Americans of different races have long worshipped in different churches, but in the past few years, that's been changing. About one in five churchgoing Americans now attend multiracial churches, where no more than 80 percent of the congregation is of any one race. That's almost twice as many as before the turn of the 21st century. The rise of multiracial churches made sociologist Ryon Cobb wonder: Has worshipping alongside minorities made white churchgoers more progressive?
In a new study, Cobb and two colleagues found that it hasn't. When it comes to attitudes about racial inequality in the United States, whites who attend multiracial churches aren't different from whites who go to white churches, the researchers found. Meanwhile, Americans of color who attend multiracial churches tend to take on a conservative view, believing that the reason black Americans tend to fall behind white Americans in income and achievement is because they're unmotivated—not because of racism, or differences in access to education. In contrast, black Americans who attend black churches are likely to attribute the black-white gap to racism and education access. No one has studied what Hispanic-American churchgoers think about the black-white achievement gap, but studies showthat, historically, they've typically attributed poverty to structural problems more than individual motivation.
[For more of this story, written by France Diep, go to http://www.psmag.com/books-and...multiracial-churches]
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