The Bridging Activity of Multiracial Congregations

The growing diversity of U.S. communities has led scholars to explore how racial/ethnic diversity effects social capital, civic engagement, and social trust. Less is known about the relationship between diversity and the work of community-based organizations (CBOs). In this study, we examine how the racial/ethnic composition of one ubiquitous type of CBO, religious congregations, is related to measures of organizational bridging social capital. Analyzing data collected through a census of congregations in one Midwestern county, we explore the relationship between racial/ethnic diversity and the bridging activity of religious congregations. We find that multiracial congregations are more likely to be involved with externally focused service programs, tend to support a larger number of programs, and report more interorganizational collaborators than other congregations. Our findings suggest that multiracial congregations can provide a valuable resource for increasingly diverse communities and civil society.

Estranged Pioneers: The Case of African American and Asian American Multiracial Church Pastors

This article draws upon 121 in-depth interviews from the Religious Leadership and Diversity Project (RLDP)—a nationwide study of leadership of multiracial religious organizations in the United States—to examine what it means for African American and Asian American pastors to head multiracial churches. We argue that African American and Asian American pastors of multiracial churches are estranged pioneers. They have to leave the familiar to explore a new way of doing church, but their endeavors are not valued by their home religious communities. African American pastors face challenges to their authenticity as black religious leaders for leading multiracial congregations. Asian American pastors experience a sense of ambiguity that stems from a lack of clarity about what it means for them to lead multiracial congregations as Asian Americans. Yet, despite differences in how they experience this alienation, both are left to navigate a racialized society where they are perceived and treated as inferior to their white peers, which has profound personal and social implications for them.

Religion, Race, and Immigration in Contemporary America

Due in part to immigration, religion in contemporary America is more religiously and racially diverse than ever before. Much of this diversity remains hidden, since many American congregations remain racially and ethnically segregated. Multiracial congregations are becoming more common, but they often adopt the beliefs and practices of majority-white religious traditions and embrace narratives of color-blindness while leaving structural racism unchallenged. Transnational religious connections forged through immigration have the potential to shift America’s historical religio-racial patterns. Ongoing encounters with religio-racial “others” from abroad can transform individual and collective religious identities, beliefs, and practices in profound ways. As immigration to the United States continues in the coming years, scholars should pay attention to how religion, race, and immigration intersect, including how color-blind theologies may block the potential of immigration to dismantle entrenched racial and ethnic divides in American religion.

Worshiping across the Color Line: The Influence of Congregational Composition on Whites’ Friendship Networks and Racial Attitudes

Religious participation has reinforced the color line in American society for generations. Despite rising racial and ethnic diversity across U.S. communities, most Americans continue to belong to congregations composed primarily of others from their own racial/ethnic groups. Yet recent scholarship suggests that the presence of multiple racial or ethnic groups in the same congregation is increasing. The authors examine how the racial/ethnic composition of U.S. congregations is related to white attenders’ friendship networks and comfort with other racial/ethnic groups (i.e., blacks, Hispanics, and Asians). Using national survey data, the authors find that whites in multiracial congregations report more diverse friendship networks and higher levels of comfort with nonwhites than do whites in nonmultiracial congregations. However, the influence of worshipping with another race/ethnicity seems to be most pronounced for whites in congregations with Hispanics. Moreover, neighbors and friends of other races have more impact on whites’ friendship networks and attitudes than do congregations. The authors discuss implications of these findings for understanding U.S. intergroup relations and the potential of congregations to address the color line.

Urban Church Imagined

Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic data and 55 qualitative interviews, this book examines the ways in which race, class, gender, and consumption intersect with an urban context to shape the goals, identity, and experiences of a new religious congregation in Chicago. Downtown Church wants to be a church “of” and “for” the city, and wants to accomplish that goal by developing a membership that is young, trendy, sophisticated, and racially diverse. Consequently, the urban environment fosters a particular set of expectations about both cultural consumption and racial diversity—a “racialized urban imaginary”—that shapes the congregation and its self-identity. This imaginary also situates the relationship between race and place as a motivating factor for the types of interracial interaction experienced within this urban-based congregation. Church leaders and congregants negotiate between their imagined ideas of what a church in the city should look like and the structures of inclusion and exclusion these imaginaries help create and recreate. In particular, two notable organizational practices flow from the imaginary. The first, “managed diversity,” is the leadership’s attempt to attract a diverse membership, but keep it within a balance among the groups represented. The second, “racial utility,” involves the conscious and often strategic use of racial identity, by both the leadership and the membership, to accomplish their goals. This work contributes to the growing constellation of studies on urban religious organizations and multiracial congregations, as well as the emerging scholarship on intersectionality and congregational characteristics in American religious life.

The City Imagined

The concluding chapter reviews the three major concepts discussed in the book—racialized urban imaginary, managed diversity, racial utility—and how they relate to the analysis of the congregation and to each other. Drawing on examples from across the chapters, the conclusion shows that a set of images about what is authentically urban, and that urban-ness is connected to African Americans as well as consumer culture, inform the actions of the church leadership and the church members. In order to realize their imaginary, church leaders hope to foster a diverse congregation, but they want to manage the diversity so that they do not become seen as a “black church” or threaten the leaders’ authority in the congregation. The utility of using racial identity to accomplish these goals is a common organizational practice. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the prospects for multiracial congregations and American religion.

Difference

Ethnic personal parishes are the most common variety of contemporary personal parishes in the United States. They enable Catholics (usually, Catholics of color) to unify along the lines of shared ethnicity and experience, generating a meaningful parish family. This chapter introduces the idea of the territorial parish as a generalist organization, designed to meet the diverse needs of all in its midst, and that of the personal parish as a named, specialist organization. Personal parishes intentionally serve a more narrow purpose. They embed an institutional desire to preserve and retain particular strands of cultural Catholicism. Personal parishes become specialist organizations via decree, not merely via grassroots behavior. Ethnic personal parishes reveal that integrated, multiracial congregations are not the only institutional strategy to accommodate racial diversity. Heterogeneous populations and uneven integration in territorial parishes begs the need for a non-assimilative organizational form that may cater to specific Catholics.

Is the Multiracial Congregation an Answer to the Problem of Race? Comparative Perspectives from South Africa and the USA

This paper uses a comparative perspective to analyze how multiracial congregations may contribute to racial reconciliation in South Africa. Drawing on the large-scale study of multiracial congregations in the USA by Emerson et al., it examines how they help transform antagonistic identities and make religious contributions to wider reconciliation processes. It compares the American research to an ethnographic study of a congregation in Cape Town, identifying cross-national patterns and South African distinctives, such as discourses about restitution, AIDS, inequality and women. The extent that multiracial congregations can contribute to reconciliation in South Africa is linked to the content of their worship and discourses, but especially to their ability to dismantle racially aligned power structures.