Have The Democrats Lost The Black Church?
Photo by Avel Chuklanov
(ANALYSIS) One of the most important components of the Democratic coalition is the Black church. Joe Biden has appeared at a number of prominent Black Protestant churches over the last several years, including a recent visit to Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
This congregation is one of the most well-known Black churches in the United States and is tragically remembered as the site where Dylan Roof killed nine people after a Bible study in June of 2015.
But I have to wonder if there are not cracks beginning to form in the alliance between the Democratic Party and Black Protestant Christianity. I have written about this a little bit before, but I felt like it needed a second look.
What drove that is a recent piece in Good Authority, a website that is full of content written by political scientists. The title tells the story of the article, “America is less polarized by race – but more polarized about race.” That’s a theme that also showed up in Perry Bacon’s column at the Washington Post back in October, “More people of color are voting Republican. That’s not all bad news.” The same conclusion is bubbling up now — voters of color should not be taken for granted by the Democratic Party.
But I wanted to put a religious angle on this. Here’s a hypothesis that was rolling around in my head. Religiously active Black Protestants have never really been that comfortable with where the Democratic Party is headed on certain cultural issues (like abortion), and this may actually result in some shifts in voting patterns in the future.
So I narrowed my sample to just folks who are Black and Protestant and attend religious services at least once week. What you see below is the mean political and ideological position of this group over the last several election cycles.
And, I think it’s pretty apparent from these results that there is movement afoot — especially in the 2020 and the 2022 results.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.