How their disaffiliation stands to have a bigger impact on their communities and why leaders are hopeful they’ll come back.
By Kaate Shellnutt
(Source Christianity Today):
Black Americans are the most religious non-religious group in the country.
In a new Pew Research Center report on the growing segment of unaffiliated “nones” in the US, they stand out for their faithfulness. Nearly all Black nones believe in a higher power, and a third still believe in the God of the Bible. Barely any consider themselves atheists.
Even among those who no longer label themselves with any faith, they pray more, attend church more, and see religion as more significant than any other unaffiliated demographic.
“Black nones are far more connected to the Black church than white nones are connected to Christianity overall,” said sociologist Jason E. Shelton, a professor and director of the Center for African American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. “These are not qualitatively the same kinds of people.”
Though Black nones make up less than 10 percent of all nones in America, their disaffiliation is particularly significant for a culture historically tied to church and faith. One in five Black Americans are religiously unaffiliated.
Black Americans leave religion for some of the same reasons as others do: They feel the church isn’t open to addressing their questions and doubts; they’ve been hurt by bad experiences; they’ve found a sense of community and identity elsewhere.
Plus, there’s a segment of Black Americans who have left white evangelical churches and ministries as a result of the intense polarization around race and politics in recent years.
“They say, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this if this is what Christianity is about and you dehumanize me,’” said Lisa Fields, apologist and founder of the ministry the Jude 3 Project. “When Black people have been in white evangelical or multiethnic churches, I find they use the language of ‘deconstruction’ a little bit more than Black people that came from the Black church.”
As more Americans overall deconstruct or drop their religious affiliations, so have more Black Christians; the proportion of nones who are Black has held steady at 9 percent for at least the past decade of Pew polling.
Across the board, though, Black nones don’t feel as negatively about religion or as adamant about their disaffiliation compared to any other demographic; in Pew’s findings, they stand out by double-digit margins for many questions.
A quarter of Black nones say they feel like they don’t need religion in their lives, compared to 41 percent of nones overall. Thirty percent of Black nones don’t like religious organizations, versus 47 percent of all nones.
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