbs, passed him a book titled Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, by a then obscure academic named Michael Emerson. The book's polls showed that Evangelicals tended to "believe that their faith ought to be a powerful impetus for bringing people together across race." Yet they had fewer minority acquaintances than non-Evangelicals. Most regarded racial inequality as either illusory or the wages of personal sin, rather than as a societal flaw. This and other buried assumptions...
...Willow Got ReligionLarry Butler first visited Willow Creek in the 1970s and left fast. "I liked the teaching, but I didn't see anybody like me," says Butler, 57, a solidly built, hazel-eyed African-American pharmacist from Oklahoma. "I didn't have any problem with the people, but I didn't know if they had a problem with me. So I thought, 'I'll go elsewhere.' " Other minorities who sampled the church felt similarly uncomfortable. Yet Butler returned to Willow in the early '80s, later inviting his wife Renetta and, as he says, "hoping things would change." (Read...