Mainline Protestant Churches Are Warmer to Potential Members if They’re White

By Published on November 19, 2015

Christians are called to welcome the stranger in their midst, but, according to a new academic study, some churches are much more likely to reply to an email from a potential new member with a white-sounding name than a black-, Hispanic- or Asian-sounding name.

The study was published in September in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, a peer-reviewed academic journal. A team led by Bradley Wright, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, sent emails to more than 3,000 churches across America. Each email was ostensibly from a person who had recently moved to the neighborhood, was thinking about joining the congregation, and wanted information about the church or parish. The researchers signed the emails with names that were considered identifiable as white, black, Hispanic or Asian to see whether churches replied to them in different ways. To select the names, researchers used census data to create a short list of names that strongly correlated with a particular racial identity and then used small surveys to see whether people did indeed identify a given name with a particular race.

 

Read the article “Mainline Protestant Churches Are Warmer to Potential Members if They’re White” on fivethirtyeight.com.

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